quotations about love
It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in a play not with a woman of the outside world but with a doll inside our brain -- the only woman moreover that we have always at our disposal, the only one we shall ever possess -- whom the arbitrary power of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the Balbec of my dreams had been from the real Balbec; an artificial creation which by degrees, and to our own hurt, we shall force the real woman to resemble.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way
To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task ... tremendous and foolish and human.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
Oh, my young friends, how delightful is the beginning of a love-business, and how undignified, sometimes, the end!
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Virginians
We all have the seeds of love in us. We can develop this wonderful source of energy, nurturing the unconditional love that does not expect anything in return.
THICH NHAT HANH
Teachings on Love
O, high the happy bosom heaves
When love is in the dancer!
WITTER BYNNER
"Three Poplars"
Caressing reassures lovers that their love endures.
WITTER BYNNER
"Rose-Time"
Love and money should properly have nothing to do with each other.
JOHN SAUL
Guardian
If you love someone, then your freedom is curtailed. If you love someone, you give up much of your privacy. If you love someone, then you are no longer merely one person but half of a couple. To think or behave any other way is to risk losing that love.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Obsidian Butterfly
If with love thy heart has burned;
If thy love is unreturned;
Hide thy grief within thy breast,
Though it tear thee unexpressed;
For when love has once departed
From the eyes of the false-hearted,
And one by one has torn off quite
The bandages of purple light;
Though thou wert the loveliest
Form the soul had ever dressed,
Thou shalt seem, in each reply,
A vixen to his altered eye;
Thy softest pleadings seem too bold,
Thy praying lute will seem to scold;
Though thou kept the straightest road,
Yet thou errest far and broad.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
To Rhea
No wound is worse than counterfeited love.
SOPHOCLES
Antigone
Love's fire colors once our neutral form, to blacken to eternal embers.
ELISE PUMPELLY CABOT
"Arizona"
Though she had been besieged, courted, and pursued by men who had fallen in love with her, she did not in her heart believe in the existence of love. It seemed to her as unreal as the painted drop scenes, the temples of love, and the banks of roses that formed the settings for her dances. But though she was cold and insensitive to love, she was esteemed a wonderful mistress. She herself practiced love as a duty imposed by her profession, a part to be played that might sometimes please but always fatigued her and called for a high degree of art.
VICKI BAUM
Grand Hotel
A man loves with more or less passion according to the number of cords which his pretty mistress binds to his heart.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Love was a country he knew nothing about.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Burning with tender love is not really an image for someone who has warmed mercury over a gentle flame. In slowness, gentleness, and hope we have the hidden force of moral perfection and of material transmutation.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Formation of the Scientific Mind
Love is but a fire that is to be transmitted.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Psychoanalysis of Fire
Love is kind of like a unicorn -- elusive and very hard to explain.
OLIVIA TRUFFAUT-WONG
"11 Movies To Watch When You're In Love To Get You Through The Good, The Bad, & All The Feels", Bustle, December 2015
There's love, sweet love, for one and all--
For love is best for great and small.
MAUD LINDSAY
"Inside the Garden Gate", Mother Stories
Love enters a man through his eyes, a woman through her ears.
POLISH PROVERB
To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.'
AYN RAND
The Fountainhead