quotations about love
If there is no love more in yonder heart, it is but a corpse unburied.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Newcomes
Until Obi met Clara on board the cargo boat Sasa he had thought of love as another grossly over-rated European invention.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
With whom shall a young lady fall in love but with the person she sees? She is not supposed to lose her heart in a dream, like a Princess in the "Arabian Nights;" or to plight her young affections to the portrait of a gentleman in the Exhibition, or a sketch in the "Illustrated London News." You have an instinct within you which inclines you to attach yourself to some one: you meet Somebody: you hear Somebody constantly praised; you walk, or ride, or waltz, or talk, or sit in the same pew at church with Somebody: you meet again, and again, and--"Marriages are made in Heaven," your dear mamma says, pinning your orange-flower wreath on, with her blessed eyes dimmed with tears--and there is a wedding breakfast, and you take off your white satin and retire to your coach-and-four, and you and he are a happy pair--Or, the affair is broken off and then, poor dear wounded heart! Why then you meet Somebody Else, and twine your young affections round number two. It is your nature so to do. Do you suppose it is all for the man's sake that you love, and not a bit for your own? Do you suppose you would drink if you were not thirsty, or eat if you were not hungry?
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Pendennis
Love is the union between natural craving and sentiment.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
As a drop of honey is dissipated and lost in a pail of water, so the sweet affection of love would totally vanish through too extensive a diffusion.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?
JANE AUSTEN
Pride and Prejudice
Here is one of the most beautiful effects of love, its confidence not only in the present, but in the future as well. Cynics may declare that it is only the deceitful way nature uses to make human beings perform her will. To such a view all lovers are indifferent. In their confidence they bind themselves to one another, not for a day only, not even for a lifetime, but for eternity.
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's a dog in a manger.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers
David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was an English writer and poet. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection on the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. His opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage".
The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Surfacing
Margaret Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Her works encompass a variety of themes including gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, and "power politics".
Love wasn't the soft, silky words the poets spoke of. Love, with it's twin edges, was the one factor that weakened so many women, that pushed them to compromise their own wants, their own needs for the needs and wants of another.
NORA ROBERTS
Sweet Revenge
'Tis a secret: none knows how it comes, how it goes:
But the name of the secret is Love!
LEWIS CARROLL
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
The flame of anger, bright and brief,
Sharpens the barb of Love.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Tell Me Not Things Past all Belief
Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other. Throw it in the garbage and it springs up clean. Try to root it out and it only flourishes. Love is a weed, a dandelion that you poison from your heart. The taproots wait. The seeds blow off, ticklish, into a part of the yard you didn't spray. And one day, though you worked, though you prodded out each spiky leaf, you lift your eyes and dozens of fat golden faces bob in the grass.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Bingo Palace
Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Heart of the Matter
For me, however, if I understand the concept, to love properly and in earnest one would have to do it anonymously, or at least in an undeclared fashion, so as not to seem to ask anything in return, since asking and getting are the antithesis of love--if, as I say, I have the concept aright, which from all I have said and all that has been said to me so far it appears I do not. It is very puzzling. Love, the kind that I mean, would require a superhuman capacity for sacrifice and self-denial, such as a saint possesses, or a god, and saints are monsters, as we know, and as for the gods--well.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
The heart is forever unfaithful, and the feelings of love will come and go, but true love is not about what you feel. It is about what you do.
DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS
The Lost Diary of Don Juan
You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Painted Drum
The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honour -- the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Quiet American