Quotes about lovers (990 quotes, page 7)

“The black snow that runs from the rooftops;
A red finger dips into your forehead
Blue flakes sink into the bare room,
These are the dead mirrors of lovers.”

Georg Trakl (1887–1914) austrian poet

"Delirium" (1913)
Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2014/10/29/wild-heart-turning-white-georg-trakl-and-cocaine/

Dead

“Lovers be war and tak gude heid about
Quhome that ye lufe, for quhome ye suffer paine.
I lat yow wit, thair is richt few thairout
Quhome ye may traist to have trew lufe agane.”

Robert Henryson The Testament of Cresseid

Source: The Testament of Cresseid, Line 561.

Pain , War , Suffering

“I long to talk with some old lover's ghost,
Who died before the god of love was born.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

Love's Deity, stanza 1

Love , God

““The Void Which Binds is touched by all of us who have wept with happiness, bidden a lover good-bye, been exalted with orgasm, stood over the grave of a loved one, or watched our baby open his or her eyes for the first time.”
Aenea is looking at me as she speaks, and I feel the gooseflesh rise along my arms.
“The Void Which Binds is always under and above the surface of our thoughts and senses,” she continues, invisible but as present as the breathing of our beloved next to us in the night. Its actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit.””

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 20 (p. 400)

Love , Religion , Feeling , Sense

“Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

The Sun Rising, stanza 1

Fools , Business , Sun , Season

“… the folks Obama and Clinton detest, disparage, and pity are the white working- and middle-class folks Richard Nixon celebrated as Middle Americans and the Silent Majority. They are the folks who brought America through the Depression, won World War II, and carried us through the Cold War from Truman in 1945 to victory with Ronald Reagan in 1989. These are the Trump supporters. They reside mostly in red states like West Virginia, Kentucky and Middle Pennsylvania, and Southern, Plains and Mountain states that have provided a disproportionate share of the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who fought and died to guarantee the freedom of plutocratic LGBT lovers to laugh at and mock them at $2,400-a-plate dinners.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

"Last Chance for the ‘Deplorables’" http://buchanan.org/blog/last-chance-deplorables-125655 (September 12, 2016), Patrick J. Buchanan
2010s

War , World , Mountain , Support

“For nearly four decades I placed some ideation, some ideal, some abstraction, before personal love, foolishly - inhumanly - believing that some cause, some goal, some ideology, was the most important thing and therefore that, in the interests of achieving that cause, that goal, implementing that ideology, one's own personal life, one's feelings, and those of others, should and must come at least second if not further down in some lifeless manufactured schemata. My pursuit of such things - often by violent means and by incitement to violence and to disaffection - led, of course, not only to me being the cause of suffering to other human beings I did not personally know but also to being the cause of suffering to people I did know; to family, to friends, and especially to those - wives, partners, lovers - who for some reason loved me. In effect I was selfish, obsessed, a fanatic, an extremist. Naturally, as extremists always do, I made excuses - to others, to myself - for my unfeeling, suffering-causing, intolerant, violent, behaviour and actions; always believing that 'I could make a difference' and always blaming some-thing else, or someone else, for the problems I alleged existed 'in the world' and which problems I claimed, I felt, I believed, needed to be sorted out […] Yet the honest, the obvious, truth was that I - and people like me or those who supported, followed, or were incited, inspired, by people like me - were and are the problem.”

David Myatt (1950) British writer

Source: Letter To My Undiscovered Self (2012) http://www.davidmyatt.info/letter-to-self.html

Love , Life , People , Truth

“This is the soldier brave enough to tell
The glory-dazzled world that "war is hell":
Lover of peace, he looks beyond the strife,
And rides through hell to save his country's life.”

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) American diplomat

The Statue of Sherman by St. Gaudens (1904).

Life , War , World , Peace

“We read events by what goes before and after. We think of Bunker Hill as the first real battle for independence, the prelude to the Revolution. Yet these were both after thoughts. Independence Day was still more than a year away and then eight years from accomplishment. The Revolution cannot be said to have become established until the adoption of the Federal Constitution. No, on this June day, these were not the conscious objects sought. They were contending for the liberties of the country, they were not yet bent on establishing a new nation nor on recognizing that relationship between men which the modern world calls democracy. They were maintaining well their traditions, these sons of Londonderry, lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray, and these sons of the Puritans, whom Macaulay tells us humbly abased themselves in the dust before the Lord, but hesitated not to set foot upon the neck of their king.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

From a speech https://coolidgefoundation.org/resources/early-speeches-1890-1918-17/ delivered on Bunker Hill Day (17 June 1918).
1910s, Speech on Bunker Hill Day (17 June 1918)

Men , World , Democracy , Thinking

“[begin list of sophomoric puns] I bet he'd find a place up the chimney of any woman. He's certainly good at filling their stockings. Trouble is, he wouldn't be much good as a lover as he can only come once a year. [end list of sophomoric puns] (Why Chicks Dig Father Christmas)”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Fully Ramblomatic, Essays

