quotations about love
Love has both honey and gall in abundance.
ROMAN PROVERB
In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one's will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another's passion; of seeing another human being seared by the flame of her desire and of having to look impotently, lacking the power, the capacity, the strength to pluck her from the flames.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
It is not the healthy, the confident, the proud, the joyous, the happy, that one must love -- they have no need of one's love! Arrogant and indifferent, they accept love only as homage that is theirs to command, as their due. The devotion of another is to them a mere embellishment, an ornament for the hair, a bracelet on the arm, not the whole meaning and bliss of their lives. Only those with whom life has dealt hardly, the wretched, the slighted, the uncertain, the unlovely, the humiliated, could really be helped by love. He who devotes his life to them atones to them for what life has taken from them. They alone know how to love and be loved as one should love -- gratefully and humbly.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
Love is a warm brain, not a leaping heart.
TIM LEBBON
Face
Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Brothers Karamazov
The longer the road to love, the keener is the pleasure.
ANDRE MAUROIS
An Art of Living
Maybe the act of love came too late. As a career move, I should have lost my burdensome virginity at thirteen or fourteen, when there would have been no question of lasting attachment and no desire for one. As it was, I shook when I removed my clothes and I cried after it was done, not out of pain or disappointment but out of an up-rush of muddling emotion which twenty-four hours later I was ready to call love.
HILARY MANTEL
An Experiment in Love
Love: noun. The force that allows us to overcome our seemingly irreconcilable differences and empowers us to experience the peace of one-ness.
BURT GERSHATER
"Inner Heroes", Arizona Daily Sun, August 20, 2018
In order to be loved, we have to love, which means we have to understand.
THICH NHAT HANH
Teachings on Love
Sudden love takes the longest time to be cured.
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.
Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the world is to be cured of sin.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Not to love is in love an infallible means of being loved.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
If I fell in love with you
Would you promise to be true
And help me understand
'Cause I've been in love before
And I found that love was more
Than just holding hands
THE BEATLES
"If I Fell", A Hard Day's Night
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.
Of all the compound passions, which proceed from a mixture of love and hatred with other affections, no one better deserves our attention, than that love, which arises betwixt the sexes, as well on account of its force and violence, as those curious principles of philosophy, for which it affords us an uncontestable argument. It is plain, that this affection, in its most natural state, is derived from the conjunction of three different impressions or passions, viz. The pleasing sensation arising from beauty; the bodily appetite for generation; and a generous kindness or good-will. The origin of kindness from beauty may be explained from the foregoing reasoning. The question is how the bodily appetite is excited by it.
DAVID HUME
"Of the Amorous Passion, or Love Betwixt the Sexes", A Treatise of Human Nature
Love is what helps mothers lift cars off kids, it's what helps people in earthquakes lift boulders off people who are crushed.
BEN HERRING
"Former New Zealand star Ben Herring believes love is the best language when trying to motivate players", Daily Mail, September 1, 2016
Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind of delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Never Give All the Heart", In the Seven Woods
To love someone is to long to be loved by that someone.
CHRIS SEIDMAN
Little Buddy
This love, this mortal love, is of their own making ... the thing we did not intend, foresee or sanction. How then should it not fascinate us?... It is as if a fractious child had been handed a few timber shavings and a bucket of mud to keep him quiet only for him promptly to erect a cathedral.... Within the precincts of this consecrated house they afford each other sanctuary, excuse each other their failings, their sweats and smells, their lies and subterfuges, above all their ineradicable self-obsession. This is what baffles us, how they wriggled out of our grasp and somehow became free to forgive each other for all that they are not.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
Love is like the sea. It's a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Their Eyes Were Watching God