quotations about love
Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
The Looking Glass War
Didn't love, like a plant from India, require a prepared soil, a particular temperature? Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over hands yielded to a lover, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness thus could not be separated from the balconies of great châteaux filled with idle amusements, a boudoir with silk blinds, a good thick carpet, full of pots of flowers, and a bed raised on a dais, nor from the sparkle of precious stones and shoulder knots on servants' livery.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
Despite the advancements in understanding our bodies and minds over the past couple millennia, we are still disentangling the intricacies of emotions as they are represented in the brain. Perhaps the most interesting emotional state is that which has spurred humans throughout history to sing for it, dance for it, kill for it, live for it, even die for it. Yes, that emotional state found in 170 different societies worldwide that has captivated artists, poets, writers and everyone in between: love.
CLAUDIA AGUIRRE
"Your Brain on Love", Huffington Post, February 15, 2016
Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Marriage and Morals
Caressing reassures lovers that their love endures.
WITTER BYNNER
"Rose-Time"
Call us what you will, we are made such by love.
JOHN DONNE
The Canonization
Burning with tender love is not really an image for someone who has warmed mercury over a gentle flame. In slowness, gentleness, and hope we have the hidden force of moral perfection and of material transmutation.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Formation of the Scientific Mind
Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another! Not calculable by algebra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious, effectual, mighty as the hidden process by which the tiny seed is quickened, and bursts forth into tall stem and broad leaf, and glowing tasseled flower.
GEORGE ELIOT
Janet's Repentance
Being in love is an elaborate state of anticipation for the continual exchanging of certain kinds of gifts. The gifts can range from a glance to the offering of the entire self. But the gifts must be gifts: they cannot be claimed. One has no rights as a lover--except the right to anticipate what the other wishes to give.
JOHN BERGER
G. John Berger
As your lover describes you, so you are.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Sexing the Cherry
Are not all loves secretly the same? A hundred flowers sprung from a single root.
TANITH LEE
Delirium's Mistress
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"For What Binds Us"
Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Invisible Monsters
Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"The Buried Life"
A woman findeth in her last lover much of her first love; but a man seeth his next-to-the-last love, alway.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
A summer romance is something special, because it blazes like a comet across the sky and then fades out. The thing that makes it special--that makes everything move so fast--is that a summer romance is doomed to end.
JOHN VORNHOLT
Coyote Moon
A man loves with more or less passion according to the number of cords which his pretty mistress binds to his heart.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
AMY HEMPEL
"The Dog of the Marriage"
"To fall for," "to be fallen for"--I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an impression of fatuousness. It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar "What a messy business it is to be fallen for" by the more literary "What uneasiness lies in being loved."
OSAMU DAZAI
No Longer Human
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Meeting in a Dream", Other Inquisitions