quotations about love
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
Being in love is an elaborate state of anticipation for the continual exchanging of certain kinds of gifts. The gifts can range from a glance to the offering of the entire self. But the gifts must be gifts: they cannot be claimed. One has no rights as a lover--except the right to anticipate what the other wishes to give.
JOHN BERGER
G. John Berger
Love. My golly, it sells diapers, don't it!
DAVID MAMET
Goldberg Street: Short Plays and Monologues
Love is of noble birth and heavenly origin. The glory of his personality no words can describe. He is as an angel of light dwelling among the children of men.
NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY
Helps to Happiness
It's a cliché, but also a deep truth (as cliché's tend to be), that you can't love another person very well if you don't love yourself.
HARRIET LERNER
"The Top 10 Reasons Women Re-Marry The Wrong Guys", Huffington Post, July 7, 2012
Once you love someone it's like cancer. It spreads and spreads until it eats you up.
ANN WUEHLER
Interviews With Loneliness
One who possesses such immense power over our existence will inspire awe that easily threatens to overwhelm us, even if we believe he will never abandon or destroy us.... Its grandeur makes us feel both powerful and powerless--not just to possess the loved one--but in our existence itself: the existence which we yearn for love to anchor. To be in a relationship of love is, in other words, always a relationship of fear; indeed, the greater the love the greater the fear.
SIMON MAY
Love: A History
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 love's reward.
JOHN DRYDEN
Palamon and Arcite
In the vacuum of the heart love falls forever.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit is Rich
Cannot we all learn something from love, even those of us who may not be professed lovers? The teachers of the new cults, of mental and moral healing, go so far as to say that all they know has been learned through love. The foundation of their philosophy is love, and the inspiration, too. In it they declare there is the only health. In its enemy, hate, they find the only disease, the only cause of death. Surely there are many expressions of love besides the one that has been allowed to usurp the word. The love of the youth for the maiden and of the maiden for the youth is only one form of the love that radiates through the whole world, the sunshine of life from which we all derive our health and our energy.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Love", Reactions and Other Essays Discussing Those States of Feeling and Attitude of Mind That Find Expression In Our Individual Qualities
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
letter, May 14, 1904
Love cannot be cured by herbs.
ROMAN PROVERB
Love is meant to be put into right use full ness. Love is an action. It is an experience. Love is what love does.
MELANIE LUTZ
"Love is Meant to be put Into Right Use Full Ness", BeliefNet, November 2, 2017
There is no evil angel but Love.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Love's Labour's Lost
William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616) was an English playwright, poet, and actor. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language.
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Prometheus Unbound
The ultimate fact of the universe is love; and its sway is all-comprehensive, and absolutely certain of final victory.
FRANK CUMMINS LOCKWOOD
Robert Browning
My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis, for object, strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair,
Upon Impossibility.
ANDREW MARVELL
The Definition of Love
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket -- safe, dark, motionless, airless -- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
C. S. LEWIS
The Four Loves