quotations about love
Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Heart of the Matter
Let us suppose the loved one is as madly impelled toward the lover. In a few days, in an hour, nay, in an instant -- for there is such a thing as love at first sight -- this man and woman, two unrelated individuals, who may never have seen each other before, conceive a passion, greater, intenser than all other affections, friendships, and social relations. So great, so intense is it, that the world could crumble to star-dust so long as their souls rushed together. If necessary, they would break all ties, forsake all friends, abandon all blood kin, run away from all moral responsibilities. There can be no discussion.... We see it every day, for love is the most perfectly selfish thing in the universe.
JACK LONDON
The Kempton-Wace Letters
All love is lost but upon God alone.
WILLIAM DUNBAR
The Merle and the Nightingale
Great Love has many attributes, and shrines
For varied worshippers, but his force divine
Shows most its many-named fulness in the man
Whose nature multitudinously mixed--
Each ardent impulse grappling with a thought--
Resists all easy gladness, all content
Save mystic rapture, where the questioning soul
Flooded with consciousness of good that is
Finds life one bounteous answer.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Spanish Gypsy
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
Love is harsh, and it consumes. And more than anything, it demands sacrifice.
TIM LEBBON
Unnatural Selection
Yes, life is but a waste,
A cheerless pathway, where
No healthy fruit allures the taste,
No flowerets balm the air,
If Love, the wild rose, ne'er luxuriates there.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN
"Love"
Love speaks a language most sublime,
Its idioms known in every clime.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Language"
At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
"The Diamond as Big as the Ritz"
The plough of Time breaks up our Eden-land,
And tramples down its fruitful flowery prime.
Yet thro' the dust of ages living shoots
O' the old immortal seed start in the furrows;
And, where Love looked on with glorious eye,
These quicken'd germs of everlastingness
Flower lusty, as of old in Paradise!
GERALD MASSEY
"Wooed and Won"
I loved a being, an idea of my own mind, which had no real existence. I concreted this abstract of perfection, I annexed this fictitious quality to the idea presented by a name; the being, whom that name signified, was by no means worthy of this. This is the truth: Unless I am determinedly blind -- unless I am resolved causelessly and selfishly to seek destruction, I must see it. Plain! is it not plain? I loved a being; the being, whom I loved, is not what she was; consequently, as love appertains to mind, and not body, she exists no longer. I regret when I find that she never existed, but in my mind; yet does it not border on willful deception, deliberate, intentional self-deceit, to continue to love the body, when the soul is no more?
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Jun. 2, 1811
Love makes the world go round.
FRENCH PROVERB
I am moved, still, at the power of love to set us on life changing courses, and to make our lives shine brightly with the light of God. It's dark out there, folks. Let's become the light of love, even more, where it is most desperately needed.
JANET FULLER
"Love is the light we need", Burlington Times News, October 28, 2017
All love's details burned bright. Surely they meant something? Surely they were enough? But they came and went and there we still were, with new unfillable space between us.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
A man in love prefers his passion to every other consideration, and is fonder of his mistress than he is of virtue. Should she prove vicious, she makes vice lovely in his eyes.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
You are worthy of love simply because you exist. Because you inhale and you exhale. You are worthy of love because you stumbled across this blog and you wanted to be encouraged, inspired and feel less alone. You are worthy of love because you have an open, beating, wildly beautiful, ever-hopeful heart. You are worthy of love because you are imperfect. Because you are built on strength and courage, curiosity and compassion. You are worthy of love because you give it and you intend to receive it. You are worthy of love because you look for the good when all you can see is the bad. You are worthy of love because you try. Because you dream. Because you are.
LINDSAY TIGAR
"You Are Worthy of Love", Confessions of a Love Addict, October 26, 2015
The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Conversations with Samuel R. Delany
Life without Love is as a flower without fragrance.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
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
Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature -- it makes the proud man meek -- the cheerful, sad -- the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy fail before it. Believe me, you cannot prophesy of its future effect in a man from any knowledge of his past character.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Eugene Aram: A Tale