quotations about love
He gives a ripe apple for an apple-blossom that changes an old love for a new.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
The Days Before
None but those who have loved can be supposed to understand the oratory of the eye, the mute eloquence of a look, or the conversational powers of the face. Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken; the full heart knows no rhetoric of words, and resorts to the pantomime of sighs and glances.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
The feeling of love is a rich feeling, but the expression of love in word or deed is a joy.
ALEXANDER LOWEN
Depression and the Body
Despite the advancements in understanding our bodies and minds over the past couple millennia, we are still disentangling the intricacies of emotions as they are represented in the brain. Perhaps the most interesting emotional state is that which has spurred humans throughout history to sing for it, dance for it, kill for it, live for it, even die for it. Yes, that emotional state found in 170 different societies worldwide that has captivated artists, poets, writers and everyone in between: love.
CLAUDIA AGUIRRE
"Your Brain on Love", Huffington Post, February 15, 2016
Once you love someone it's like cancer. It spreads and spreads until it eats you up.
ANN WUEHLER
Interviews With Loneliness
All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Love
When [men] see a pretty woman, and feel the delicious madness of love coming over them, they always stop to calculate her temper, her money, their own money, or suitableness for the married life.... Ha, ha, ha! Let us fool in this way no more. I have been in love forty-three times with all ranks and conditions of women, and would have married every time if they would have let me. How many wives had King Solomon, the wisest of men? And is not that story a warning to us that Love is master of the wisest? It is only fools who defy him.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Men's Wives
Wail not too wildly for expiring Love:
The Love that dies was never quite alive.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"Marriage and Love", Anarchism and Other Essays
The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open.
PHILIP ROTH
The Dying Animal
Love is a spiritual force, the deep aliveness that is the essence of being before we think about it.
JUDITH SEDGEMAN
Love Is Not What You Think
For me the cosmic aeons lie complete,
O Love, between thy forehead and thy feet!
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
Not the swart Pariah in some Indian grove,
Lone, lean, and hunted by his brother's hate,
Hath drunk so deep the cup of bitter fate
As that poor wretch who cannot, cannot love:
He bears a load which nothing can remove,
A killing, withering weight.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"The Solitary"
Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met -- or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
ROBERT BURNS
Ae Fond Kiss
God is Love, I dare say. But what a mischievous devil Love is.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Note Books
As your lover describes you, so you are.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Sexing the Cherry
A history of listening to Top 40 radio had left me with a ridiculous and clichéd notion of love. I had never entertained the feeling myself but knew that it meant never having to say you're sorry. It was a many-splendored thing. Love was a rose and a hammer. Both blind and all-seeing, it made the world go round.
DAVID SEDARIS
Naked
Love is like infinity: You can't have more or less infinity, and you can't compare two things to see if they're "equally infinite." Infinity just is, and that's the way I think love is, too.
FRED ROGERS
The World According to Mister Rogers
Love is in that extra hour of sleep you didn't even realize he gave you until you woke up feeling that little bit more human.
RASHA RUSHDY
"Love Is Sweatpants and Take-out, Actually", Huffington Post, February 14, 2016