quotations about love
Let me prevail as of old, as lover, as lord, as king, or have done with Love's tyrant rule.
WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT
To Nimue
It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
It is the plain women who know about love; the beautiful women are too busy being fascinating.
KATHARINE HEPBURN
attributed, Evan Esar's 20,000 Quips & Quotes
It is love that I am seeking for,
But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind
That is not in the world.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Shadowy Waters
In seeing there is love, in being seen there is abhorrence. One grins, trying to bear the pain of being seen. But not just anyone can be someone who only looks. If the one who is looked at looks back, then the person who was looking becomes the one who is looked at.
KOBO ABE
The Box Man
In love, the quickest is always the best cure.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
I've heard it called a Cinderella story, I've heard it called magic. But it's not magic, it's love. And when love is true from the heart, nothing magic about it.
BILL MAHON
"Love From the Ashes", KWTX, November 13, 2017
I had no illusions about love anymore. It came, it went, it left casualties or it didn't. People weren't meant to be together forever, regardless of what the songs say.
SARAH DESSEN
This Lullaby
I feel like, when we're kids, you're sold into this fairy tale of what love is. That Prince Charming's gonna come along and save you and you're gonna live happily ever after. They're gonna rescue me from the Bronx, and we're gonna go off and live in a castle somewhere and it's gonna be awesome. He's gonna love me forever, and I'm gonna love him forever, and it's gonna be real easy. And it's so different than that.
JENNIFER LOPEZ
interview with Maria Shriver, The Today Show, November 3, 2014
I don't love you any less, but I can't love you anymore.
LYLE LOVETT
"I Can't Love You Anymore", The Road to Ensenada
I am moved, still, at the power of love to set us on life changing courses, and to make our lives shine brightly with the light of God. It's dark out there, folks. Let's become the light of love, even more, where it is most desperately needed.
JANET FULLER
"Love is the light we need", Burlington Times News, October 28, 2017
Her heart consenteth before her lips say: Yea; and in this interval lieth her Paradise; wherefore she would prolong it.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
He who would not be idle, let him fall in love.
ROMAN PROVERB
Happy is love or friendship when returned--
The lovers whose pure flames have equal burned.
BION OF SMYRNA
"Friendship"
For misdirected love, the attainment of its object is, indeed, the best cure; but it cures as the guillotine cures headache.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Every genuine expression of love grows out of a consistent and total surrender to God.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Christmas sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, 1957
Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.
In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Down by the Salley Gardens", Crossways
Any love is enveloping and potentially dangerous; after all, you are putting your heart into someone else's hands and with that an incredible power to cause pain of various kinds (and vice versa). That's a given. But there is an additional absolutism about first love, when you have nothing to compare it with. You don't know anything, yet you feel you know everything -- this can be calamitous.
JULIAN BARNES
interview, The Guardian, January 29, 2018
Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring: when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide.
GEORGE ELIOT
Mr. Gilfil's Love Story
All human love is a faint type of God's;
An echoing note from a harmonious whole;
A feeble spark from an undying flame;
A single drop from an unfathomed sea:
But God's is infinite; it fills the earth
And heaven, and the broad, trackless realms of space.
ALBERT LAIGHTON
"The Love of God"