quotations about love
Love does not rust.
GERMAN PROVERB
To me, love is a pure idea forged in flesh, awkwardly maybe, but it had to connect to somewhere, despite twists and turns of underground cable. An all-too-perfect thing. Sometimes the lines get crossed. Or you get a wrong number. But that's nobody's fault. It'll always be like that, so long as we exist in this physical form. As a matter of principle.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Dance, Dance, Dance
Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Pere Goriot
Love has this in common with scruples, that it becomes embittered by the reflections and the thoughts that beset us to free ourselves.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères
Jean de La Bruyère (16 August 1645 - 11 May 1696) was a French philosopher and moralist noted for his satire. His Caractères, which appeared in 1688, captures the psychological, social, and moral profile of French society of his time.
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body
Love was altogether more predatory. It was concerned with pursuit, capture, enjoyment; it was caused by beauty, the way raw red skin is caused by the sun; it was an appetite, like hunger or thirst, a physical discomfort that tortured you until it was satisfied.
K. J. PARKER
Devices and Desires
I think love and hate are really the same thing. They're what you feel when someone matters more to you than anything else; more than yourself, even.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
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
This love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a logically necessary way, if on the other hand we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
Love is an artful arrangement of artless pretensions, whereby we labor to appear innocent in what we desire to be most cunning.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
How far above all price Love's costly wine,
Which can the meanest chalice make divine!
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
"Love"
Love isn't like money--the more you give away the more you get back, and the more you have to give.
S. M. STIRLING
The Sunrise Lands
Whatever our religious practice, love has no religion. On the contrary love is a religion of its own.
SANJAY LEELA BHANSALI
"Bajirao Mastani is a tribute to Mughal-e-Azam: Sanjay Leela Bhansali", Firstpost, December 22, 2015
All love is lost but upon God alone.
WILLIAM DUNBAR
The Merle and the Nightingale
My love is hopeless! I know it. But it will feed me to my dying day.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol
Love, I find is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Dust Tracks on a Road
Until Obi met Clara on board the cargo boat Sasa he had thought of love as another grossly over-rated European invention.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
Love is the secret you unmask yourself to find; it is the foundation of the spiritual life, the destination where all roads of the journey lead.
ELIZABETH LESSER
The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure
It may be true that love is blind, but only for what is ugly: its sight is keen enough for what is beautiful.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
The end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Powerbook