Quotes about love
page 22

“To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: Jayber Crow

“It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you.”

Nigel Slater (1958) English food writer, journalist and broadcaster

“love is blind
and lovers cannot see
the pretty follies
that themselves commit”

William Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice

Source: The Merchant of Venice

Lovers

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

No estoy seguro de que yo exista, en realidad. Soy todos los autores que he leído, toda la gente que he conocido, todas las mujeres que he amado. Todas las ciudades que he visitado, todos mis antepasados... <br class="br">Source: El Pais, 1981 http://elpais.com/diario/1981/09/26/ultima/370303206_850215.html; translation: The Guardian, 2008 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/10/jorgeluisborges

Women, People, Reading

“Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)

Perfection, Wedding

“When you ask God for a gift,
Be thankful if he sends,
Not diamonds, pearls or riches,
but the love of real true friends.”

Helen Steiner Rice (1900–1981) American poet

God

“If you want a lover
I'll do anything you ask me to.
And if you want another kind of love
I'll wear a mask for you.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

"I'm Your Man"
I'm Your Man (1988)

Lovers

“We love our habits more than our income, often more than our life.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: Sceptical Essays

Life

“I'm not going to sacrifice love, real love, for any *%@$n' war or any friend, or any business, because in the end you're alone at night.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

War, Business, Night

“Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me.”

Edith Wharton book The House of Mirth

Source: The House of Mirth

Help

“To be without love is to be without grace, what matters most in life.
We is so much better than I.”

James Patterson book Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Source: Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Life

“Those we love, we can grow to hate. And life… life can be perfect one minute and in shambles the next.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Through the Zombie Glass

Life, Hate, Perfection

“Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

Source: Love Poems and Sonnets

Wedding, love

“I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

People, Knowledge

“… and when you meet someone and fall in love, and they fall in love with you, you ask them "Will you take my heart-- stains and all?" and they say "I will," and they ask you the same question and you say, "I will," too.”

Douglas Coupland Microserfs

Source: Microserfs

Question, Heart

“I am nothing special; of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts, and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Duke, Miracles, p. 2
Source: 1990s, The Notebook (1996)

Life, Soul, Heart, love

“Love's gift cannot be given, it waits to be accepted.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Waiting

“What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved -- what then?”

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

“The story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye, the story of love is hello and goodbye… until we meet again”

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) American musician, singer and songwriter

Life, Goodbye

“My dearest life, I know you are not mine forever; but do love me even if it’s for this moment. After that I shall vanish into the forest where you cast me, I won’t ask anyone for anything again. Give me something that can last me till I die.”

Rabindranath Tagore book Chokher Bali

Source: Chokher Bali

Life

“It's always hard to remember love - years pass and you say to yourself, Was I really in love, or was I just kidding myself? Was I really in love, or was I just pretending he was the man of my dreams? Was I really in love, or was I just desperate?”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Source: I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Dreams

“It wasn't the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more. Its the foghorn I hate. It won't let you alone. It keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back.”

Eugene O'Neill Long Day's Journey into Night

Page 100-101 (Act 3)
Long Day's Journey into Night (1955)
Source: Long Day's Journey Into Night

Hate, World, Feeling, Change

“Oh, ’tis love, ’tis love, that makes the world go round!”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

World

“True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.”

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

Life, Madness

“man, i would have peeled off my shirt faster than you can say bubba loves trucks.”

P. C. Cast (1960) American writer

“Thou art of the Jungle and not of the Jungle. And I am only a black panther. But I love thee, Little Brother.”

Rudyard Kipling book The Jungle Book

Source: The Jungle Book

Art

“I love you, with a love so great that it simply couldn't keep growing inside my heart, but had to leap out and reveal itself in all its magnitude.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

Heart

“When you put faith, hope and love together, you can raise positive kids in a negative world.”

