quotations about love
Why the pull of sexual attraction to someone who is unfamiliar, whose allure as Horace marked, portends a war with one's self? As we'll consider, the object of sexual desire has a different constitution from the focus of personal love. With sexual love, there is an emphasis upon touch and kinesthesia that alters the whole/part structure of objects. It brings with it a shift in temporality as well as makes the pleasure of repetitive sexual scenarios curiously new and unique.
PETER HADREAS
A Phenomenology of Love and Hate
Love differs from all the other contagious diseases: the last time a man is exposed to it, he takes it most readily, and has it the worst!
BRET HARTE
"Two Men of Sandy Bar"
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 for those too easily won does not last long.
ROMAN PROVERB
I love you pretty baby
You're the only love I've ever known
Just as long as you stay with me
The whole world is my throne
Beyond here lies nothin'
Nothin' we can call our own
BOB DYLAN
"Beyond Here Lies Nothin'", Together Through Life
That feelings of love and hate make rational judgments impossible in public affairs, as in private affairs, we can clearly enough see in others, though not so clearly in ourselves.
HERBERT SPENCER
The Study of Sociology
I love your letters. How far is that from saying I love you? Well--about a mile. Two miles.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Serpents of Paradise
No friend to Love like a long voyage at sea.
APHRA BEHN
The Rover
Aphra Behn (1640 - 1689) was an English playwright, poet, and novelist from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors.
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
No man knoweth how another man maketh his love, for women tell not.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
Every relationship you enter into is a form of a love relationship. It is a sharing of energy, time and space. It is a partnership. It is unity in its highest form. We become intimate by the contract of the joining itself.
TERRELL WASHINGTON
"To Love is to Trust", The Good Men Project, August 18, 2016
O little hour of Love, so wild and sweet!
I gave the world, thy honey-dew to eat;
And now the tear-sown pathway of the dead
Echoes the patter of thy flying feet.
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
It is not love that he feels for me. It is more like a constant resentment that has become such a habit to him that to have it removed, like an aching tooth, brings him no relief.
PHILIPPA GREGORY
The Boleyn Inheritance
Love is blind; couch not his eyes.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
Ranthorpe
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Meeting in a Dream", Other Inquisitions
When love is full grown it has few words, and sometimes it growls them out.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Old Gorgon Graham
Love demands that we stop asking "how can my wife/parent/sibling be better" and start asking "how can I make my wife/parent/sibling the happiest in the world?" Love demands death to self.
CHRIS STEFANICK
"Love is Easy Until It's Tested", National Catholic Register, March 19, 2016
It was always about love. Always, always about love. Lost love, love denied, the obsessive hunger for love. Parental or romantic. Whether it was twisted or pure, fulfilled or unrequited, love was always at the source.
JAMES W. HALL
Magic City
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
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