quotations about love
The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Conversations with Samuel R. Delany
Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black. We can't tell if it will survive us. But we can be sure that it's the last thing to go.
MARTIN AMIS
The Second Plane
Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.
ANNE CARSON
Eros the Bittersweet
Love was altogether more predatory. It was concerned with pursuit, capture, enjoyment; it was caused by beauty, the way raw red skin is caused by the sun; it was an appetite, like hunger or thirst, a physical discomfort that tortured you until it was satisfied.
K. J. PARKER
Devices and Desires
Love born of anxiety resembles a thorn shaped so that efforts to pull it out of one's flesh merely cause it to penetrate more deeply therein.
ANDRE MAUROIS
An Art of Living
There are many kinds of love, as many kinds of light,
And every kind of love makes a glory in the night.
There is love that stirs the heart, and love that gives it rest,
But the love that leads life upward is the noblest and the best.
HENRY VAN DYKE
"Love and Light"
Love is the grand prize and the garbage heap. Love is a spiritual root canal and the only thing that makes life worth living. Love is a little taste of always and a big bite of nothing. And love is everything in between these extremes.
ROBERT FULGHUM
True Love
I had no illusions about love anymore. It came, it went, it left casualties or it didn't. People weren't meant to be together forever, regardless of what the songs say.
SARAH DESSEN
This Lullaby
It's easy to live when you're in love.
LEO ROBIN
"Easy Living"
Experience is bitter, but its teachings we retain; It has taught me this--who once has loved, loves never on earth again!
GEORGE ARNOLD
"Introspection"
Choose to love whomsoever thou wilt: all else will follow.
ST. AUGUSTINE
On the Mystical Body of Christ
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.
Those that go searching for love
only make manifest their own lovelessness,
and the loveless never find love,
only the loving find love,
and they never have to seek for it.
D. H. LAWRENCE
"Search for 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".
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
All is fair in love and war.
JOHN LYLY
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit
True love is a giant cheese wheel.
DAYNA EVANS
"True Love Is a Giant Cheese Wheel", New York Magazine, December 21, 2015
What love is depends on where you are in relation to it. Secure in it, it can feel as mundane and necessary as air -- you exist within it, almost unnoticing. Deprived of it, it can feel like an obsession; all-consuming, a physical pain. Love is the driver for all great stories: not just romantic love, but the love of parent for child, for family, for country. It is the point before consummation of it that fascinates: what separates you from love, the obstacles that stand in its way. It is usually at those points that love is everything.
JOJO MOYES
"What is love -- can it really be defined and explained?", The Guardian, February 12, 2016
Love's the big hint life can't stop dropping, the biggest beguilement of all.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
As a drop of honey is dissipated and lost in a pail of water, so the sweet affection of love would totally vanish through too extensive a diffusion.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos