LOVE QUOTES

It's love that makes the world go round!

W.S. GILBERT, Iolanthe

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, Sonnets from the Portuguese

Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections, as leaves are to the life of trees. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, American Note-Books, Mar. 9, 1853

Love -- bittersweet, irrepressible -- loosens my limbs and I tremble.

SAPPHO, To Atthis

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.

D.H. LAWRENCE

Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the sense that in uniting the beloved life to ours we can watch over its happiness, bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of privation and suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy.

GEORGE ELIOT, Daniel Deronda

Love is an alchemist that can transmute poison into food.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

ANAIS NIN, Parted Lips: Lesbian Love Quotes Through the Ages

Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Invisible Monsters

Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense.

HELEN ROWLAND

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.

RAINER MARIA RILKE, Letters to a Young Poet

When one loves somebody everything is clear -- where to go, what to do -- it all takes care of itself and one doesn't have to ask anybody about anything.

MAXIM GORKY, Jerry Dorsman's How to Achieve Peace of Mind

Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship - never.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

As love is the most noble and divine passion of the soul, so is it that to which we may justly attribute all the real satisfactions of life, and without it, man is unfinished, and unhappy.

APHRA BEHN, The Fair Jilt

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

BIBLE, Leviticus 19:18

They do not love that do not show their love.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Love is jealous that any should come before her, or after. She would be all in all. If a man will trust her and live in her, he shall know all things.

JENNETTE LEE, The Ibsen Secret

Love--that divine fire which was made to light and warm the temple of home--sometimes burns at unholy altars.

HORACE MANN, Thoughts

Love will not serve those who do not live for her, and in her, and to whom she is not the breath of life.

JENNETTE LEE, The Ibsen Secret

Love ceases to be a pleasure, when it ceases to be a secret.

APHRA BEHN, The Lover's Watch, Four o'clock

Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease is prevailent [sic] only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.

AMBROSE BIERCE, The Devil's Dictionary

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

Love is blind.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales

Love your enemies.

BIBLE, Matthew 5:44

Love is the wine of existence. When you have taken that, you have taken the most precious drop that there is in the cluster.

HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit

If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?

LILY TOMLIN, Parted Lips: Lesbian Love Quotes Through the Ages

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,

'Tis woman's whole existence.

LORD BYRON, Don Juan

We don't believe in rheumatism and true love until after the first attack.

MARIE VON EBNER-ESCHENBACH, Aphorism

Love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.

HERMANN HESSE, Peter Camenzind

Love fattens on smooth words.

KATHARINE HEPBURN, Me: Stories of My Life

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness. It is not true that love makes things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult.

GEORGE ELIOT, Felix Holt

The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can never end.

BENJAMIN DISRAELI

Love, such as it is in society, is only the exchange of two fantasies, and the contact of two bodies.

SEBASTIEN R.N. CHAMFORT, Maximes et pensées

The course of true love never did run smooth.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Love is eternal as long as it lasts.

VINICIUS DE MORAIS

Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty.... People with no imagination feed it with sex -- the clown of love. They don't know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that -- softly, without props.

TONI MORRISON, Love

It is the plain women who know about love; the beautiful women are too busy being fascinating.

KATHARINE HEPBURN, Evan Esar's 20,000 Quips & Quotes

Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God.

TONI MORRISON, Paradise

Love's tongue is in the eyes.

PHINEAS FLETCHER, Piscatory Eclogues

At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER, Animal Dreams

Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby- awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.

DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket), Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

It must be sad to outlive aught we love.

GEORGE ELIOT, The Spanish Gypsy

Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.

LEO TOLSTOY, War and Peace

The greatest pleasures of love are inseparable from its greatest pains: Love has the face of a goddess, but the talons of a lion.

IVAN PANIN, Thoughts

Love will have its day.

BONO, "North and South of the River"

Have you heard the word is love?

It’s so fine, it’s sunshine.

THE BEATLES, The Word

Everyone has a right to love and be loved, and nobody on this earth has the right to tell anyone that their love for another human being is morally wrong.

BARBRA STREISAND, The Advocate, Aug. 17, 1999

Love seeketh not itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives its ease,

And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.

WILLIAM BLAKE, Songs of Experience

Love means not ever having to say you're sorry.

ERICH SEGAL, Love Story

There is a comfort in the strength of love;

'Twill make a thing endurable, which else

Would overset the brain, or break the heart.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, Michael

Let me prevail as of old, as lover, as lord, as king, or have done with Love's tyrant rule.

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT, To Nimue

True love is a durable fire,

In the mind ever burning.

SIR WALTER RALEIGH, As Ye Came from the Holy Land

Love's mysteries in souls do grow,

But yet the body is his book.

JOHN DONNE, The Ecstasy

Some meet love's dreams when kissed by death,

And some again in youth,

But all have felt the quickening breath

Of love's undying truth.

EDWIN LEIBFREED, "Love's Dreams"

We can't profess love without talking through hand puppets.

DAVID SEDARIS, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.

VICTOR HUGO, Les Misérables

Love's wing moults when caged and captured,

Only free, he soars enraptured.

THOMAS CAMPBELL, Freedom and Love

Love does nothing but make you weak! It turns you into an object of pity and derision--a mewling pathetic creature no more fit to live than a worm squirming on the pavement after a hard summer rain.

TERESA MEDEIROS, The Vampire Who Loved Me

True love begins in heaven's bower,

Unfolds on earth a perfect flower.

ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, "Love's Language"

Love ... like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low.

HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit

Love's fire colors once our neutral form, to blacken to eternal embers.

ELISE PUMPELLY CABOT, "Arizona"

Love is such a simple thing when we have only one-and-twenty summers and a sweet girl of seventeen trembles under our glance, as if she were a bud first opening her heart with wondering rapture to the morning. Such young unfurrowed souls roll to meet each other like two velvet peaches that touch softly and are at rest; they mingle as easily as two brooklets that ask for nothing but to entwine themselves and ripple with ever-interlacing curves in the leafiest hiding-places.

GEORGE ELIOT, Adam Bede

Love is the hastening gravitation of spirit towards spirit, and body towards body, in the joy of creation.

D. H. LAWRENCE, "Love"

Love isn't love until it's past.

PRINCE, Sometimes It Snows in April

Son, if a maiden love thee, thou shalt appear handsome in her sight; she shall praise thine eyes, and the corners of thy mouth, yea, she shall admire thy hands. Though thou wert even as the orangutan yet shall she paint thee with fancies.

GELETT BURGESS, The Maxims of Methuselah

A summer breeze can be very refreshing; but if we try to put it in a tin can so we can have it entirely to ourselves, the breeze will die. Our beloved is the same. He is like a breeze, a cloud, a flower. If you imprison him in a tin can, he will die. Yet many people do just that. They rob their loved one of his liberty, until he can no longer be himself. They live to satisfy themselves and use their loved one to help them fulfill that. That is not loving; it is destroying.

THICH NHAT HANH, Teachings on Love

Yes, life is but a waste,

A cheerless pathway, where

No healthy fruit allures the taste,

No flowerets balm the air,

If Love, the wild rose, ne'er luxuriates there.

WILLIAM B. TAPPAN, "Love"

Love's tendrils round the heart doth twine,

As round the oak doth cling the vine.

ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, "Love's Language"

To love is to destroy, and ... to be loved is to be the one destroyed.

CASSANDRA CLARE, City of Bones

If two people are in love they can sleep on the blade of a knife.

EDWARD HOAGLAND, Balancing Acts

You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so how could we take it back without asking?

JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body

To go through life without love is to travel through the world in a carriage with closed windows.

IVAN PANIN, Thoughts

Love is a moral drunkenness; and, whilst it lasts, the shrew seems gentle, the tigress a dove, the flirt constant, and the fiend an angel.

CHARLES WILLIAM DAY, The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos

If the thing loved is base, the lover becomes base.

LEONARDO DA VINCI, Thoughts on Art and Life

Love is the key-note of the universe--

The theme, the melody.

HENRY ABBEY, "The Troubadour"

If there is no love more in yonder heart, it is but a corpse unburied.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Newcomes

Tell not thy previous loves to a woman, lest she also telleth thee hers.

GELETT BURGESS, The Maxims of Methuselah

Love, in this world, is like a seed taken from the tropics, and planted where the winter comes too soon; and it cannot spread itself in flower-clusters and wide-twining vines, so that the whole air is filled with the perfume thereof. But there is to be another summer for it yet. Care for the root now, and God will care for the top by and by.

HENRY WARD BEECHER, Life Thoughts

Love is a spy who is plotting treason,

In league with that warm, red rebel, the Heart.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "Communism"

'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

ALFRED TENNYSON, In Memoriam

Love's never a fair trade.

MARGARET ATWOOD, The Year of the Flood

Heav'nly love shall outdo Hellish hate.

JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost

Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?

JEANETTE WINTERSON, Lighthousekeeping

Love makes its record in deeper colors as we grow out of childhood into manhood; as the Emperors signed their names in green ink when under age, but when of age, in purple.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, Table-Talk

Not the swart Pariah in some Indian grove,

Lone, lean, and hunted by his brother’s hate,

Hath drunk so deep the cup of bitter fate

As that poor wretch who cannot, cannot love:

He bears a load which nothing can remove,

A killing, withering weight.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, "The Solitary"

One of the remarkable things about love is that, despite very irritating people writing poems and songs about how pleasant it is, it really is quite pleasant.

DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket), Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

Upon Love's bosom Earth floats like an Ark

Safely through all the Deluge of the dark.

GERALD MASSEY, "To My Wife"

Each moment of a happy lover's hour is worth an age of dull and common life.

APHRA BEHN, The Younger Brother

If a man can be properly said to love something, it must be clear that he feels affection for it as a whole, and does not love part of it to the exclusion of the rest.

PLATO, The Republic

Love is no hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and colour are always wild!

JOHN GALSWORTHY, The Forsyte Saga

Love is made out of ecstasy and wonder;

Love is a poignant and accustomed pain.

It is a burst of Heaven-shaking thunder;

It is a linnet's fluting after rain.

JOYCE KILMER, "In Memory"

Love, from its awful throne of patient power

In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour

Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,

And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs

And folds over the world its healing wings.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Prometheus Unbound

Love ... must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightning -- a hurricane from heaven that drops down on your life, overturns it, tears away your will like a leaf, and carries your whole heart off with it into the abyss.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Madame Bovary

How far above all price Love's costly wine,

Which can the meanest chalice make divine!

RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, "Love"

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

Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.

SYLVIA PLATH, "The Stones," The Colossus and Other Poems

A man is only as good as what he loves.

SAUL BELLOW, Seize the Day