quotations about love
Love is to be the lodestar of our lives and, if blessed with the capacity to exercise it, we can aspire to imitate God.
SIMON MAY
Love: A History
Love knoweth no laws.
JOHN LYLY
Euphues
Love lives in palaces as well as in thatched huts.
JAPANESE PROVERB
Love not only occupies the higher lobes of the brain, but crowds out the lower to make room for its expansion.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Love, in this world, is like a seed taken from the tropics, and planted where the winter comes too soon; and it cannot spread itself in flower-clusters and wide-twining vines, so that the whole air is filled with the perfume thereof. But there is to be another summer for it yet. Care for the root now, and God will care for the top by and by.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Nothing is so strange when one is in love ... as the complete indifference of other people.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Mrs. Dalloway
Nothing is true but Love, nor aught of worth;
Love is the incense which doth sweeten earth.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
"Love"
Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Plague of Doves
One love drives out another.
SPANISH PROVERB
Our earthly loves are but so many silver steps leading us up to the great golden love of God.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Sure, love vincit omnia; is immeasurably above all ambition, more precious than wealth, more noble than name. He knows not life who knows not that: he hath not felt the highest faculty of the soul who hath not enjoyed it.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
The gospel of love spread among a sex for the needs of militarism and the labor market has filled woman with the spiritual hysteria of apostleship.
MARIAN COX
"The Fools of Love", The Dry Rot of Society and Other Essays
The kind of love my mum talks about is full of worry and work and forgiving people and putting up with things and stuff like that. It's not a lot of fun, that's for sure. If that really is love, the kind my mum talks about, then nobody can ever know if they love somebody, can they? It seems like what she's saying is, if you're pretty sure you love somebody, the way I was sure in those few weeks, then you can't love them, because that isn't what love is. Trying to understand what she means by love would do your head in.
NICK HORNBY
Slam
The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Burning Secret and Other Stories
True love survives all shocks: an affection originally produced by admiration for unusual beauty may not only survive the loss of that beauty, but may become more intense if the beauty has changed into ugliness through causes that bind the lovers together in tender associations.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
When a man and woman are successfully in love, their whole activity is energized and victorious. They walk better, their digestion improves, they think more clearly, their secret worries drop away, the world is fresh and interesting, and they can do more than they dreamed that they could do. In love of this kind sexual intimacy is not the dead end of desire as it is in romantic or promiscuous love, but periodic affirmation of the inward delight of desire pervading an active life.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Morals
You can run from love
And if it's really love it will find you
Catch you by the heel
U2
"A Man and a Woman", How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
A lover is like a firefly,
lighting your life for a moment,
then leaving you to deal with the darkness
Until it flashes again.
RICH REITH
"Soulmate"