Zig Ziglar (1926–2012) American motivational speaker

World, Faith, Hope

“We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes…”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Women, Men

“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1920s, Marriage and Morals (1929)

Life, Fear, Parting, Dead

“Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace'

One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.

One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you.

One fine day.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919) American artist, writer and activist

Happiness, Beauty, Coffee, Tree

“Oh why rebuke you him that loves you so? / Lay breath so bitter on your bitter foe.”

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream

“Love Conquers Time.”

Brittney Ryan

The Legend of Holly Claus

Time

“I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.”

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet

Source: Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

World, Imagination, Memory, Time

“I did not need to know if he could love me.
I needed to know if he could need me.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“People hate as they love, unreasonably.”

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) novelist

Hate, People

“I have decided to stick to love… Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Source: A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

Hate, Wise, Peaceful, Cute

“Blind is his love and best befits the dark- Benvolio (in Romeo and Juliet)”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

“Don't you worry your pretty little mind. People throw rocks at things that shine and life makes love look hard”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Life, People, Making love

“Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Wisdom, Fools, For Him

“What is this thing called life? I believe
That the earth and the stars too, and the whole glittering universe, and rocks on the mountains have life,
Only we do not call it so--I speak of the life
That oxidizes fats and proteins and carbo-
Hydrates to live on, and from that chemical energy
Makes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these things grow
From a chemical reaction?
I think they were here already, I think the rocks
And the earth and the other planets, and the stars and the galaxies
have their various consciousness, all things are conscious;
But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain
Bring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-glass
To concentrate the heat and make it catch fire:
It seems to us martyrs hotter than the blazing hearth
From which it came. So we scream and laugh, clamorous animals
Born howling to die groaning: the old stones in the dooryard
Prefer silence; but those and all things have their own awareness,
As the cells of a man have; they feel and feed and influence each other, each unto all,
Like the cells of a man's body making one being,
They make one being, one consciousness, one life, one God.”

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet

Source: The Selected Poetry

Life, God, Pain, Pleasure

“Students, eh? Love 'em or hate 'em, you can't hit them with a shovel!”

Terry Pratchett book Making Money

Source: Making Money

Hate

“O me, you juggler, you canker-blossom, you thief of love!”

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream

“Ay me! for aught that ever I could read,
could ever hear by tale or history,
the course of true love never did run smooth.”

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream

History, Reading

“I've always loved the first day of school better than the last day of school. Firsts are best because they are beginnings.”

Jenny Han book To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Source: To All the Boys I've Loved Before

School

“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Hope, Way, Personality, Hope

“I will not live without love.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

“In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

People, Change, Country

“a young woman in love always looks like patience on a monument smiling at grief”

William Shakespeare Twelfth Night

Source: Twelfth Night

Smile, Patience

“When another recognizes you, that recognition draws the dimension of Being more fully into this world through both of you. That is the love that redeems the world.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

World, Drawing

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Variant: A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Sense

“One must love everything.”

Virginia Woolf book Jacob's Room

Source: Jacob's Room

“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.”

John Ruskin book The Stones of Venice

Volume II, chapter V, section 30.
Source: The Stones of Venice (1853)

“No love, no friendship, can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.”

Francois Mauriac (1885–1970) French author

Friendship, For Friend

“For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel:
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him!
This was the most unkindest cut of all”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

God, Angels

“Love is not enough. But, it is the rock on which all else stands.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Blood Brothers

“If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.”

Angelina Jolie (1975) American actress, film director, and screenwriter

Life, Death, People, Thinking

“What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!”

Erich Maria Remarque book The Night in Lisbon

Source: The Night in Lisbon

“What a silly thing love is! It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything and it is always telling one things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

“TO COME HOME TO YOURSELF May all that is unforgiven in you Be released. May your fears yield Their deepest tranquillities. May all that is unlived in you Blossom into a future Graced with love.”

