quotations about love
Love is a kind of warfare.
OVID
The Art of Love
Love is ... knowing that, should it come to it, they would want you to hollow out their corpse and use the carcass as a one-man tent to keep warm. Should it come to it.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
Love for those too easily won does not last long.
ROMAN PROVERB
Love demands that we stop asking "how can my wife/parent/sibling be better" and start asking "how can I make my wife/parent/sibling the happiest in the world?" Love demands death to self.
CHRIS STEFANICK
"Love is Easy Until It's Tested", National Catholic Register, March 19, 2016
In the vacuum of the heart love falls forever.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit is Rich
If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.
LYNDA BARRY
attributed, The Surrendered Single
Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met -- or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
ROBERT BURNS
Ae Fond Kiss
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
You can't make me love you.
NEIL GAIMAN
Coraline
Neil Gaiman (born 10 November 1960) is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, films, and nonfiction. He is best known for the comic book series The Sandman and novels such as American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book.
When love enters, the whole spiritual constitution of a man changes, is filled with the Holy Ghost, and almost his form is altered.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers
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".
When I think of what true love means to us, I also think of the mundane days of bill paying, chore completing, and grocery shopping. Even though we hate being adults, being adults together somehow seems tolerable and perhaps even survivable.
LINDSAY DETWILER
"True Love Is Built In The Simple Moments", Huffington Post, October 22, 2017
What is annoying in love, is that it is a crime in which one cannot do without an accomplice.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
We never love with all our heart and all our soul but once, and that is the first time.
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.
There is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love.
IVAN KLIMA
Love and Garbage
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
G. K. CHESTERTON
"The Advantages of Having One Leg", On Lying in Bed and Other Essays
The belief that love is a finite essence that will eventually run out holds a certain logic for me even now, even if I am supposed to know better.
SUSANNA MOORE
The Big Girls
The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Fusees
One who possesses such immense power over our existence will inspire awe that easily threatens to overwhelm us, even if we believe he will never abandon or destroy us.... Its grandeur makes us feel both powerful and powerless--not just to possess the loved one--but in our existence itself: the existence which we yearn for love to anchor. To be in a relationship of love is, in other words, always a relationship of fear; indeed, the greater the love the greater the fear.
SIMON MAY
Love: A History
O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
W. B. YEATS
"Brown Penny"
O little hour of Love, so wild and sweet!
I gave the world, thy honey-dew to eat;
And now the tear-sown pathway of the dead
Echoes the patter of thy flying feet.
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love