Christmas

“Finally we hit upon the old cathedral of Amsterdam, which belongs to the Reformed Church and which we remodeled. The owners gave us permission, on certain financial conditions, to shoot the film there. Before that, we had planned to use the cathedral of Cologne, but two days before we began our preparations, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover was shown on German television and the archbishop immediately forbade us from entering the cathedral site!”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

From an interview in Positif, January 1994
Interviews

Cooking

“Here's what I know. I could not be standing here without that undying love that was just sung about by, not Bruce [Springsteen], but Neil Young. And I have that in a lover that is so close to fine, we should all be able to experience such heaven right here on earth. I know also that, I should not be doing this, I should not be here, but I am because of the union of such filmmakers as Ed Saxon, Ron Nyswaner, Kristi Zea, Tak Fujimoto, Jonathan Demme -- who seems to have these [referring to the Oscar] attached to his limbs for every actor that works with him of late. And a cast that includes Antonio Banderas, who, second to my lover, is the only person I would trade for. And a cast that includes many other people, but the actor who really put his film image at risk, and shone because of his integrity, Mr. Denzel Washington, who I really must share this with.”

Tom Hanks (1956) American actor

66th Academy Award Speech (1994)

Love , People , Personality

“Distant lover, ooo, sugar
How can you treat my heart so mean and cruel?
Didn't you know, sugar, that I dream
Of what I spent with you?
I treasure it like it was a precious jewel, oh baby.
Lord have mercy!”

Marvin Gaye (1939–1984) American singer-songwriter and musician

Distant Lover, co-written with Gwen Gordy and Sandra Greene.
Song lyrics, Let's Get It On (1973)

Dreams , Distant , Heart , Baby

“There is no born lover, there is no born Don Juan, for we are all lovers.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Lover http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/lover-16/
From the poems written in English

“"… whatever… you pretend… if any of you be a prayerless person, or a scoffer, or a lover of evil company (Proverbs 13:20), in a word, if you are not a holy, strict, and self-denying Christian, you cannot be saved." (Hebrews 12:14; Matthew 15:14).”

Joseph Alleine (1634–1668) Pastor, author

Source: An Alarm to the Unconverted aka A Sure Guide to Heaven (first published 1671), P. 21.

Evil , Personality

“I could have been a sailor, could have been a cook,
A real live lover, could have been a book,
I could have been a signpost, could have been a clock,
As simple as a kettle, steady as a rock.
I could be here and now,
I would be, I should be, but how?
I could have been one of these things first.”

Nick Drake (1948–1974) British singer-songwriter

One of These Things First
Song lyrics, Bryter Later (1970)

Books , Cooking

“I doubt whether any girl would be satisfied with her lover's mind if she knew the whole of it.”

Anthony Trollope book The Small House at Allington

Source: The Small House at Allington (1864), Ch. 4

Girl

“I know that I'm the happiest of lovers…”

Max Frisch book Gantenbein

Gantenbein faking to his lover he is blind
Gantenbein (1964)

“Lovers she hated, though she loved their love.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Canto XVI, stanza 38 (tr. T. B. Harbottle)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Love , Hate

“All her lovers have passed, her beautiful lovers have passed,
The young and eager men that fought for her arrogant hand,
And the only voice which endures to mourn for her at the last
Is the voice of the lonely land.”

Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) English writer and gardener

"Mariana In The North"
Orchard and Vineyard (1921)

Men , Beauty

“"You have loved enough, now let me be the lover." You could say that God is speaking to you or the cosmos, or your lover. It just means, like, Forget it. Lean back and be loved by all that is already loving you. It is your effort at love that is preventing you from experiencing it. It is like if you ever taught kids how to swim. The most difficult thing is Goddam to understand that they will float, if they relax, if they hold their breath and relax, they will actually float. For most kids it is difficult to swim. They feel they are going to sink like a stone to the bottom of the lake.”

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

On the lyrics to "You Have Loved Enough" in an interview released at the Ten New Songs site (2001)

Love , God , Feeling , Understanding

“I appeal to you, therefore, that a man like this stands not only before the bar of this court, but stands before the bar of the high court of History… Long after this controversy is hushed in silence, long after this turmoil and this agitation ceases, long after he is dead and gone, he will be looked upon as the poet of patriotism, as the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity. Long after he is dead and gone his words will be echoed and re-echoed not only in India but across distant seas and lands.”

Chittaranjan Das (1870–1925) Indian politician and leader of the Swaraj Party

Speech in defence of Aurobindo Ghosh in the Maincktala Bomb Case. The judgement was issued in 1909. Quoted by Dr. Nitish Sengupta in his “History of the Bengali-speaking People.”
Legal

History , Silence , Distant , Sea

“The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade,
For talking age and whispering lovers made.”

Oliver Goldsmith The Deserted Village

Source: The Deserted Village (1770), Line 13.

Age

“The inner lover of God, who possesses God in enjoyable rest, and himself in devoted, working love, and his entire life in virtues with justice, this inner person then comes, by means of these three points and the hidden revelation of God, into a God contemplating life, at least the lover who is pious and just, whom God in His freedom wishes to choose and to elevate to a superessential contemplation in divine light and according to the way of God.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Love , Life , God , Justice

“The man who comes home exhausted because he has been taught to believe without question that his male identity is based on nine-to-five loyalty and the giving of his best energies to the corporation has made a decision about his sexuality. He sacrifices his corpus to the corporation. His chosen method of expending energy and structuring time disallows afternoon dalliance with his wife or lover.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 101

Home , Question , Decision , Time

“Einstein's theory has the very highest degree of æsthetic merit: every lover of the beautiful must wish it to be true. It gives a vast unified survey of the operations of nature, with a technical simplicity in the critical assumptions which makes the wealth of deductions astonishing. It is a case of an advance arrived at by pure theory: the whole effect of Einstein's work is to make physics more philosophical (in a good sense), and to restore some of that intellectual unity which belonged to the great scientific systems of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but which was lost through increasing specialization and the overwhelming mass of detailed knowledge. In some ways our age is not a good one to live in, but for those who are interested in physics there are great compensations.”

Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928) Dutch physicist

p, 125
Theory of Relativity: A Concise Statement (1920)

Age , Beauty , Way , Nature

“Clear waters wind
Around our village,
With long summer days
Full of loveliness;
Fluttering in and out
From the house beams
The swallows play;
Waterfowl disport together
As everlasting lovers; …
What more could I wish for?”

Du Fu (712–770) Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty

"The River by Our Village", as translated by Rewi Alley in Du Fu: Selected Poems (1962), p. 100

Water , Summer , Housing

“Browsing in books as lovers do, they were only being considerate, because their tenderness to each other made them tender towards others as well.”

Stig Dagerman book A Burnt Child

Source: A Burnt Child (1948), p. 192

Books

“A soft and blue Italian sky, — the blue
That painters and that poets love, — the blue
The lover worships in the maiden's eyes,
Whose beauty is their power and spell.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Love , Beauty

“If you get tired of just hanging around
Pick up a guitar, spin a web of sound
And then you could be strung out all day
With lovers and clowns
Now I find myself still hanging around”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

"Ha Ha Wall"(with Carl Barat)
Lyrics and poetry

“Dear, why should you command me to my rest,
When now the night doth summon all to sleep?
Methinks this time becometh lovers best;
Night was ordain'd together friends to keep.”

Michael Drayton (1563–1631) English poet

Idea's Mirror (1594), Sonnet XXXVII.

Sleep , Time , Night

“A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one.
And there are terrors, fears, and hesitations — trouble and storm in the love of a woman of thirty years, never to be found in a young girl's love. At thirty years a woman asks her lover to give her back the esteem she has forfeited for his sake; she lives only for him, her thoughts are full of his future, he must have a great career, she bids him make it glorious; she can obey, entreat, command, humble herself, or rise in pride; times without number she brings comfort when a young girl can only make moan.”

Honoré de Balzac book A Woman of Thirty

La jeune fille n'a qu'une coquetterie, et croit avoir tout dit quand elle a quitté son vêtement; mais la femme en a d'innombrables et se cache sous mille voiles; enfin elle caresse toutes les vanités, et la novice n'en flatte qu'une. Il s'émeut d'ailleurs des indécisions, des terreurs, des craintes, des troubles et des orages chez la femme de trente ans, qui ne se rencontrent jamais dans l'amour d'une jeune fille.Arrivée à cet âge, la femme demande à un jeune homme de lui restituer l'estime qu'elle lui a sacrifiée; elle ne vit que pour lui, s'occupe de son avenir, lui veut une belle vie, la lui ordonne glorieuse; elle obéit, elle prie et commande, s'abaisse et s'élève, et sait consoler en mille occasions, où la jeune fille ne sait que gémir.
Source: A Woman of Thirty (1842), Ch. III: At Thirty Years.

Love , Fear , Girl , Thinking

“Love when felt at all deeply has an element of transcendentalism in it, which makes it the most natural thing in the world for the two lovers — even though drawn together by a passing sex-attraction — to swear eternal troth to each other; but there is something quite diabolic and mephistophelean in the practice of the Law, which creeping up behind, as it were, at this critical moment, and overhearing the two thus pledging themselves, claps its book together with a triumphant bang, and exclaims: "There now you are married and done for, for the rest of your natural lives."”

Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) British poet and academic

Love's Coming of Age (1896)

Love , Books , World , Law

“As one grows older, one lives more and more off the little signs of whatever community one moves through day to day and less and less off the gifts that fall out of individual relationships. If one does not prepare for this change in youth, than age becomes a bitter time. This is not to disparage the beauty of one’s relationships with lover or friend. It is only to acknowledge what, for so many in the city, is a sad truth. Community can, however awkwardly, replace individual relationships. But individual relationships only grow poisonous and resentful if there is no community to support them.”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 7, “Of Commerce, Capital, Myths, and Missions” (p. 147)

Truth , Youth , Age , Sadness

“The continuum had somehow managed to correct the incongruity, pairing off lovers like the last act of a Shakespearean comedy, though just how it had managed it wasn’t clear. What was clear was that it had wanted us out of the way while it was doing whatever it was doing. So it had done the time-travel equivalent of locking us in our rooms.”

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), Chapter 26 (p. 436)

Way , Travel , Time

“Man is by nature a lover. Only he has yet to discover the real thing to love. This quest awakens him to the fulfillment of his real Self.”

Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) Indian writer and guru

The Wings of Joy (1997)

Love , Nature

“No love-story has ever been told twice. I never heard any tale of lovers that did not seem to me as new as the world on its first morning.”

Eleanor Farjeon book Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard

Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard (1922)

Love , World

“See, therefore, how you, the philosophers of various schools of thought, agree in the religion of the one God, whom you all presupposed in that which you as lovers of wisdom acknowledge”

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) German philosopher, theologian, jurist, and astronomer

De Pace Fidei (The Peace of Faith) (1453)

Wisdom , God , School , Religion

“It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment, or the courage, to pay the price…. One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover, and yet demand no easy return of love. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963)

Love , Pain , World , Search

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

Aphra Behn (1640–1689) British playwright, poet, translator and fiction writer

The Younger Brother, Act III, sc. ii (published posthumously 1696).

For Him , Life , Age , Happiness

“This too can be endured, though it is hard:
A lover in the end has his reward.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Premio al ben servire
Pur viene al fin, se ben tarda a venire.
Canto XXXI, stanza 3 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

“A lovers' spat," he said. "You know how it is. Boy meets girl, girl wants boy dead. An everyday story, really.”

David Gemmell book The Swords of Night and Day

Source: Drenai series, The Swords of Night and Day, Ch. 14

Girl , Boy , Dead

“When we reach the silver sands and plunge into the great sea of God's silence, we begin to understand that he alone is God — Lover, Friend, the totality of gentleness, peace and rest. He calls us and we cannot resist that call. We have to be alone with him. It is a necessity, it is a hunger. It has been said that prayer is a hunger. But this Christ walks with loneliness and rejection, and so must we.”

Catherine Doherty (1896–1985) Religious order founder; Servant of God

Molchanie (1982)

Hunger , God , Peace , Understanding

“It naturally follows that the creature you love next best is the person — the God-lover or God-hater (almost never, apparently, anything in between), the saint or profligate, moralist or complete immoralist — who can write a poem that is a poem.”

Jerome David Salinger book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1959)

Love , God , Nature , Personality

“Yesterday I was on the edge
Hoping everything was going to work itself out
A good honest man doing the work of God
Trying to make things better for Him
A lover of life in a school for fools
Trying to find another way to survive”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Music
Song lyrics, Buddha and the Chocolate Box (1974)

Life , God , School , Hope

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch.7

Life , Children , Home , Tree

“There certainly is self division. The man who watches a woman undressing has the red eyes of an ape; yet the man who sees two young lovers, really alone for the first time, who brings out all the pathos, the tenderness and uncertainty when he tells about it, is no brute; he is very much human. And the ape and the man exist in one body; and when the ape's desires are about to be fulfilled, he disappears and is succeeded by the man, who is disgusted with the ape's appetite.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter one, The Country of the Blind

Time

“History is a hermaphrodite with many distinguished lovers. We are neither mysteries nor strangers but the living breath of revelation made flesh by the unrestrained desires of a free and universal love. Universal me. Universal you.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(The Past Present and Future are One, p. 22).
Book Sources, ELEMENTAL, The Power of Illuminated Love (2008)

Love , History , Universe

“Marriage is not at all what romantic lovers imagine it to be; it is an institution founded upon an instinct; to be successful, it requires not only physical attraction, but will-power, patience, and the always difficult acceptance of "the other"; finally, if these conditions are fulfilled, a beautiful and lasting affection can be established - a unique and, to those who have never known it, incomprehensible mingling of love, friendship, sensuality, and respect, without which there is no true marriage.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Marriage

Love , Friendship , Marriage , Beauty

“Your lover who just walked out the door, has taken all his blankets from your floor.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

“As to the First, methought I had some feeling in the Passion of Christ, but yet I desired more by the grace of God. Methought I would have been that time with Mary Magdalene, and with other that were Christ’s lovers, and therefore I desired a bodily sight wherein I might have more knowledge of the bodily pains of our Saviour and of the compassion of our Lady and of all His true lovers that saw, that time, His pains. For I would be one of them and suffer with Him. Other sight nor shewing of God desired I never none, till the soul were disparted from the body. The cause of this petition was that after the shewing I should have the more true mind in the Passion of Christ.”

