Quotes about love
page 13

“And once again I believe that nothing that's important really becomes lost. We just delude ourselves, thinking that we own the things, the moments and the others. Still with me are all the dead persons who I loved, all the friends who turned away, all the happy days that faded. I lost nothing but the illusion that everything could be mine forever.”

Miguel Sousa Tavares (1952) Portuguese writer

Happiness, Thinking, Personality, Dead

“Love is the force that leaves you colorless”

Ovid Metamorphoses

Source: Metamorfosis

“Banish'd from [those we love] Is self from self: a deadly banishment!”

William Shakespeare The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Source: The Two Gentlemen of Verona

“God will judge us not according to how much we endured, but how much we could love”

Richard Wurmbrand (1909–2001) Romanian Christian minister of Jewish descent

Source: Tortured for Christ N/E

God

“I love you. I worry about you. I wonder whether I tell you enough how I love you and want you and need you and how I am diminished… when you are not with me and how I am multiplied when you are here.”

Pat Frank book Alas, Babylon

Source: Alas, Babylon

“If music be the food of love, play on.”

William Shakespeare Twelfth Night

Orsino, Act I, scene i.
Variant: Music, moody food
Of us that trade in love.
Source: Twelfth Night (1601)

Food, Music, Romantic, Wedding

“you have to love something before you can hate it.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Last Song

Source: The Last Song

Hate

“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Source: My Father's Tears and Other Stories

People, Memory

“You've got to have something to eat, and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave.”

Billie Holiday (1915–1959) American jazz singer and songwriter

Life

“As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Feeling

“A boy admiring a pretty girl. A rare thing to be certain. But love—true love—is something else.”

Alex Flinn (1966) American children's writer

Source: A Kiss in Time

Girl, Boy

“I think I love him, but I also think that you can love people who aren't good for you.”

Augusten Burroughs book Dry

Source: Dry

People, Thinking

“If your body goes in search of a relationship, we call this sexuality. If your mind goes in search of relationships, we call this companionship. If your emotion goes in search of relationships, we call this love. If your energies go in search of relationship, we call this yoga.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Source: Life and Death in One Breath

“I only fear the death of others. For me, true death is that of the people I love”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Death, People, Fear

“I don't know how to talk.
Oh! talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.”

Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance

Source: A Woman of No Importance

Perfection, Season

“Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book Half of a Yellow Sun

Source: Half of a Yellow Sun

“I have been loved, Edward told the stars. So? said the stars. What difference does that make when you are all alone now?”

Kate DiCamillo book The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

Source: The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

Star

“No matter what else, we have love. Always love.”

P. C. Cast book Hidden

Source: Hidden

“The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Jealousy

“I hope you never love anything as much as I love you.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 73

Hope

“You never lose by loving, you lose by holding back.”

Barbara De Angelis (1951) American psychologist

Variant: You never lose by loving. You always lose by holding back.
Source: Chicken Soup for the Couple's Soul

For women, Relationship, Cute, Romantic

“When I was your age — about, ooh, a thousand years ago — I loved a good bedtime story. The Three Little Sontarans. The Emperor Dalek's New Clothes. Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday, eh? All the classics.”

Mark Gatiss (1966) British actor, screenwriter and novelist

Age, Clothes

“You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

Source: Tragedy of Coriolanus

Men, Hate, Cry, Dead

“‎Mark it down: God loves you with an unearthly love. You can't win it by being winsome. You can't lose it by being a loser. But you can be blind enough to resist it”

Max Lucado (1955) American clergyman and writer

God

“The greatest cure for love is still that time honoured medicine - love returned.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Time

“Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding”

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) American photographer and author

Variant: Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.

Understanding, Relationship, Romantic

“How lovely it is that there are words and sounds. Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“We walked back to iDEATH, holding hands. Hands are very nice things, especially after they have travelled back from making love.”

Richard Brautigan book In Watermelon Sugar

Source: In Watermelon Sugar

Making love, Travel

“I wouldn't know what to do with [colour]. Colour to me is too real. It's limiting. It doesn't allow too much of a dream. The more you throw black into a colour, the more dreamy it gets… Black has depth. It's like a little egress; you can go into it, and because it keeps on continuing to be dark, the mind kicks in, and a lot of things that are going on in there become manifest. And you start seeing what you're afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

Source: Lynch on Lynch

Dreams

“There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something, we'd all love one another.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

Zen Masters : The Wisdom of Frank Zappa (2003)

“You can't force love, I realized. It's there or it isn't. If it's not there, you've got to be able to admit it. If it is there, you've got to do whatever it takes to protect the ones you love.”

