quotations about love
Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.
ANNE CARSON
Eros the Bittersweet
Ah, my friends, Love, like a froward boy, with his hands full of sugar-plums, still cries for more.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
For, without love, pleasure withers quickly, becomes a foul taste on the palate, and pleasure's inventions are soon exhausted.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Love is to be the lodestar of our lives and, if blessed with the capacity to exercise it, we can aspire to imitate God.
SIMON MAY
Love: A History
Love is an immortal wound that cannot be closed up. A person loses something, a part of her soul, when she loves someone. And she goes about looking for that lost part of her soul, for she knows that otherwise she is incomplete and cannot be at rest. It is only when she is with the person she loves that she becomes complete again in herself; but the moment he leaves, she loses that part which he has taken with him and knows no rest till she has found him once more.
LIN YUTANG
Moment in Peking
Choose to love whomsoever thou wilt: all else will follow.
ST. AUGUSTINE
On the Mystical Body of Christ
For me, however, if I understand the concept, to love properly and in earnest one would have to do it anonymously, or at least in an undeclared fashion, so as not to seem to ask anything in return, since asking and getting are the antithesis of love--if, as I say, I have the concept aright, which from all I have said and all that has been said to me so far it appears I do not. It is very puzzling. Love, the kind that I mean, would require a superhuman capacity for sacrifice and self-denial, such as a saint possesses, or a god, and saints are monsters, as we know, and as for the gods--well.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Powerbook
The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
Love is a negative form of hatred.
ROGER ZELAZNY
This Immortal
I'd go hungry, I'd go black and blue
I'd go crawling down the avenue
There's nothing that I wouldn't do
To make you feel my love
BOB DYLAN
"Make You Feel My Love", Time Out of Mind
So being in love is like being hooked up to a perpetual dopamine drip, and you get a little hit every time you see the person or touch them or think about them?
SEAN ILLING
"This is what love does to your brain", Vox, April 23, 2018
Love thy neighbor, but pull not down thy hedge.
GERMAN PROVERB
Love Bertrand, love his dog.
FRENCH PROVERB
True Christian love is not derived from things without, but floweth from the heart, as from a spring.
MARTIN LUTHER
Sermon XI, A Selection of the Most Celebrated Sermons of M. Luther and J. Calvin
When we consider the lofty character of love, and remember his wonderful helpfulness to man, it would seem that he could have no opposition in his work, nor enemies under the sun; yet there is a whole bunch of fellows who are constantly antagonizing love. Among them are anger, hatred, revenge, envy, and jealousy. Love will have no fellowship with these, and if any one of them is admitted into the heart love goes out.
NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY
Helps to Happiness
Oh, love. Love is best of all. There is no such total element, not even pain. Who has ever loved, knows this. I need not say more.
TANITH LEE
Mortal Suns
True love is a giant cheese wheel.
DAYNA EVANS
"True Love Is a Giant Cheese Wheel", New York Magazine, December 21, 2015
Are you a man? Then don't disgrace your manhood and go "moping" about because a worthless girl has "jilted" you, and sacrificed truth and honour to her inclination for the time being. You have heard that there are supposed to be as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. I believe there are better; try and catch them, and be thankful for the escape you have had. If you are a man, don't try to drown your grief with the brandy bottle, you might as well drown it in the river; but act like one, and your mind will soon be at ease. Young women, if any of you have been cast off by a thing in man's garb, fret not, you can easily get a better, and remember you have the deep sympathy of every man worthy the name who knows how you have been treated. Parents, it is your duty to watch over your children, and much of the above sort of pain that is in the world endured, might be avoided.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On Requited Love", Short Essays
To men of a certain type
The suspicion that they are incapable of loving
Is as disturbing to their self-esteem
As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence.
T. S. ELIOT
The Cocktail Party