Julian of Norwich book Revelations of Divine Love

Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Chapter 2

God , Pain , Feeling , Soul

“In negotiating with rejected lovers or husbands, women must stop thinking they can make everyone happy. In many cases of harassment and stalking, it is clear that the woman never learned how to terminate the fantasy — which requires resolution and decisiveness on their part. Wavering, dithering, or passive hysterical fear will only intensify or prolong pursuit.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 47

Women , Fear , Thinking , Decision

“"Who are you?" I asked the phantom,
"I am rest from Hate and Pride.
"I am friend to king and beggar,
"I am Alpha and Omega,
"I was councilor to Hagar
"But men call me suicide."
I was weary of tide breasting,
Weary of the world's behesting,
And I lusted for the resting
As a lover for his bride.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

The Tempter (1937)

Men , Hate , World , Suicide

“He was very pure in mind and heart. He was a lover: a lover not only of his race but a lover of all mankind. His heart was so broad, so great, so magnanimous, and this gave him a most sincere feeling of absolute oneness with everyone. This is what made him so divinely great.”

Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) Indian writer and guru

On Martin Luther King, Jr.
America The Beautiful (2010)

Feeling , Heart , Sincerity

“I took a stroll in the city. It was infernally hot. The usual evening hubbub around me. Lovers on the pavements, hurrying to cinemas and other places of amusement as if nothing had happened, nothing. Living their nonexistent lives. Or do they exit, and it’s me who doesn’t.”

Imre Kertész (1929–2016) Hungarian writer

Source: Detective Story (2008), p. 31.

“If one of two lovers is loyal, and the other jealous and false, how may their friendship last, for Love is slain! But sweetly and discreetly love passes from person to person, from heart to heart, or it is nothing worth. For what the lover would, that would the beloved; what she would ask of him that should he go before to grant. Without accord such as this, love is but a bond and a constraint. For above all things Love means sweetness, and truth, and measure.”

Marie de France medieval poet

Se l'uns des amans est loiax,
E li autre est jalox è faus,
Si est amors entr'ex fausée,
Ne puet avoir lunge durée.
Amors n'a soing de compagnun,
Boin amors n'est se de Dex nun,
De cors en cors, de cuer en cuer,
Autrement n'est prex à nul fuer.
Tulles qui parla d'amistié,
Dist assés bien en son ditié,
Que vent amis, ce veut l'amie
Dunt est boine la compaignie,
S'ele le veut è il l'otreit.
Dunt la druerie est à dreit,
Puisque li uns l'autre desdit,
N'i a d'amors fors c'un despit;
Assés puet-um amors trover,
Mais sens estuet al' bien garder,
Douçour è francise è mesure.
"Graelent", line 85; pp. 149-50.
Misattributed

Love , Friendship , Truth , Heart

“In summertime village cricket is a delight to everyone. Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the young men play and the old men watch. In the village of Lintz in the County of Durham they have their own ground, where they have played these last 70 years. They tend it well. The wicket area is well rolled and mown. The outfield is kept short. It has a good clubhouse for the players and seats for the onlookers. The village team plays there on Saturdays and Sundays. They belong to a league, competing with the neighbouring villages. On other evenings they practice while the light lasts. Yet now after these 70 years a judge of the High Court has ordered that they must not play anymore. He has issued an injunction to stop them. He has done it at the instance of a newcomer who is no lover of cricket. This newcomer has built, or has had built for him, a house on the edge of the cricket ground which four years ago was a field where cattle grazed. The animals did not mind the cricket, but now this adjoining field has been turned into a housing estate. The newcomer bought one of the houses on the edge of the cricket field. No doubt the open space was a selling point. Now he complains that when a batsman hits a six the ball has been known to land in his garden or on or near his house. His wife has got so upset about it that they always go out at weekends. They do not go into the garden when cricket is being played. They say that this is intolerable. So they asked the judge to stop the cricket being played. And the judge, much against his will, has felt that he must order the cricket to be stopped: with the consequence, I suppose, that the Lintz Cricket Club will disappear. The cricket ground will be turned to some other use. I expect for houses or a factory. The young men will turn to other things instead of cricket. The whole village will be much poorer. And all this because of a newcomer who has just bought a house there next to the cricket ground.”

Alfred Denning, Baron Denning (1899–1999) British judge

Miller v. Jackson [1977] QB 966 at 976.
Judgments

Men , Light , Animals , Housing

“The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1910s, Principles of Research (1918)

Effort , Heart

““(I got introduced to) the late and great Mani Madhava Cakyar’s King Udayana in Svapnavasavadatta. In what may have been among his last performances on the public stage I was fortunate to see Sri Cakyar, who at an advanced age, literally threw away his walking stick as he entered the stage to become a sprightly royal lover pining away for his beloved Vasavadatta. At his home in Likkadi he demonstrated the nava rasas… Sri Cakyar vividly illustrated to me that kutiyattam acting has the power to transform even the oldest person into the character he portrays”
- Prof. Farley P. Richmond (Expert on Indian theatre), Department of Theatre and Film Studies, University of Georgia.”

Mani Madhava Chakyar (1899–1990) Indian actor

Abhinaya and Netrābhinaya
Source: www.uga.edu/farleyrichmond/projects/trivandrum%20speech.pdf

Age , Home , Study , Universe

“Imagine a lover who has received a letter from his beloved – I assume that God’s Word is just as precious to you as this letter is to the lover. I assume that you read and think you ought to read God’s Word in the same way the lover reads this letter.”

Sören Kierkegaard book For Self-Examination

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 26
1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), What is Required in Order to Look at Oneself with True Blessing in the Mirror of the Word?

God , Way , Imagination , Thinking

“Lovers lying two and two
Ask not whom they sleep beside,
And the bridegroom all night through
Never turns him to the bride.”

A.E. Housman book A Shropshire Lad

No. 12, st. 4.
A Shropshire Lad (1896)

Lying , Sleep , Night

“I was a troubled teen
Who put an advert in a magazine
To the annoyance of my imaginary lover
She doubted my integrity
And this is what she said to me:
She said, "Oh, you, you're green
You don't know what love means
Well, let me tell you”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

"I Love You (But You're Green)"
Lyrics and poetry

Love

“Deliver me from your cold phlegmatic preachers, politicians, friends, lovers and husbands.”

Abigail Adams (1744–1818) 2nd First Lady of the United States (1797–1801)

Letter to John Adams (5 August 1776)

“"Leicester," she cried, "is this thy love
That thou so oft hast sworn to me,
To leave me in this lonely grove,
Immured in shameful privity?"No more thou com'st with lover's speed,
Thy once beloved bride to see;
But be she alive, or be she dead,
I fear, stern Earl, 's the same to thee."Not so the usage I received
When happy in my father's hall;
No faithless husband then me grieved,
No chilling fears did me appall."I rose up with the cheerful morn,
No lark more blithe, no flower more gay;
And like the bird that haunts the thorn,
So merrily sung the livelong day."If that my beauty is but small,
Among court ladies all despised,
Why didst thou rend it from that hall,
Where, scornful Earl, it well was prized?"”

William Julius Mickle Cumnor Hall

Stanzas 3–7
Cumnor Hall (1784)

Love , Fear , Beauty , Flowers

“So many lovers, yet there is no love.”

Avner Strauss (1954) Israeli musician

Birds of the Mind and Chameleons of the Heart (1978).

Love

“Lovers come and go, the river roll, roll, roll.”

Robert Hunter (1941–2019) American musician

"Brokedown Palace"
Song lyrics, American Beauty (1970)

“Yet it must be acknowledged that there is a fundamental difference between the sexual impulse in men and women. Her need is for a lover, a protector, a father for her children. His desire is for mastery, conquest, to be allowed to use her body for his own satisfaction. He feels like a bee, burying itself in a flower, apparently doing nothing for the flower but taking its sweetness. If he loves her, then his desire is mixed with a kind of pity.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

L'amour: The Ways of Love (1970)

Love , Women , Men , Children

“No martyr ever went the way of duty, and felt the shadow of death upon it. The shadow of death is darkest in the valley, which men walk in easily, and is never felt at all on a steep place, like Calvary. Truth is everlasting, and so is every lover of it; and so he feels himself almost always.”

William Mountford (1816–1885) English Unitarian preacher and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 339.

Death , Men , Truth , Way

“People always assume if you're vegetarian you can just live on cheese and meanwhile cheese is awful for your body even if tastes so good. I'm a massive animal lover too. Being vegan has been so good for me. I've never felt better.”

Kate Mara (1983) American actress

" House of Cards' Kate Mara: 'It is complicated being compared to my sister Rooney' http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/house-of-cards-kate-mara-it-is-complicated-being-compared-to-my-sister-kate-rooney-9281446.html". Interview for The Independent. April 25, 2014.

People , Animals

“I think of the whole of the city, the people who inhabit its halls, who sleep now and breathe its recycled air and whose activities by day animate this strip of land on the rim of the desert, and I remember — because this thought is always a memory — that they will all one day be gone, that everyone of them will be taken outside and pushed into the sand, that in a hundred years, or two hundred years, to be certain, every human being here, every lover and loser, every captain of industry and every hotel cleaner, every mother and father and every child will be no more and that these buildings will stand, not all of them, but enough will persevere without them. Its a thought that stills me, that brings a moment of calm. And I walk and walk, and amid the concrete, steel and glass, under lights burning brighter than the noonday sun, it is the knot of anxiety, always tightening and turning, for which, above all else, I resent her.”

Zia Haider Rahman British novelist

In The Light of what We Know (2014)

People , Thinking , Sleep , Light

“My late friend hated book-jackets, and ripped them all off immediately. I think he felt, somehow, that the book was still trying to sell him its contents after he had paid for it (or turn him in, if he had stolen it). Dejacketed, the book is anonymous and valueless. To translate something immediately into this state is an unequivocal act of proprietorship. You remove a book-jacket just as you make a lover naked: before their complete possession, they must be removed from the currency.”

Don Paterson (1963) Poet

Aphorisms in Poetry, vol. 187, n. 1, October 2005

Hate , Books , Thinking

“The complete man, then, is the “lover” added to the scientist; the rhetorician to the dialectician.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric,” p. 21.
The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)

“When the time came for Pompadour herself to die, she confessed, was given her viaticum, and was from that time forth forbidden to see her lover. And when her body was borne away from Versailles, Louis was thought to have behaved rather badly because he watched the sad procession from a balcony. Let no one suppose that these people lived lives that were any more free from religious and neighbourly censure than the adulterers in our smallest Canadian villages. Even wealth and privilege could not wholly insulate them from that frost.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Madame de Pompadour (1954).

People , Sadness , Time , Wealth

“In one room, silently, lover looks upon lover,
And thinks the air is fire.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Thinking

“And there was one, beneath black eaves, who thought,
Combing with lifted arms her golden hair,
Of the lover who hurried towards her through the night;
And there was one who dreamed of a sudden death
As she blew out her light.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Death , Dreams , Light , Night

“I have never had any desire to play a maid, a liquor store owner kicking a black person out of my store, a rude and harried waitress, a worldly-wise acupuncturist, an early-rising, loose black cotton pants wearing elderly woman practicing tai chi in the park, a manicurist, a prostitute, a student in an English as a Second Language course, a purveyor of exotic mushrooms and ginseng, an exchange student, a newscaster covering gang warfare in Chinatown, a woman drowning my newborn baby in a bowl, a daughter crying with my mom over our constant battle between East and West yet finally coming together over a particularly intense game of mahjong…a young girl being raped and killed by GIs in the Killing Fields, a woman balancing a basket of any kind on my head…committing suicide because my white lover did not come back to Japan after the war, or having him come back for me and fooling him successfully for years and years thinking I am a woman when really I'm a dude, as if my race castrates me so much this deception is completely feasible…”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, PIGEONHOLING PEOPLE

War , Fools , Girl , Game

“Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.”

Anatole France book The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

Les amants qui aiment bien n'écrivent pas leur bonheur.
La Bûche [The Log] (November 30, 1859)
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)

For Him , Love , Happiness

“Jupiter laughs at the false oaths of lovers.”
Periuria ridet amantum<br/>Iuppiter.

Tibullus (-50–-19 BC) poet and writer (0054-0019)

Periuria ridet amantum
Iuppiter.
Bk. 3, no. 6, line 49.
Misattributed

Falseness

“[Romeo … transfers his affections from Rosalind to Juliet] 'A lover, my dear Lady Betty,' said Flora, 'may, I conceive, persevere in his suit, under very discouraging circumstances. Affection can (now and then) withstand very severe storms of rigour, but not a long polar frost of downright indifference. Don't, even with your attractions, try the experiment upon any lover whose faith you value. Love will subsist on wonderfully little hope, but not altogether without it.”

Walter Scott book Waverley

Source: Waverley (1814), Chapter LIV

Love , Faith , Hope , Perseverance

“Happy will be the men who, having the power and the love and the benevolent forecast to [create a park], will do it. They will not be forgotten. The trees and their lovers will sing their praises, and generations yet unborn will rise up and call them blessed.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

"The Basin of the Columbia River" in Picturesque California (1888-1890); reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 22
1880s

Love , Men , Tree , Singing

“Oh, we have had great lovers that we followed to the pyre;
Our boasts out-do the Sabine girls—the Mosque of St. Sophia.
And we are very sure of ours, for when a city falls,
They seize us and they love us and they hurl us from the walls.”

Nathalia Crane (1913–1998) American writer

"Our Lovers"
Venus Invisible and Other Poems (1928)

Love , Girl

“While I live in the monastery palace,
I am Ridzin Tsangyang Gyatso,
honored in this lineage.
When I roam the streets in Lhasa,
and down in the valley to Shol,
I am the wildman, Dangyang Wangpo,
who has many lovers.”

Tsangyang Gyatso, 6th Dalai Lama (1683–1706) sixth Dalai Lama of Tibet

Source: Attributed, Poems of Sadness: The Erotic Verse of the Sixth Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso tr. Paul Williams 2004, p.64

“A pair of lovers are like sunset and sunrise: there are such things every day but we very seldom see them.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 11

“I was a peaceful sedentary man, a lover of a quiet life, with no appetite for perils and commotions. But I was beginning to realise that I was very obstinate.”