Richelle Mead book Frostbite

Source: Frostbite

Romantic

“sorrow… is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of
love touches it”

Oscar Wilde book De Profundis

Source: De Profundis

“Alcohol is like love," he said. "The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.”

Raymond Chandler book The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye (1954)

Alcohol, Girl, Kiss, Clothes

“Ninety percent of true love is acute, ear-burning embarrassment.”

Terry Pratchett book Wyrd Sisters

Source: Wyrd Sisters

“I love the way that each book—any book—is its own journey. You open it, and off you go….”

Sharon Creech (1945) American writer of children's novels

Books, Way

“But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

People, Indifference

“The biggest changes in a women's nature are brought by love; in man, by ambition”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Women, Nature, Change

“I love you, Jonathan," she whispered.
A long arm snaked around her, and he pulled her against his side.
"I know," he said. "I just wanted to be sure you knew it, too.”

Tamora Pierce In the Hand of the Goddess

Source: In the Hand of the Goddess

“God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.”

Daniel Webster (1782–1852) Leading American senator and statesman. January 18, 1782 – October 24, 1852. Served as the Secretary of Sta…

Speech (3 June 1834); reported in Edward Everett, ed., The Works of Daniel Webster (1851), volume iv, page 47

God

“The only way love can last a lifetime is if it's unconditional. The truth is this: love is not determined by the one being loved but rather by the one choosing to love.”

Stephen Kendrick book The Love Dare

Source: The Love Dare

Truth, Way

“Can miles truly separate you from friends… If you want to be with someone you love, aren't you already there?”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Missing You

“Oh, I love hugging. I wish I was an octopus, so I could hug 10 people at a time!”

Drew Barrymore (1975) American actress, director and producer

People, Time

“There is no doubt that the princess did become a queen---not only on the screen. One of the most loved, one of the most skillful, one of the most intelligent, one of the most sensitive, charming actresses---and friends, in my life---but also in the later stages of her life, the UNICEF ambassador to the children of the world. The generosity, sensitivity, the nobility of her service to the children of the world and the mothers of the world will never be forgotten.”

Gregory Peck (1916–2003) American actor

Life, Children, World, Intelligence

“But surely for everything you love you have to pay some price.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

Source: An Autobiography

“I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Music, Thinking

“Any piece of good music is in essence a love song.”

Diana Gabaldon book Dragonfly in Amber

Source: Dragonfly in Amber

Music

“Suddenly Ka realized he was in love with İpek. And realizing that this love would determine the rest of his life, he was filled with dread.”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

Life

“Love, hope, fear, faith - these make humanity; These are its sign and note and character”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

Source: Browning's Paracelsus: Being the Text of Browning's Poem

Fear, Faith, Hope

“We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire.”

Saul Bellow book Henderson the Rain King

Source: Henderson the Rain King

Star

“I was born when he kissed me, I died when he left me, I lived a few weeks while he loved me”

Dorothy B. Hughes book In a Lonely Place

Variant: I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived a few weeks while you loved me.
Source: In a Lonely Place

Kiss

“The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!”

Jane Austen book Sense and Sensibility

Variant: Mama, the more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love.
Source: Sense and Sensibility

World

“It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!”

Oscar Wilde book The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Pt. II, st. 9
The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)

Life, Dance

“Whenever we cannot love in the old, human way… God can give us the perfect way.”

Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983) Dutch resistance hero and writer

Source: The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom

God, Way, Perfection

“We should add that it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk: it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love. Eventually”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Course of Love

Understanding, Thinking, Hurt, Personality

“Give into love or live in fear”

Jonathan Larson (1960–1996) American composer and playwright

Rent (1996)

Fear

“Nobody loves the light like the blind man.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Light

“They do not love, that do not show their love.”

William Shakespeare The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Variant: They do not love that do not show their love.
Source: The Two Gentlemen of Verona

For Him

“I became intent on saving him through showing him that he was loved.”

Joyce Johnson (1935) American novelist, short story writer, memoirist

Source: Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958

“How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or seen anybody die?”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Life, Baby

“How peaceful life would be without Love, Adso. How Safe. How Tranquil. And how Dull.”

Umberto Eco book The Name of the Rose

Source: The Name of the Rose

Life, Peace

“Passion is the love of turning being into action. It fuels the engine of creation. It changes concepts to experience…. Never deny passion, for that is to deny Who You Are, and Who You Truly Want To Be.”

Neale Donald Walsch (1943) American writer

Passion, Change

“What is the thing you want most from me? What can I do to make you love me?'

Be yourself,' said Ipek.”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

“Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.”

William Shakespeare As You Like It

Source: As You Like It

Friendship, Wise

“Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can't control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Feeling, Personality

“Love, joy, and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Peace, Joy

“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved”

William Shakespeare book Shakespeare's Sonnets

Source: Shakespeare's Sonnets

Error, Wedding

“A life of short duration… could be so rich in joy and love that it could contain more meaning than a life lasting eighty years.”

