“Love makes requests, not demands.”

Devil's Bride

The Amulet of Samarkand (2003)

Source: Madame Bovary

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
Context: Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Les femmes tiennent et doivent toutes tenir à être honorées, car sans l'estime elles n'existent plus. Aussi est-ce le premier sentiment qu'elles demandent à l'amour.
Source: A Woman of Thirty (1842), Ch. III: At Thirty Years.

Source: Squire

Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Context: The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them. But if we nevertheless hold out and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the light and frivolous play, behind which people have hidden from the most earnest earnestness of their existence — then a little progress and alleviation will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us; that would be much.

[Raffi, Khatchadourian, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian, No Secrets, The New Yorker, June 9, 2010, 2010-06-17]