quotations about love
True love will not brook reserve; it feels undervalued and outraged, when even the sorrows of those it loves are concealed from it.
WASHINGTON IRVING
"The Wife", The Sketch Book
Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Passion
Are not all loves secretly the same? A hundred flowers sprung from a single root.
TANITH LEE
Delirium's Mistress
Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?
JANE AUSTEN
Pride and Prejudice
For me the cosmic aeons lie complete,
O Love, between thy forehead and thy feet!
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
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
Love is an experiment ... what happens next is always surprising.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
Love is love's reward.
JOHN DRYDEN
Palamon and Arcite
Love. My golly, it sells diapers, don't it!
DAVID MAMET
Goldberg Street: Short Plays and Monologues
Sacred love is selfless, seeking not its own. The lover serves his beloved and seeks perfect communion of oneness with her.
D. H. LAWRENCE
"Love"
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".
The feeling of love is a rich feeling, but the expression of love in word or deed is a joy.
ALEXANDER LOWEN
Depression and the Body
There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.
SARAH DESSEN
The Truth About Forever
Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state -- admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological -- in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that "I" and "you" are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
When people love each other, when they find each other out of thousands and millions of people. It's always destiny.
SERGEI LUKYANENKO
Night Watch
A man is only as good as what he loves.
SAUL BELLOW
Seize the Day
Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Invisible Monsters
Be the love that the world needs to survive, to thrive, and to continue make being alive more worthwhile.
SONYA MATEJKO
"This Is What I Know About The World At 24", Huffington Post, April 5, 2016
Didn't love, like a plant from India, require a prepared soil, a particular temperature? Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over hands yielded to a lover, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness thus could not be separated from the balconies of great châteaux filled with idle amusements, a boudoir with silk blinds, a good thick carpet, full of pots of flowers, and a bed raised on a dais, nor from the sparkle of precious stones and shoulder knots on servants' livery.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
letter, May 14, 1904
I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration. Some seem to have but one vulnerable point, or door of access; while others have a thousand avenues, and may be captured in a thousand different ways. It is a great triumph of skill to gain the former, but a still greater proof of generalship to maintain possession of the latter, for man must battle for his fortress at every door and window. He who wins a thousand common hearts is therefore entitled to some renown; but he who keeps undisputed sway over the heart of a coquette is indeed a hero.
WASHINGTON IRVING
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow