quotations about love
To have refused love is very much more picturesque than not to have been offered it.
STELLA BENSON
Pipers and a Dancer
When there is love, you can live even without happiness.
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
Notes From Underground
Oh love is the wondrous magician
That changes dull lead into gold;
If it wounds it can play the physician,
And cure both the young and the old!
Then hail to the glorious passion
That makes what is earthly, sublime!
That cares not for custom or fashion,
But dwells like an angel with time!
C. B. LANGSTON
"Love"
Love's tendrils round the heart doth twine,
As round the oak doth cling the vine.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Language"
Love wasn't a piece of music you could play over and over again with different interpretations. It actually needed to be improvised as you went along.
TOBSHA LEARNER
Quiver: A Book of Erotic Tales
Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the world is to be cured of sin.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave
There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear.
BIBLE
I John 4:18
Maybe the act of love came too late. As a career move, I should have lost my burdensome virginity at thirteen or fourteen, when there would have been no question of lasting attachment and no desire for one. As it was, I shook when I removed my clothes and I cried after it was done, not out of pain or disappointment but out of an up-rush of muddling emotion which twenty-four hours later I was ready to call love.
HILARY MANTEL
An Experiment in Love
Love is what helps mothers lift cars off kids, it's what helps people in earthquakes lift boulders off people who are crushed.
BEN HERRING
"Former New Zealand star Ben Herring believes love is the best language when trying to motivate players", Daily Mail, September 1, 2016
In order to be loved, we have to love, which means we have to understand.
THICH NHAT HANH
Teachings on Love
It is not the healthy, the confident, the proud, the joyous, the happy, that one must love -- they have no need of one's love! Arrogant and indifferent, they accept love only as homage that is theirs to command, as their due. The devotion of another is to them a mere embellishment, an ornament for the hair, a bracelet on the arm, not the whole meaning and bliss of their lives. Only those with whom life has dealt hardly, the wretched, the slighted, the uncertain, the unlovely, the humiliated, could really be helped by love. He who devotes his life to them atones to them for what life has taken from them. They alone know how to love and be loved as one should love -- gratefully and humbly.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
There's nothing deader than a dead love.
LEONA HELMSLEY
Playboy, Nov. 1990
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Brothers Karamazov
Love is always having to say you're sorry.
BRENDAN O'CONNOR
"Love is ...", The Independent, February 15, 2016
Love has become but a dream and desire in minds free to dream and desire the unattainable. Love has become the great make-believe of adult play. Love is an imaginary pirouette amidst the lock-steps of realities. Love is a luxuriating in the racial cradle of temperament. Love is a cunning dipsomania carried about in public like the black bottle hugged beneath an old lady's shawl. Love is many things, and plays strange roles in the mind of humanity today; and for the indulgence of its delicate emotional calisthenics man has provided the theater and books and many other brilliant exploitations of lucrative fiction.
MARIAN COX
"The Fools of Love", The Dry Rot of Society and Other Essays
Not to love is in love an infallible means of being loved.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY
Wind, Sand and Stars
Oh love, rose made wet by mermaids and foams, fire that dances and climbs up the invisible stairs and awakens the blood in the tunnel of sleeplessness.
PABLO NERUDA
"The Month of March Returns with its Hidden Light"
There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.
ANNE ENRIGHT
The Gathering