quotations about love
It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in a play not with a woman of the outside world but with a doll inside our brain -- the only woman moreover that we have always at our disposal, the only one we shall ever possess -- whom the arbitrary power of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the Balbec of my dreams had been from the real Balbec; an artificial creation which by degrees, and to our own hurt, we shall force the real woman to resemble.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way
Swift doth young Love flee,
And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.
GEORGE MEREDITH
Modern Love
Some people will only love you as long as you fit in their box. Don't be afraid to disappoint.
ANONYMOUS
Love is kind of like a unicorn -- elusive and very hard to explain.
OLIVIA TRUFFAUT-WONG
"11 Movies To Watch When You're In Love To Get You Through The Good, The Bad, & All The Feels", Bustle, December 2015
Love is but a fire that is to be transmitted.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Psychoanalysis of Fire
The first love disappears, but never goes. That ache becomes reconciliation.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Love's fire colors once our neutral form, to blacken to eternal embers.
ELISE PUMPELLY CABOT
"Arizona"
Woman has been trained to stake her all upon love, to dream and plan and wait and focusu life's Multitudinousness upon love's little glamour. And the inquiry is as pertinent now as ever before to ask is such a policy of life propitious to woman's happiness or evolution? Or, if one may not be allowed to take such a pagan view of woman's destiny, to ask is it essential to the happiness or evolution of man?
MARIAN COX
"The Fools of Love", The Dry Rot of Society and Other Essays
Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"The Buried Life"
Love is a stream that will find its course.
JAMAICAN PROVERB
It is easy to halve the potato where there's love.
IRISH PROVERB
Love laughs at locksmiths.
ENGLISH PROVERB
Love subdues everything, except the felon heart.
FRENCH PROVERB
Love begins at home.
GERMAN PROVERB
Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
The Looking Glass War
First we love within, then we love the world.
ELIZABETH LESSER
The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure
Love cannot in its very nature be peaceful or content. It is a restlessness, an unsatisfaction. I can grant a lasting love just as I can grant a lasting unsatisfaction; but the lasting love cannot be coupled with possession, for love is pain and desire and possession is easement and fulfilment.
JACK LONDON
The Kempton-Wace Letters
I want love on demand. Take it away when it hurts, but deliver it when desired, straight to my door.
HEIDI K. ISERN
"The responsibility to fall out of love is on you", Quartz, August 5, 2016
Though this faith in love as the one democratic, even universal, form of salvation open to us moderns is the result of a long religious history that saw divine love as the origin of human love and as the model to be imitated, it has paradoxically come into its own because of a decline in religious faith. It has been possible only because, since the end of the eighteenth century, love has increasingly filled the vacuum left by the retreat of Christianity.
SIMON MAY
Love: A History
Christians see love as a vertical (love for God) and horizontal (love for fellow human beings). Just as the vertical and horizontal wood or metal come together to form a cross, so also love for God and love for fellow human beings define the whole essence of love.
FRANCIS EWHERIDO
"Love is a cross", Vanguard, November 11, 2017