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

Source: To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Invocations and Blessings

Fear, Home, Future

“Love is a weapon of Light, and it has the power to eradicate all forms of darkness. That is the key. When we offer love even to our enemies, we destroy their darkness and hatred…”

Yehuda Berg (1972) American writer

Light

“What you tell me about in the nights. That is not love. That is only passion and lust. When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Farewell to Arms

Source: A Farewell to Arms

Passion, Night

“I love you, not just for now, but for always, and I dream of the day that you’ll take me in your arms again.”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

Source: Dear John

Dreams

“To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Source: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Relationship, Romantic, Wedding, For Him

“Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs.”

Borís Pasternak book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago

People, Wedding

“So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition,
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem.”

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Parting

“Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Antichrist

Sec. 23
The Antichrist (1888)

“You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world.”

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

World

“I am weird, you are weird. Everyone in this world is weird. One day two people come together in mutual weirdness and fall in love.”

Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books

People, World

“After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

Death, World

“You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

-Mr. Darcy”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“You touched my flawed life so gently with love
burning upward in dark steady flame
burning me, burning me into healing.”

Christy Brown (1932–1981) Irish artist

Source: Of Snails and Skylarks

Life

“Oh, I don’t care about Jack. I don’t care for anybody in the whole world but you. I love you, Cecily. You will marry me, won’t you?
You silly boy! Of course. Why, we have been engaged for the last three months.
For the last three months?”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

World, Boy

“You are more to me than any of them has any idea; you are the atmosphere of beauty through which I see life; you are the incarnation of all lovely things… I think of you day and night. ~ Letter to Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Life, Beauty, Idea, Thinking

“It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love or how you love, it matters only that you love”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

“Love is a great beautifier.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women (1868), Ch. 24 : Gossip

“Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books,
But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Source: Romeo and Juliet

Books, School

“I love the friends I have gathered together on this thin raft…”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

“Even when a river of tears courses through this body, the flame of love cannot be quenched.”

Izumi Shikibu (976–1033) Japanese poet

Tear

“Without excuse and self-consideration of health or limb or life, true soldiers fight, live to fight, love the thickest of the fight, and die in the midst of it.”

William Booth (1829–1912) British Methodist preacher

As quoted in Revolution (2005) by Stephen Court & Aaron White .

Life, Health, Fight

“Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought.... life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.”

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) Brazilian writer

The Passion According to G.H. (1964), p. 169

Life, Reality, Silence

“Oh, I love London society! It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what society should be.”

Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband

Mabel Chiltern, Act I
An Ideal Husband (1895)

Beauty

“I have a thing for soda, I love it. [Points to the side of the stage] I know they gave me water, but- [Looks over to the side] Ooh-hoo, a soda! [Walks to it] I didn't even see it there. [Goes to a stool on the side of the stage, a bottle of water and a glass of soda sitting on it. ] Excuse me, uno momento.”

Gabriel Iglesias (1976) American actor

[Picks up the glass of soda]..."Pepsi."
Hot & Fluffy (2007)

Water

“The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky book The Idiot

...князь утверждает, что мир спасет красота! А я утверждаю, что у него оттого такие игривые мысли, что он теперь влюблен.
The Idiot (1868–9)

World, Beauty, Idea

“Neither family, nor privilege, nor wealth, nor anything but Love can light that beacon which a man must steer by when he sets out to live the better life.”

Plato (-427–-347 BC) Classical Greek philosopher

178c, M. Joyce, trans, Collected Dialogues of Plato (1961), p. 533
The Symposium

Life, Family, Light, Wealth

“Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
But—why did you kick me down stairs?”

John Philip Kemble (1757–1823) British actor-manager

The Panel, Act i, Scene 1, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Altered from Isaac Bickerstaff's "'T is Well 't is no Worse"; also found in Debrett's "Asylum for Fugitive Pieces", vol. i., p. 15.

