quotations about love
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
JOHN DONNE
The Sun Rising
The ideal of romantic love stands in opposition to much of our history, as we shall see. First of all, it is individualistic. It rejects the view of human beings as interchangeable units, and it attaches the highest importance to individual differences as well as to individual choice. Romantic love is egoistic, in the philosophical, not in the petty, sense. Egoism as a philosophical doctrine holds that self-realization and personal happiness are the moral goals of life, and romantic love is motivated by the desire for personal happiness. Romantic love is secular. In its union of physical with spiritual pleasure in sex and love, as well as in its union of romance and daily life, romantic love is a passionate commitment to this earth and to the exalted happiness that life on earth can offer.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
The Psychology of Romantic Love
Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.
ECKHART TOLLE
A New Earth
I've never had my heart broken ... It's a very sad state of affairs. I think everybody should have their heart broken. I don't think it says anything good about me at all ... My lover and my best friend and my partner has been my work. But I certainly would in life have wanted to know--would like to know--what it was like to have a real partner.
SALLY FIELD
Good Housekeeping, Mar. 2009
He who loveth, knoweth the inner sun; he see'th Life's blaze.
ELISE PUMPELLY CABOT
"Arizona"
Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.
TOM ROBBINS
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Tom Robbins (born July 22, 1932) is an American novelist best known for his novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which was made into a movie in 1993 starring Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, and Keanu Reeves.
To men of a certain type
The suspicion that they are incapable of loving
Is as disturbing to their self-esteem
As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence.
T. S. ELIOT
The Cocktail Party
I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Sexing the Cherry
Love unlocks doors and opens windows that weren't even there before.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Neurotic's Notebook
I think love and hate are really the same thing. They're what you feel when someone matters more to you than anything else; more than yourself, even.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!
ROBERT BROWNING
"Fra Lippo Lippi"
Be worthy love, and love will come.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
Oh, love. Love is best of all. There is no such total element, not even pain. Who has ever loved, knows this. I need not say more.
TANITH LEE
Mortal Suns
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
True love is never ending. That's like saying, "If this book I'm reading is really a book, it will never end." Books do end when the authors stop writing them. That doesn't make a book any less of a book. Even short stories can teach us valuable lessons. But when my kids ask me how to be part of a love story that's never ending, I'll tell them to find a prolific writing partner and keep working on new chapters together. No love is written in the stars. If you want a good love story, you have to keep creating it.
JULIE MITCHELL
"Love is not written in the stars", Corsicana Daily Sun, November 6, 2017
The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
Love is the union between natural craving and sentiment.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
He who knows Love becomes Love, and he knows
All beings are himself, twin-born of Love.
ELSA BARKER
He Who Knows Love
The flame of anger, bright and brief,
Sharpens the barb of Love.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Tell Me Not Things Past all Belief
Love speaks a language most sublime,
Its idioms known in every clime.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Language"