John Buchan book The Power-House

Source: The Power-House (1916), Ch. 4 "I Follow The Trail Of The Super-Butler"

Life , Peace

“I often see my lost lover in dreams.
I will ask a shaman to search in there
and bring her back to me.”

Tsangyang Gyatso, 6th Dalai Lama (1683–1706) sixth Dalai Lama of Tibet

Source: Attributed, Poems of Sadness: The Erotic Verse of the Sixth Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso tr. Paul Williams 2004, p.52

Dreams , Search

“How should they know that Sappho lived and died
Faithful to love, not faithful to the lover,
Never transfused and lost in what she loved,
Never so wholly loving nor at peace.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Sappho (Rivers to the Sea)"
Rivers to the Sea (1915)

Love , Peace , Faith

“I did a piece about four years ago about coming out. Telling my parents that I'm gay. It occurred to me that my parents have known for years that I'm gay. I'm sure of it. They have never told me; they have never needed to tell me. In some ways I will never be gay to them. And they would prefer that I never use that word with them. They know the man that I have been closest to. They also know that he's godfather to two of my nephews. They invite him to Christmas dinner. They know he's part of my life. When he had the flu this Christmas they knew I had to leave early, and no one protested. Will he ever be introduced as my lover? No”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Violating the Boundaries: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez (1999)

Life , Way , Parent , Christmas

“I am a genre lover – everything from spaghetti western to samurai movie.”

Quentin Tarantino (1963) American film director, screenwriter, producer, and actor

Talking Fiction (Rolling Stone, 2003) http://www.tarantino.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=310&Itemid=41.

“There is nothing more splendid than the prospect of sitting in the morning before a new ink-stone and a sheet of white paper. The smell of the white paper is like the scent of the skin of a new lover who has just paid a surprise visit out of a rainy garden. And the black ink is like lacquered hair. And the quill? Well the quill is like the instrument of pleasure whose purpose is never in doubt but whose surprising efficiency one always -- always forgets.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

, quoted in Peter Greenaway's The
The Pillow Book

Pleasure , Forgetting

“I shall defer my visit to Faneuil Hall, the cradle of American liberty, until its doors shall fly open on golden hinges to lovers of Union as well as lovers of liberty.”

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

Letter (April 1851)

Flying

“Stand still, you floods, do not deface
That image which you bear:
So votaries, from every place,
To you shall altars rear.

No winds but lovers' sighs blow here,
To trouble these glad streams,
On which no star from any sphere
Did ever dart such beams.”

Thomas Carew (1594–1640) English poet

"On Sight Of A Gentlewoman's Face In The Water".
Carew's Poems

Star

“Can believe it, like no other,
love is a gift and you take it so much!
You need the blue night to discover
only true lovers have the magic touch.”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Islands (1987)

Love , Night

“It's a natural aspect of the marketplace. It's always been that way in storytelling. The guy who was good at playing the lover plays the lover, the funny guy gets the comic role. Movies are so expensive, when they put them together they want to have a couple of solid blocks in what they're building. I accept that. In theater, though, I tend to look for other things, I think I tend to be best in comedy.”

Christopher Walken (1943) American actor

Terry Lawson: Knight-Ridder Newspapers (February 18, 1996) "Weird, As In Walken - No, He's Not Really Nuts … Maybe", St. Louis Post-Dispatch, p. 3D.

Way , Guy , Nature , Thinking

“And in that place the cruel tyrant, Love,
Who treacherously every promise breaks,
Who bides his time and watches every move,
And every chance to thwart true lovers takes.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Quivi il crudo tiranno Amor, che sempre
D'ogni promessa sua fu disleale,
E sempre guarda come involva e stempre
Ogni nostro disegno razionale.
Canto XIII, stanza 20 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Love , Chance , Time

“Perfect love is rare indeed — for to be a lover will require that you continually have the subtlety of the very wise, the flexibility of the child, the sensitivity of the artist, the understanding of the philosopher, the acceptance of the saint, the tolerance of the scholar and the fortitude of the certain.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

pp 198-199
LOVE (1972)

Love , Understanding , Perfection

“If that thise men that lovers hem pretende,
To women weren feythfull good and trewe,
And dreden hem to deceyven or offende,
Women, to love hem, wolde nat eschewe;
But every day hath man an herte newe:
Yt, upon oon, abide can no while.
What fore ys it, swich a wight to be-gile?”

Thomas Occleve (1369–1426) British writer

If those men who to be lovers pretend
Behaved more faithfully and did not lie,
And dreaded to deceive or to offend,
Then women might not choose to pass them by.
But each man's heart's a fickle butterfly
Which can alight on one just a short while.
Can it be wrong in this case to beguile?
"The Letter of Cupid", line 267; vol. 1, p. 83; translation from Thelma S. Fenster and Mary Carpenter Erler (eds.) Poems of Cupid, God of Love (Leiden: Brill, 1990) p. 191.

Love , Women , Men