Viktor E. Frankl (1905–1997) Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor

Life, Joy

“I'd sacrificed true love and a popped cherry to the god of deception and hormones." - Zoey Redbird (Ch 24)”

P. C. Cast book Chosen

Source: Chosen

God

“Do you feel loved by God because you believe he makes much of you, or because you believe he frees you and empowers you to enjoy making much of him?”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Variant: Do you love the cross because it makes much of you? Or do you love it because it enables you to enjoy and eternity of making much of God?

God, Feeling

“The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history.”

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) Austrian writer

Source: The Burning Secret and other stories

Disappointment, History, Heart, Loneliness

“Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.”

Derek Walcott (1930–2017) Saint Lucian–Trinidadian poet and playwright

“The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.”

Oscar Wilde book De Profundis

Source: De Profundis

God

“I am accused. I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the
world conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Hate, World, Fear, Dreams

“Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.”

Marya Hornbacher book Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Source: Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Indifference

“I fell in love with her when we were together, then fell deeper in love with her in the years we were apart. Our story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. And although this is the way all stories unfold, I still can't believe that ours didn't go on forever.”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

John Tyree, Prologue, p. 4
Source: 2000s, Dear John (2006)

Way, Parting

“Some people care too much. I think it's called love.”

A.A. Milne book Winnie-the-Pooh

Source: Winnie-the-Pooh

People, Thinking, Sad, Anniversary

“Some people are easier to love when you don't have to be around them.”

Irvine Welsh (1958) Scottish novelist

People

“Love thy enemies, it says in the scriptures. My foster mother always added, "At the very least, you will be polite to them.”

Patricia Briggs book Moon Called

Source: Moon Called

“Love, known to the person by whom it is inspired, becomes more bearable.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Personality

“Pleasure of love lasts but a moment, Pain of love lasts a lifetime.”

Bette Davis (1908–1989) film and television actress from the United States

Pain, Pleasure, Sad, Heartbreaking

“Physical experiences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and perversions of pleasure. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Pleasure, Joy, Dependency

“I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of daily life.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

Life

“If you’re looking for the full deal, the till-death deal, then look at me. No one’s ever going to love you, stick by you, understand how you work the way I do.
(Malcolm Kavanaugh)”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Happy Ever After

Death, Way, Understanding

“I despise my own hypersensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance. It is certainly abnormal to crave so much to be loved and understood.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

“There is the heat of Love,
the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover's whisper,
irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.”

Homér Iliad

XIV. 216–217 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Alexander Pope's translation:
: In this was every art, and every charm,
To win the wisest, and the coldest warm:
Fond love, the gentle vow, the gay desire,
The kind deceit, the still reviving fire,
Persuasive speech, and more persuasive sighs,
Silence that spoke, and eloquence of eyes.
Iliad (c. 750 BC)
Source: The Iliad

Lovers, Madness

“Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Variant: A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
Source: Lolita

Happiness, Hope, Change

“Shouldn't you know what love's like, before you begin renouncin' it"
George Cooper”

Tamora Pierce In the Hand of the Goddess

Source: In the Hand of the Goddess

“Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: On Love

Understanding

“Real understanding does not come from what we learn in books; it comes from what we learn from love of nature, of music, of man. For only what is learned in that way is truly understood.”

Pablo Casals (1876–1973) Catalan cellist and conductor

Books, Music, Way, Understanding

“And because I love this life
I know I shall love death as well.
The child cries out when
From the right breast the mother
Takes it away, in the very next moment
To Find in the left one
Its consolation.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Life, Death

“I love you because no two snowflakes are alike, and it is possible, if you stand tippy-toe, to walk between the raindrops.”

Nikki Giovanni (1943) American writer and academic

“The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first and love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Letter to S. Stanwood Menken, chairman, committee on Congress of Constructive Patriotism (January 10, 1917). Roosevelt’s sister, Mrs. Douglas Robinson, read the letter to a national meeting, January 26, 1917. Reported in Proceedings of the Congress of Constructive Patriotism, Washington, D.C., January 25–27, 1917 (1917), p. 172
1910s
Context: Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood—the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

Life, Peace

“A little love and attention can go a long way… too bad more people don't realize that.”

Frank E. Peretti book Hangman's Curse

Source: Hangman's Curse

People, Way

“I do profess to be no less than I seem; to serve him truly that will put me in trust: to love him that is honest; to converse with him that is wise, and says little; to fear judgment; to fight when I cannot choose; and to eat no fish.”

William Shakespeare King Lear

Source: King Lear

Fear, Fish, Fight