A collection of quotes on the topic of for bestfriend, family, friendship, life.
“There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.”
“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”
Variant: Love all, trust a few.
Source: All's Well That Ends Well
“How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.”
“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”
Variant: The only remedy for love is to love more.
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
“We love the things we love for what they are.”
"Hyla Brook" (1920)
1920s
“You never fail until you stop trying.”
“Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic.”
Variant: Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are a bourbon biscuit.
“The biggest coward of a man is to awaken the love of a woman without the intention of loving her.”
“A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.”
A line written by Ono many years before, and quoted by Lennon in December 1980, as quoted in All We Are Saying : The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (2000) by John Lennon, Yōko Ono, David Sheff, p. 16.
Source: Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings
"In Search of a Majority: An Address" (Feb 1960); reprinted in Baldwin, "Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobody_Knows_My_Name (1961)
Variant: You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.
Disputed
Source: Claimed to be from Men Without Women, but it does not appear in that work. May have originated in a 2011 blogpost by Marc Chernoff entitled 30 things to stop doing to yourself http://www.marcandangel.com/2011/12/11/30-things-to-stop-doing-to-yourself/.
“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you, I could walk through my garden forever.”
Variant: Everyone wants to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.
“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”
“Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”
The Prophet (1923)
“Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.”
Variant: Be a rainbow in somebody else's cloud.
Source: Letter to My Daughter
“A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.”
“I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.”
Source: Revolutionary Petunias
“It's easy to fall in love. The hard part is finding someone to catch you.”
Variant: You can make more friends in two months by being interested in them, than in two years by making them interested in you.
Source: How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), p. 52 (in 1998 edition)
Attributed to Monroe in self-help books and on social media, this quotation is of unknown origin and date.
Misattributed
“To the world you may be one person; but to one person you may be the world.”
"In Blackwater Woods"
American Primitive (1983)
Source: New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
Dancing the Dream (1992), also used in his funeral invitation. Quoted in "Dead stars and classic art will surround Michael Jackson" in CNN.com/entertainment (3 July 2009) http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/03/michael.jackson.funeral/index.html#cnnSTCOther1
“It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.”
“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”
“Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.”
frequently attributed to Lennon, but entirely unsourced
Disputed
“When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.”
Source: The Alchemist
“I love you, and I will love you until I die, and if there’s a life after that, I’ll love you then.”
Jace to Clary, pg. 331
Variant: There is no pretending, I love you, and I will love you until I die, and if there is life after that, I'll love you then.
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Glass (2009)
Lord Darlington, Act II
Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)
Overheard by his nephew, Billy James, in 1902; quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, vol V: The Master 1901-1916 (1972).
“There are no have-to's, just choices”
“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
ii. America: The Pueblo Indians http://books.google.com/books?id=w6vUgN16x6EC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Jung+Memories+Dreams+and+Reflections&hl=en&sa=X&ei=LLxKUcD0NfSo4APh0oDABg&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false (Extract from an unpublished ms) (Random House Digital, 2011).
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)
Context: We always require an outside point to stand on, in order to apply the lever of criticism. This is especially so in psychology, where by the nature of the material we are much more subjectively involved than in any other science. How, for example, can we become conscious of national peculiarities if we have never had the opportunity to regard our own nation from outside? Regarding it from outside means regarding it from the standpoint of another nation. To do so, we must acquire sufficient knowledge of the foreign collective psyche, and in the course of this process of assimilation we encounter all those incompatibilities which constitute the national bias and the national peculiarity. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. I understand England only when I see where I, as a Swiss, do not fit in. I understand Europe, our greatest problem, only when I see where I as a European do not fit into the world. Through my acquaintance with many Americans, and my trips to and in America, I have obtained an enormous amount of insight into the European character; it has always seemed to me that there can be nothing more useful for a European than some time or another to look out at Europe from the top of a skyscraper. When I contemplated for the first time the European spectacle from the Sahara, surrounded by a civilization which has more or less the same relationship to ours as Roman antiquity has to modem times, I became aware of how completely, even in America, I was still caught up and imprisoned in the cultural consciousness of the white man. The desire then grew in me to carry the historical comparisons still farther by descending to a still lower cultural level.
