quotations about love
He who has loved often ... has loved never.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The Last Days of Pompeii
Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.
WASHINGTON IRVING
attributed, Golden Gleams of Thought: From the Words of Leading Orators
Love is an alchemist that can transmute poison into food.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Charles Caleb Colton (1777 - 1832) was an English cleric and writer. His books, including collections of epigrammatic aphorisms and short essays on conduct, though now almost forgotten, had a phenomenal popularity in their day.
If I give my heart to you
I must be sure
From the very start
That you would love me more than her
THE BEATLES
"If I Fell", A Hard Day's Night
The Beatles were an English rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960. Rooted in skiffle, beat, and 1950s rock and roll, their sound incorporated elements of classical music and traditional pop in previously unheard-of ways. The band later explored music styles ranging from ballads and Indian music to psychedelia and hard rock.
Love's witch'ry once ensnared my heart;
Oh! how enchanting all things seemed!
My cares, and troubles, left no smart,
Elysium, all the world I deemed;
But when the fond delusion passed,
I woke to anguish long to last!
C. B. LANGSTON
"Change"
You shouldn't have to pay for your love with your bones and your flesh.
PAT BENATAR
"Hell is for Children"
Love is ... the by-product of living in a decent flat.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow in both cases, excludes us from all enquiry.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
notes, Queen Mab
'Know that Love is a careless child,
And forgets promises past;
He is blind, he is deaf when he list,
And in faith never fast.
'His desire is a dureless content,
And a trustless joy;
He is won with a world of despair,
And is lost with a toy.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
As Ye Came from the Holy Land
Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1552 - 1618) was an English writer, poet, soldier, politician, courtier, spy, and explorer. He is also well known for popularizing tobacco in England.
Each moment of a happy lover's hour is worth an age of dull and common life.
APHRA BEHN
The Younger Brother
Aphra Behn (1640 - 1689) was an English playwright, poet, and novelist from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors.
Love is not a delicate toying,
A slim and shimmering mesh;
It is two souls wrenched into one,
Two bodies made one flesh.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
Young Adventure
Upon Love's bosom Earth floats like an Ark
Safely through all the Deluge of the dark.
GERALD MASSEY
"To My Wife"
Some people, right away, do know each other deeply. Love gives them insight into each other. Love makes them pledge themselves to each other. Love makes them inventive. Yes, it also makes them ridiculous. But that's just another of love's glories. It makes being ridiculous permissible.
JAMES KUZNER
"Should we scoff at the idea of love at first sight?", The Conversation, August 30, 2018
James Kuzner is Associate Professor of English at Brown University. With a specialty in early modern literature, his research tends to focus on the relationship between literature, selfhood, and political imagination.
Everything is a mystery with Love--his arrows, his quiver, his torch, his childlike appearance. It's not the work of one day to understand the breadth of his science.
MINA SAMUELS
"Truly, Madly, Deeply--A Fable Explains Why Love is Crazy", Huffington Post, October 31, 2017
You can love more than one person at a time, and I don't give a damn what the self-help books say.
RITA MAE BROWN
Full Cry
What is love? To be delighted by the happiness of another.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
Confessio Philosophi
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1 July 1646 - 14 November 1716) was a German philosopher, mathematician, and logician. His most prominent accomplishment was the development of differential and integral calculus independently of Sir Isaac Newton's contemporaneous achievements.
The greatest pleasures of love are inseparable from its greatest pains: Love has the face of a goddess, but the talons of a lion.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,
'Tis woman's whole existence.
LORD BYRON
Don Juan
It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive manifestations of their aggressiveness.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
ALFRED TENNYSON
"In Memoriam"