quotations about love
Love is... carefully curated ignorance.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.
ELLEN KEY
"The Morality of Woman"
Love between a man and woman is war.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
The Father
You will never again love someone the same way as you did the one who got away, but you can love again and only when you allow yourself to give up the dream of finding your way back to that one certain person will you really see what else lies ahead. True love never ends but relationships and marriages do and sometimes the broken pieces are just never meant to be put back together. Heal yourself, heal your heart, and believe that new love can be just as great, or even better, than the idealistic love you have carried around with you for much too long. Free yourself and new love will come again.
SHANNON FERGUSON
"Sometimes Love Is Simply Not Enough", Huffington Post, May 13, 2016
Love is the root of creation; God's essence; worlds without number
Lie in his bosom like children; he made them for this purpose only.
Only to love and to be loved again.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"The Children of the Lord's Supper"
Love -- is anterior to Life --
Posterior -- to Death --
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Love is anterior to Life"
If you have given up your heart ... you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast.
STEPHEN KING
The Drawing of the Three
Love clamors far more incessantly and passionately at a closed gate than an open one!
MARIE CORELLI
The Master Christian
If one loves, one need not have an ideology of love.
BRUCE LEE
The Warrior Within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee
Love is the only thing that pays for birth,
Or makes death welcome. Oh, dear God above
This beautiful but sad, perplexing earth,
Pity the hearts that know--or know not--Love!
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"What Love Is"
Free-market free love is simultaneously a utopian idea and a dystopian idea. The idea of total sexual freedom is an ideal, but then it's also a Michel Houellebecq nightmare. Now online dating and apps have made that normal. Everyone is "on the market" or "off the market"; friends with "benefits," "investing" time--these are all economic metaphors.
MOIRA WEIGEL
"Love in a Time of Capital: An Interview With Moira Weigel", The Nation, August 29, 2016
All you need is love. And a tiara. And maybe a cookie.
ANONYMOUS
When a plain-looking woman is loved, it is certain to be very passionately; for either her influence on her lover is irresistible, or she has some secret and more irresistible charms than those of beauty.
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.
Ah, cruel 'tis to love,
And cruel not to love,
But cruelest of all
To love and love in vain.
ANACREON
"Ode XXIX", Odes
We outgrow love like other things
And put it in the drawer,
Till it an antique fashion shows
Like costumes grandsires wore.
EMILY DICKINSON
"We Outgrow Love Like Other Things"
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Human Condition
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Love is one of the last things that gives meaning and magic in a world where god is dead and nothing matters anymore.
BRENDAN O'CONNOR
"Love is ...", The Independent, February 15, 2016
Love is a cognitive, willful act. Feelings have very little to do with it, particularly around three o'clock in the morning when the baby needs changing or somebody has "lost it" before getting to the bathroom to throw up.
KEVIN LEMAN
Smart Women Know When to Say No
If somebody says "I love you" to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? "I love you, too."
KURT VONNEGUT
Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons