quotations about love
Perhaps love's greatest gift--that it is indeed unconditional--is also its greatest curse.
KRISTIN ARMSTRONG
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
So soon as this want or power [of love] is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"On Love", Essays and Letters
Thou demandest what is love? It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"On Love", Essays and Letters
Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Marriage and Morals
Once you love someone it's like cancer. It spreads and spreads until it eats you up.
ANN WUEHLER
Interviews With Loneliness
Love is like the wild rose-briar;
Friendship like the holly-tree.
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms,
But which will bloom most constantly?
EMILY BRONTE
Love and Friendship
Love is the only shocking act left on the face of the earth.
SANDRA BERNHARD
attributed, Parted Lips: Lesbian Love Quotes Through the Ages
Love likes not the falling fruit,
Nor the withered tree.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
As Ye Came from the Holy Land
Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1552 - 1618) was an English writer, poet, soldier, politician, courtier, spy, and explorer. He is also well known for popularizing tobacco in England.
It is certain there is no other passion which does produce such contrary effects in so great a degree. But this may be said for love, that if you strike it out of the soul, life would be insipid, and our being but half animated. Human nature would sink into deadness and lethargy, if not quickened with some active principle; and as for all others, whether ambition, envy, or avarice, which are apt to possess the mind in the absence of this passion, it must be allowed that they have greater pains, without the compensation of such exquisite pleasures as those we find in love.
JOSEPH ADDISON
"The Passion of Love", Essays Moral and Humorous
It was always about love. Always, always about love. Lost love, love denied, the obsessive hunger for love. Parental or romantic. Whether it was twisted or pure, fulfilled or unrequited, love was always at the source.
JAMES W. HALL
Magic City
Love does not seek equals; it creates them.
STENDAHL
The Red and the Black
Love and death were what novels were about.
OAKLEY HALL
Love and War in California
For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.
GEORGE ELIOT
Daniel Deronda
I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel.
ADRIENNE RICH
Necessities of Life
It is not love that he feels for me. It is more like a constant resentment that has become such a habit to him that to have it removed, like an aching tooth, brings him no relief.
PHILIPPA GREGORY
The Boleyn Inheritance
If Love his moment overstay,
Hatred's swift repulsions play.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Visit
When people fall in love they not only change themselves, but in their eyes the whole world changes. They may have been commonplace or dull before. But once in love they take on a strange brightness. And however uninteresting and dreary the world may have seemed to them, it at once becomes a fairyland.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Love", Reactions and Other Essays Discussing Those States of Feeling and Attitude of Mind That Find Expression In Our Individual Qualities
Love is never free ... It is the most expensive emotion we have.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Burnt Offerings
Love made you vulnerable; if you gave your heart to another, they could leave you or die.
JOHN TWELVE HAWKS
The Traveler
Caressing reassures lovers that their love endures.
WITTER BYNNER
"Rose-Time"