quotations about love
Love made you vulnerable; if you gave your heart to another, they could leave you or die.
JOHN TWELVE HAWKS
The Traveler
The imagination of a eunuch dwells more and longer upon the material of love than that of man or woman ... supplying, so far as he can, by speculation, the place of pleasures he can no longer enjoy.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
journal, Apr. 4, 1831
Heav'nly love shall outdo Hellish hate.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost
Love is love's reward.
JOHN DRYDEN
Palamon and Arcite
Call us what you will, we are made such by love.
JOHN DONNE
The Canonization
When they speak of it, this love of theirs, they speak as of a kind of grand mal brought on catastrophically by a bacillus unknown to science but everywhere present in the air about us, like the tuberculosis spore, and to which all but the coldest constitutions are susceptible.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
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
What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Passion
Love ... Just Nature's way of getting one person to pay the bills for another person.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
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
Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Love is a stream that will find its course.
JAMAICAN PROVERB
Love is the sum of all the arts, as it is the reason for their existence.
JACK LONDON
The Valley of the Moon
There is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love.
IVAN KLIMA
Love and Garbage
Love is blind but sees afar.
ITALIAN PROVERB
Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense.
HELEN ROWLAND
Inter-Collegiate World
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
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
When love grows diseas'd, the best thing we can do is to put it to a violent death; I cannot endure the torture of a ling'ring and consumptive passion.
GEORGE ETHEREGE
The Man of Mode
It must be sad to outlive aught we love.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Spanish Gypsy