quotations about love
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
attributed, Zen Soup: Tasty Morsels of Wisdom from Great Minds
When people say, "God is love," I think they mean that love is extremely important, or that God really wants us to love. But in Christian conception, God really has love as his essence.
TIMOTHY KELLER
The Reason for God
Love is not some mushy feeling for your parents that you are born with, or a romanticized sexuality you learn from magazines. It is action. If you know what love is you can never be in doubt about whether someone loves you or you love someone.
PETER ABRAHAMS
The Fury of Rachel Monette
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
Of the affairs of love ... my only advice is to be honest. That's your most powerful tool to unlock a heart or gain forgiveness.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Eragon
To a person in love, the value of the individual is intuitively known. Love needs no logic for its mission. It roots in a bare wisdom that exists in senses more than mind, a wisdom that, in primitive form, evolved the mind which so often overlooks it.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
Autobiography of Values
We love being in love, that's the truth on't. If we had not met Joan, we should have met Kate, and adored her. We know our mistresses are no better than many other women, nor no prettier, nor no wiser, nor no wittier. 'Tis not for these reasons we love a woman, or for any special quality or charm I know of; we might as well demand that a lady should be the tallest woman in the world, like the Shropshire giantess, as that she should be a paragon in any other character, before we began to love her.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
If a thing loves, it is infinite.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Annotations to Swedenborg
Some things you can feel coming. You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.
UMBERTO ECO
Foucault's Pendulum
Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that hapiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lovers's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favourite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Other Voices, Other Rooms
Love's wing moults when caged and captured,
Only free, he soars enraptured.
THOMAS CAMPBELL
Freedom and Love
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
Love sometimes elevates, creates new qualities, suspends the working of evil inclinations; but only for a day. Love, then, is an Oriental despot, whose glance lifts a slave from the dust, and then consigns him to it again.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Kafka on the Shore
Man ever is and always shall be blessed; for he loves, and love is an onward current that never ebbs; and borne upon this current humanity will at last make its far, fair haven; and meanwhile, as it voyages, it will find the course not too rough, but glorified by frequent halcyon days and calm nights set with stars.
FRANK CUMMINS LOCKWOOD
Robert Browning
With the secularization of the Western world, we are turning to romantic love to give us what we once looked for in the realm of the divine. Transcendence, meaning, wholeness, and ecstasy.
ESTHER PEREL
"A top couples' therapist says our 'religion of romantic love' is making relationships harder", Business Insider, November 10, 2017
The poorest lives some little blossoms bring
To deck Love's altar in the days of spring.
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
Love kills.
EDNA BUCHANAN
Love Kills
Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all that there is in life, it seems to me. But I grant you, if you deny the VARIETY of love you deny love altogether. If you try to specialize love into one set of accepted feelings, you wound the very soul of love. Love MUST be multiform, else it is just tyranny, just death.
D. H. LAWRENCE
The Ladybird
David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was an English writer and poet. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection on the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. His opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage".
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Their Eyes Were Watching God