quotations about love
For a long time visits among lovers and professions of love are kept up through habit, after their behavior has plainly proved that love no longer exists.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères
Jean de La Bruyère (16 August 1645 - 11 May 1696) was a French philosopher and moralist noted for his satire. His Caractères, which appeared in 1688, captures the psychological, social, and moral profile of French society of his time.
Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Lighthousekeeping
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body
The end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Powerbook
I feel like, when we're kids, you're sold into this fairy tale of what love is. That Prince Charming's gonna come along and save you and you're gonna live happily ever after. They're gonna rescue me from the Bronx, and we're gonna go off and live in a castle somewhere and it's gonna be awesome. He's gonna love me forever, and I'm gonna love him forever, and it's gonna be real easy. And it's so different than that.
JENNIFER LOPEZ
interview with Maria Shriver, The Today Show, November 3, 2014
Love is my religion--I could die for that.
JOHN KEATS
letter to Fanny Brawne, Oct. 13, 1819
Love is a great beautifier.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
Ah, when love dies, women lose two and a half inches in height.
M. C. BEATON
Love, Lies and Liquor
All human actions are motivated at their deepest level by two emotions--fear or love. In truth there are only two emotions--only two words in the language of the soul.... Fear wraps our bodies in clothing, love allows us to stand naked. Fear clings to and clutches all that we have, love gives all that we have away. Fear holds close, love holds dear. Fear grasps, love lets go. Fear rankles, love soothes. Fear attacks, love amends.
NEALE DONALD WALSCH
Conversations with God
Love wasn't the soft, silky words the poets spoke of. Love, with it's twin edges, was the one factor that weakened so many women, that pushed them to compromise their own wants, their own needs for the needs and wants of another.
NORA ROBERTS
Sweet Revenge
When you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
Four Quarters, 1970
Whatever our religious practice, love has no religion. On the contrary love is a religion of its own.
SANJAY LEELA BHANSALI
"Bajirao Mastani is a tribute to Mughal-e-Azam: Sanjay Leela Bhansali", Firstpost, December 22, 2015
I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to realize what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are few who understand that.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"Tandy", Winesburg, Ohio
Love is a concept none of us really understand but yet we try to define it in the small square of accepted norms. When two people love each other and want to be together in more than one way, gender, society, age, caste, creed stops mattering.
SHRIYA JOSHI
"This Short Film About Freedom To Love Is Our Gift To You On Independence Day", Storypick, August 12, 2016
One love drives out another.
SPANISH PROVERB
Love is clockworks
And cold steel
Fingers too numb to feel
Squeeze the handle
Blow out the candle
Love is blindness
U2
"Love Is Blindness", Achtung Baby
It is love that I am seeking for,
But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind
That is not in the world.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Shadowy Waters
If love lives through all life; and survives through all sorrow; and remains steadfast with us through all changes; and in all darkness of spirit burns brightly; and, if we die, deplores us for ever, and loves still equally; and exists with the very last gasp and throb of the faithful bosom--whence it passes with the pure soul, beyond death; surely it shall be immortal!
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Newcomes
Sure, love vincit omnia; is immeasurably above all ambition, more precious than wealth, more noble than name. He knows not life who knows not that: he hath not felt the highest faculty of the soul who hath not enjoyed it.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh, no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark
Whose worth's unknown, although its height be taken.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
"sonnet cxvi"
William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616) was an English playwright, poet, and actor. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language.