quotations about love
Love is an alchemist that can transmute poison into food.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Charles Caleb Colton (1777 - 1832) was an English cleric and writer. His books, including collections of epigrammatic aphorisms and short essays on conduct, though now almost forgotten, had a phenomenal popularity in their day.
Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."
ERICH FROMM
The Art of Loving
To have, to hold, to love and caress
Is all we can ask from above
For the road that leads to happiness
Is the road that leads to love
IRVING BERLIN
"The Road that Leads to Love"
It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive manifestations of their aggressiveness.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
Love is not a delicate toying,
A slim and shimmering mesh;
It is two souls wrenched into one,
Two bodies made one flesh.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
Young Adventure
He who has loved often ... has loved never.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The Last Days of Pompeii
If you grew up in a house where you weren't loved, you didn't know there was an alternative.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
The Marriage Plot
'Know that Love is a careless child,
And forgets promises past;
He is blind, he is deaf when he list,
And in faith never fast.
'His desire is a dureless content,
And a trustless joy;
He is won with a world of despair,
And is lost with a toy.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
As Ye Came from the Holy Land
Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1552 - 1618) was an English writer, poet, soldier, politician, courtier, spy, and explorer. He is also well known for popularizing tobacco in England.
Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913) was an American short story writer, journalist, poet, and Civil War veteran. His book The Devil's Dictionary has been called "the most brilliant work of satire written in America," and his story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature.
We often weep beneath Love's cross,
But when she calls we her obey.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Guide-Board"
What is love? To be delighted by the happiness of another.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
Confessio Philosophi
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1 July 1646 - 14 November 1716) was a German philosopher, mathematician, and logician. His most prominent accomplishment was the development of differential and integral calculus independently of Sir Isaac Newton's contemporaneous achievements.
It is difficult here to give definite examples, but everybody knows how, in the subtle psychology of Falling in Love, there are involved innumerable minor elements, physical and mental, which strike us exactly because of their absolute adaptation to form with ourselves an adequate union. Of course we do not definitely seek out and discover such qualities; instinct works far more intuitively than that; but we find at last, by subsequent observation, how true and how trustworthy were its immediate indications. That is to say, those men do so who were wise enough or fortunate enough to follow the earliest promptings of their own hearts, and not to be ashamed of that divinest and deepest of human intuitions, love at first sight.
GRANT ALLEN
"Falling in Love", Falling in Love and Other Essays
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
JAMES BALDWIN
"In Search of a Majority"
You can love more than one person at a time, and I don't give a damn what the self-help books say.
RITA MAE BROWN
Full Cry
All you need is love.
THE BEATLES
"All You Need Is Love", Magical Mystery Tour
The Beatles were an English rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960. Rooted in skiffle, beat, and 1950s rock and roll, their sound incorporated elements of classical music and traditional pop in previously unheard-of ways. The band later explored music styles ranging from ballads and Indian music to psychedelia and hard rock.
Children of the future Age
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.
WILLIAM BLAKE
"A Little Girl Lost", Songs of Experience
You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so how could we take it back without asking?
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body
Love is a powerful neurological condition like hunger or thirst, only more permanent. We talk about love being blind or unconditional, in the sense that we have no control over it. But then, that is not so surprising, since love is basically chemistry.
JIM AL-KHALILI
"What is love -- can it really be defined and explained?", The Guardian, February 12, 2016
Lust is a sprightly servant,
Gallant where wines are poured;
Love is a bitter master,
Love is an iron lord.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
Young Adventure
As love is the most noble and divine passion of the soul, so is it that to which we may justly attribute all the real satisfactions of life, and without it, man is unfinished, and unhappy.
APHRA BEHN
The Fair Jilt
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.