On my next trip to the United States I went with a group of American friends to visit the Indians of New Mexico, the city-building Pueblos...
“Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eyes”
Variant: You want my opinion? We're all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness — and call it love — true love.
Source: True Love (1998)
“We were together. I forget the rest.”
“To be in company is not to be with someone, but to be in someone.”
Estar en compañía no es estar con alguien, sino estar en alguien.
Voces (1943)
“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.”
Lord Illingworth, Act III.
A Woman of No Importance (1893)
Variant: Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Every problem is a gift - without problems we would not grow.”
Source: The Wise Man's Fear (2011)
Context: We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.
“I love her and that's the beginning of everything…”
Variant: I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.
Source: Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
“I want to be with you. It's as simple, and as complicated as that.”
“Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.”
“For it is in giving that we receive.”
“Come sleep with me: We won't make Love, Love will make us.”
“Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
"Jubal Harshaw" in the first edition (1961); the later 1991 "Uncut" edition didn't have this line, because it was one Heinlein had added when he went through and trimmed the originally submitted manuscript on which the "Uncut" edition is based. Heinlein also later used a variant of this in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls where he has Xia quote Harshaw: "Dr. Harshaw says that 'the word "love" designates a subjective condition in which the welfare and happiness of another person are essential to one's own happiness.'"
Source: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961; 1991)
“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”
Variant: Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.
Source: Pride and Prejudice
“I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;”
Source: 100 Love Sonnets
“Happiness is having a loving, close knit family in another city.”
As quoted in The Mammoth Book of Zingers, Quips, and One-Liners (2004) by Geoff Tibballs, p. 251
“We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.”
“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”
Source: The Bell Jar
“Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”
Source: My Sister's Keeper (2004)
“The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return.”
"Nature Boy" (1948)
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is to love and be loved, just to love and be loved.
His assertion to Joe Romersa, of how his lyrics should be corrected, saying that "To be loved in return, is too much of a deal, and that has nothing to do with love."
Context: While we spoke of many things
Fools and kings
This he said to me:
"The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return."
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer.”
“I know I am but summer to your heart,
and not the full four seasons of the year.”
Source: I know I am but summer to your heart (Sonnet XXVII)
As quoted in Sheroes: Bold, Brash, and Absolutely Unabashed Superwomen from Susan B. Anthony to Xena (1998) by Varla Ventura, p. 150
“You never lose by loving, you lose by holding back.”
Variant: You never lose by loving. You always lose by holding back.
Source: Chicken Soup for the Couple's Soul
“Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding”
Variant: Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.
“Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.”
Attributed to Irving as early as 1883. [Hit and miss : a story of real life, Angie Stewart, Manly, Chicago, J.L. Regan, 1883, i, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435018229575?urlappend=%3Bseq=7] However, it does not seem to appear in Irving's known works. Other citations from the same year leave the quotation unattributed. [Henry S. (ed.), Clubb, The Peacemaker and Court of Arbitration, Volume 1, Universal Peace Union, 1883, 125, Philadelphia, https://books.google.com/books?id=Uu84AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA125] [The Australian Women's Magazine and Domestic Journal, Vol. 2 No. 2 (May 1883), 1883, Melbourne, 435, https://books.google.com/books?id=mq0sAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA435]. A similar passage is found in a pseudonymous novel published two years earlier in 1881: "Julia knew that sacrifices to patience are not in vain. Although they often do not produce the happiness for which they are made, they will, always, flow back and soften and purify the heart of the one who makes them". [Illma, Or, Which was Wife?, Miss, M.L.A., Cornwell & Johnson, 1881, 239, New York, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435017658592?urlappend=%3Bseq=245]
Disputed
“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
"The Meeting in a Dream"
Other Inquisitions (1952)
“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”
Variant: nobody hαs ever meαsured, not even poets, how much the heαrt cαn hold.
As quoted in The Power of Respect : Benefit from the Most Forgotten Element of Success (2009) by Deborah Norville, p. 65
“You see persons and things not as they are but as you are.”
“Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.”
“The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”
Variant: Then she kissed him. Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 11
“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
Unsourced in The Philosophy of Mark Twain: The Wit and Wisdom of a Literary Genius (2014) by David Graham
Disputed
