quotations about love
When they speak of it, this love of theirs, they speak as of a kind of grand mal brought on catastrophically by a bacillus unknown to science but everywhere present in the air about us, like the tuberculosis spore, and to which all but the coldest constitutions are susceptible.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
To love is for the Soul to choose a companion, and travel with it along the perilous defiles and winding ways of life; mutually sustaining, when it is rugged with obstructions, and mutually rejoicing, when rich broad plains and sunny slopes make journeying delight.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
The Lives and Works of Goethe
I am convinced the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the most wretched.
NORMAN MAILER
The Man Who Studied Yoga
Tell not thy previous loves to a woman, lest she also telleth thee hers.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
It is most clearly in matters of love that people show the quality of their mental images and how they handle the problem of trying to make reality and images correspond. Some men, for example, have such rigid images of the ideal woman that they must marry that they will have no compromise. They never meet anyone who fits perfectly into the pattern they have in mind, so either they never marry or else they marry again and again, hoping that eventually they will find a woman of low melting point who will pour herself into the long prepared mould.
ERIC BERNE
The Mind in Action
Oh, ill betide that villain love, not love,
That all its object and affection finds
In the mere contact of encircling arms!
PEDRO CALDERON DE LA BARCA
The Painter of His Own Dishonour
Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Passion
There is hope for all the colored people in this country while one white woman can love one colored man.
PETER ABRAHAMS
The Path of Thunder
Love is but a fire that is to be transmitted.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Psychoanalysis of Fire
Only little boys and old men sneer at love.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Rector of Justin
Love does not seek equals; it creates them.
STENDAHL
The Red and the Black
No friend to Love like a long voyage at sea.
APHRA BEHN
The Rover
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.
First we love within, then we love the world.
ELIZABETH LESSER
The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure
True love will not brook reserve; it feels undervalued and outraged, when even the sorrows of those it loves are concealed from it.
WASHINGTON IRVING
"The Wife", The Sketch Book
It must be sad to outlive aught we love.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Spanish Gypsy
That feelings of love and hate make rational judgments impossible in public affairs, as in private affairs, we can clearly enough see in others, though not so clearly in ourselves.
HERBERT SPENCER
The Study of Sociology
If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.
LYNDA BARRY
attributed, The Surrendered Single
Love is all around you and all you have to do is claim it.
PATRICIA LOVE
The Truth About Love
Oh, my young friends, how delightful is the beginning of a love-business, and how undignified, sometimes, the end!
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Virginians
This may be the very nature of love, a passion as fickle as the sea, full of certainty when the object of desire is absent, yet dubious when confronted again with the lover's presence.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne