quotations about love
A capacity for hating the object of desire is, perhaps, the best cure for love in cases of disappointment.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Heav'nly love shall outdo Hellish hate.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost
There is in man's nature a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which, if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable, as it is seen sometimes in friars. Nuptial love maketh mankind, friendly love perfecteth it, but wanton love corrupteth and embaseth it.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
Love is a moral drunkenness; and, whilst it lasts, the shrew seems gentle, the tigress a dove, the flirt constant, and the fiend an angel.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
Love is like a friendship caught on fire.
In the beginning a flame,
Very pretty, often hot and fierce
But still only light and flickering.
As love grows older, our hearts mature
And our love becomes as coals,
Deep-burning and unquenchable.
BRUCE LEE
attributed, Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew
True Love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light,
Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human phantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors,
fills The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
Of its reverberated lightning.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Epipsychidion
Love seems to beautify and inspire all nature. It raises the earthly caterpillar into the ethereal butterfly, it paints the feathers in spring, it lights the glowworm's lamp, it wakens the song of birds, and inspires the poet's lay. Even inanimate Nature seems to feel the spell, and flowers glow with the richest colours.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Use of Life
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Love can make people do funny things, inexplicable things. And thwarted love can turn some people into madmen--or madwomen. People who never had much of a grip on reality, sometimes they spin pretty illusions ... and when the illusion shatters, they become capable of anything.
SUSANNE ALLEYN
Game of Patience
Since to be loved endures,
To love is wise.
ROBERT BRIDGES
Since to be Loved Endures
Each act of love is a demonstration of the powerful right use of the heart, the example of our oneness of loving our brother as ourself. It is everything that transforms the present moment into love's miracle. It is you and me in resonance vibrating ever forward with love.
MELANIE LUTZ
"Love is Meant to be put Into Right Use Full Ness", BeliefNet, November 2, 2017
Love was a delicious blend of warm and cold. There was comfort in making love. It solved no problems: but one could run away from problems.
LARRY NIVEN
Ringworld
Love could never come to full fruition till it was destroyed.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
Fraternity
To love is for the Soul to choose a companion, and travel with it along the perilous defiles and winding ways of life; mutually sustaining, when it is rugged with obstructions, and mutually rejoicing, when rich broad plains and sunny slopes make journeying delight.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
The Lives and Works of Goethe
No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is pretense or dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Hours
Love's wing moults when caged and captured,
Only free, he soars enraptured.
THOMAS CAMPBELL
Freedom and Love
"To fall for," "to be fallen for"--I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an impression of fatuousness. It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar "What a messy business it is to be fallen for" by the more literary "What uneasiness lies in being loved."
OSAMU DAZAI
No Longer Human
Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul.
JAMES JOYCE
notes for his play Exiles
We need to cooperate to survive, to subsist, to learn, to reproduce and to raise our children. Romantic and parental love is essentially the neurochemical reward for cooperating, which is cognitively quite difficult.
ANNA MACHIN
"What is love? You asked Google -- here's the answer", The Guardian, July 11, 2018
When you find love you'll realize love was always there in one way or another.
SONYA MATEJKO
"This Is What I Know About The World At 24", Huffington Post, April 5, 2016