“I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Settembrini's view of literature, Ch. 4
The Magic Mountain (1924)

“Could you love a woman you didn't respect? Could you worship someone without believeing in her? Could you be madly in love with a woman you didn't admire? Well, you could. Not only that, it might be better that way. Easier. It took Paul almost forty years to learn that carnal platitude. Nevertheless, he always took Sonia to dinners where, sooner or later, her stupidity would explode, with the result that brighter souls would inevitably pick up on it right away and cast a sympathetic, albeit ironical, look in his direction, which only excited him all the more.”

Françoise Sagan (1935–2004) French writer

Un chagrin de passage (1994, A Fleeting Sorrow, translated 1995)

Stupidity, Way, Soul, Learning

“That’s one of the things I love about being single, everybody always goes ‘Oh, you’re single what a tragedy.’ And I go ‘Well, yeah, from about ten to two each evening it is a tragedy but that times a tragedy for most married people as well.’ One of the great advantages of being single is you can still pick up hitch hikers, if you are married you don’t want to get, you know, slit or anything, cause you have a family to support. If you single and you die it doesn’t really matter so you are free to do what you really want to do. I love that!”

Rich Mullins (1955–1997) American christian musician

Lufkin, Texas http://www.kidbrothers.net/words/concert-transcripts/lufkin-texas-jul1997-full.html (July 19, 1997) <br class="br">In Concert

People, Family, Support, Time

“Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), IX The Practice of Painting

Boy, Drawing

“To be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars- to be satisfied with your possessions but not content with yourself until you have made the best of them- to despise nothing in the world except falsehood and meanness, and to fear nothing except cowardice- to be governed by you admirations rather than by your disgusts- to covet nothing that is your neighbors except his kindness of heart and gentleness of manners- to think seldom of your enemies, often of your friends, and every day of Christ; to spend as much time as you can in God's out-of doors- these are the little guideposts on the footpaths to peace.”

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) American diplomat

Footpaths to Peace.

Life, God, World, Fear

“My theory is that for those of us who are too weak to remain single, God gives us a spouse. For those of us who are too hung up to handle marriage, God gives us celibacy. So, pick your weakness. Pick your poison, I guess. But anyway, for those of you who do choose to be in love and stuff, go for it.”

Rich Mullins (1955–1997) American christian musician

Anderson, Indiana http://www.kidbrothers.net/words/concert-transcripts/anderson-indiana-nov1695.html (November 16, 1995) <br class="br">In Concert

God, Marriage

“They know how to remain silent; and though they are possessed of the most acute sensitiveness, they are, among the people I have met, those who express it least. A friend here can give his life with the greatest simplicity to save yours, though he never told you before that he loved you in such a profound and unselfish way.”

The Mother (1878–1973) spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo

Her views on the ancient art of Samurai, quoted in "Japan (1916-20)", also in The Modern Review, Volume 23 by Ramananda Chatterjee (1918) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=fa4mAQAAIAAJ, p. 69

Life, People, Way

“The woman is increasingly aware that love alone can give her full stature, just as the man begins to discern that spirit alone can endow his life with its highest meaning. Fundamentally, therefore, both seek a psychic relation to the other, because love needs the spirit, and the spirit love, for their fulfillment.”

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

Source: Contributions to Analytical Psychology (1928), p. 185

Life

“You request me to tell you…if it is true that the creed of all who profess to love high and serious art is: "There is no God but Bach, and Mendelssohn is his prophet?"”

Hector Berlioz Mémoires

Vous me priez de vous dire…S'il est vrai que l'acte de foi de tout ce qui prétend aimer l'art élevé et sérieux soit celui-ci : "Il n'y a pas d'autre Dieu que Bach, et Mendelssohn est son prophète"?
"Premier Voyage en Allemagne", Quatrième lettre, p. 285
Mémoires (1870)

God, Art

“Let love steal in disguised as friendship.”
Intret amicitiae nomine tectus amor.

Ovid book Ars amatoria

Book I, line 720; translated by J. Lewis May in The Love Books of Ovid, 1930
Variant translation: Love will enter cloaked in friendship's name.
Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love)

Friendship