quotations about love
What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Passion
There is hope for all the colored people in this country while one white woman can love one colored man.
PETER ABRAHAMS
The Path of Thunder
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
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
Love's language everywhere is known.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Language"
Love is a boomerang that returns to the thrower's hand.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Love dwindles by pairing.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
He gives a ripe apple for an apple-blossom that changes an old love for a new.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Love is when you come back from the supermarket having rung ten times to check what is needed and you arrive in and take off your wet coat and there's no milk and you go back out.
BRENDAN O'CONNOR
"Love is ...", The Independent, February 15, 2016
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
Love is ... knowing that, should it come to it, they would want you to hollow out their corpse and use the carcass as a one-man tent to keep warm. Should it come to it.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
Falling in Love, as modern biology teaches us to believe, is nothing more than the latest, highest, and most involved exemplification, in the human race, of that almost universal selective process which Mr. Darwin has enabled us to recognise throughout the whole long series of the animal kingdom. The butterfly that circles and eddies in his aerial dance around his observant mate is endeavouring to charm her by the delicacy of his colouring, and to overcome her coyness by the display of his skill. The peacock that struts about in imperial pride under the eyes of his attentive hens, is really contributing to the future beauty and strength of his race by collecting to himself a harem through whom he hands down to posterity the valuable qualities which have gained the admiration of his mates in his own person. Mr. Wallace has shown that to be beautiful is to be efficient; and sexual selection is thus, as it were, a mere lateral form of natural selection--a survival of the fittest in the guise of mutual attractiveness and mutual adaptability, producing on the average a maximum of the best properties of the race in the resulting offspring. I need not dwell here upon this aspect of the case, because it is one with which, since the publication of the 'Descent of Man,' all the world has been sufficiently familiar.
GRANT ALLEN
"Falling in Love", Falling in Love and Other Essays
Didn't love, like a plant from India, require a prepared soil, a particular temperature? Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over hands yielded to a lover, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness thus could not be separated from the balconies of great châteaux filled with idle amusements, a boudoir with silk blinds, a good thick carpet, full of pots of flowers, and a bed raised on a dais, nor from the sparkle of precious stones and shoulder knots on servants' livery.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
Love is blind but sees afar.
ITALIAN PROVERB
Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Passion
In the vacuum of the heart love falls forever.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit is Rich
When I think of what true love means to us, I also think of the mundane days of bill paying, chore completing, and grocery shopping. Even though we hate being adults, being adults together somehow seems tolerable and perhaps even survivable.
LINDSAY DETWILER
"True Love Is Built In The Simple Moments", Huffington Post, October 22, 2017
If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.
LYNDA BARRY
attributed, The Surrendered Single
Love is the building blocks of creation, love is the substance from which we are made. From love, to love, by love.
MUNEERA RASHIDA
"What is love -- can it really be defined and explained?", The Guardian, February 12, 2016
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"