quotations about love
If the thing loved is base, the lover becomes base.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Love isn't love until it's past.
PRINCE
"Sometimes It Snows in April", Parade
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
Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"The Buried Life"
It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like so long as somebody loves you.
ROALD DAHL
"The Heart of a Mouse", The Witches
Love is basically for teenagers, and when it comes to real life for grown-ups, you're far better off with someone who's moderately pleased to see you when you're around, but leaves you in peace when you've got things to do.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
Love ... Just Nature's way of getting one person to pay the bills for another person.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
AMY HEMPEL
"The Dog of the Marriage"
Love is the cheapest of religions.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, Dec. 21, 1939
Love! dearest, sweetest power! how much are we indebted to thee! How much superior are even thy miseries to the pleasures which arise from other sources!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Dec. 20, 1810
If dying, I yet live in a tender heart or two; nor am I lost and hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
Never marry but for love; but see that thou lov'st what is lovely.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
In love, we are best pleased when we please others.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
A woman findeth in her last lover much of her first love; but a man seeth his next-to-the-last love, alway.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
What is commonly called "falling in love" is in most cases an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. You become addicted to another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever.
ECKHART TOLLE
A New Earth
A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness. It is not true that love makes things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
Forgotten tones of love recur to us, and kind glances shine out of the past--oh so bright and clear!--oh so longed after!--because they are out of reach; as holiday music from within a prison wall--or sunshine seen through the bars; more prized because unattainable--more bright because of the contrast of present darkness and solitude, whence there is no escape.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
Love! Love until the night collapses!
PABLO NERUDA
"Come Up with Me"
To love is to will the good of the other.
THOMAS AQUINAS
Summa Theologica
That adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than himself, is hardly distinguishable from religious feeling. What deep and worthy love is so? whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies, all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede