quotations about love
Love is a tenuous, halting, delicate dance at first, a gentle gavotte, a pas de deux of fits and starts and sweaty palms and nervous smiles. But when you fall, really fall, it is like topping that first high hill on a roller coaster, when the nerves give way to a breathless ride punctuated by dips and dives and moments when your stomach feels as if it is trying to escape through your throat.
JEFF MULLIN
"Love has many facets; abuse isn't one of them", Enid News & Eagle, October 21, 2018
In the beginning, love is all you know. You don't know it is love, of course, all you know is that some soft, good-smelling person holds you, feeds you, talks to you and empties your pants when they are full. As you age you come to realize this feeling is, indeed, love, and mommy and daddy become the center of your universe. You love them more than anything, other than your dog, your bike and your sister, of course, if you must. It is an all-encompassing, all-consuming love that warms you like the sun and sustains you like the air you breathe. And that brand of love is all you know until one day a blonde girl across the classroom bats her eyes at you or a dark-eyed boy in the hall gives you a crooked, pimply grin, and your insides turn to warm mush. At first you think you might have gotten a bad taco at lunch, but no, it is love.
JEFF MULLIN
"Love is a lifelong thrill ride", Enid News, February 14, 2016
In myths the warrant of grace was the acceptance of sacrifice; it is this acceptance that love, the re-enactment of sacrifice, beseeches if it is not to feel under a curse.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
If you have given up your heart ... you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast.
STEPHEN KING
The Drawing of the Three
I was thinking what a curious thing love is; only a sentiment, and yet it has power to make fools of men and slaves of women.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
A Long Fatal Love Chase
Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.
ZIG ZIGLAR
See You at the Top
All you need is love. And a tiara. And maybe a cookie.
ANONYMOUS
To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
Graziella: A Story of Italian Love
So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook?
Sometimes it ought to be.
Sometimes it is.
DORIS LESSING
Play with a Tiger
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
attributed, Zen Soup: Tasty Morsels of Wisdom from Great Minds
Love is to the soul of him who loves, what the soul is to the body which it animates.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Love clamors far more incessantly and passionately at a closed gate than an open one!
MARIE CORELLI
The Master Christian
I love Love -- though he has wings,
And like light can flee.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"Rarely, Rarely, Comest Thou"
Becoming addicted to love isn't uncommon. The chemicals released during that first phase are the same or similar to those released when consuming cocaine or drinking alcohol. And for some people the desire to feel that way all the time can be hard to resist.
KURT SMITH
"Yes, it is Possible to Be Addicted to Love", beliefnet, August 8, 2018
Why does one love? How queer it is to see only one being in the world, to have only one thought in one's mind, only one desire in the heart, and only one name on the lips--a name which comes up continually, rising, like the water in a spring, from the depths of the soul to the lips, a name which one repeats over and over again, which one whispers ceaselessly, everywhere, like a prayer.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
"Was it a Dream?"
Man loves most that which is his own.
HENRY ADAMS
Historical Essays
Love is the possibility of possibilities. Its farthest reach is beyond us, no matter how long we love or how much. It will always remain the mute mystery to whose ecstasy and ache we can only surrender with a yes.
DAVID RICHO
How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.
JULIAN BARNES
Talking It Over
Free-market free love is simultaneously a utopian idea and a dystopian idea. The idea of total sexual freedom is an ideal, but then it's also a Michel Houellebecq nightmare. Now online dating and apps have made that normal. Everyone is "on the market" or "off the market"; friends with "benefits," "investing" time--these are all economic metaphors.
MOIRA WEIGEL
"Love in a Time of Capital: An Interview With Moira Weigel", The Nation, August 29, 2016
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Human Condition