Love

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Love flowers best in openness and freedom.
  • Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968), "Cliffrose and Bayonets", p. 26.

• Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death. Loving our mysterious blue planet, we resolve riddles and dissolve all enigmas in contingent bliss.
  • Edward Abbey, Down the River (1982).

• Well, when you think you love somebody, you love them. That's what love is. Thoughts…
  • Commander William Adama (played by Edward James Olmos), Battlestar Galactica, The Farm.

• The Encyclopedia Galactica, in its chapter on Love states that it is far too complicated to define. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of love: "Avoid, if at all possible."
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), film based on the novel by Douglas Adams

• Mysterious love, uncertain treasure,
  Hast thou more of pain or pleasure!
  Endless torments dwell about thee:
  Yet who would live, and live without thee!
  • Joseph Addison, Rosamond (c. 1707), Act III, scene 2.

• When love's well-timed 'tis not a fault to love;
  The strong, the brave, the virtuous, and the wise,
  Sink in the soft captivity together.
  • Joseph Addison, Cato, A Tragedy (1713), Act III, scene 1.

• When love once pleads admission to our hearts,
  (In spite of all the virtue we can boast),
  The woman that deliberates is lost.
  • Joseph Addison, Cato, A Tragedy (1713), Act IV, scene 1.

• Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each include the other, each is enriched by the other.
  Love is an echo in the feelings of a unity subsisting between two persons which is founded both on likeness and on complementary differences. Without the likeness there would be no attraction; without the challenge of the complementary differences there could not be the closer interweaving and the inextinguishable mutual interest which is the characteristic of all deeper relationships.
  • Felix Adler, Life and Destiny (1913), Section 5: Love and Marriage.

• The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
  • Eden Ahbez, "Nature Boy" (1948).

• Love is a great beautifier.
  • Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868), chapter 24: Gossip

• Love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go, and it makes the end so easy.
  • Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868), chapter 40: The Valley Of The Shadow.

• “There is much to be known,” said Adaon, “and above all much to be loved, be it the turn of the seasons or the shape of a river pebble. Indeed, the more we find to love, the more we add to the measure of our hearts.”
  • Lloyd Alexander, The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–1973), Book II: The Black Cauldron (1965), Chapter 3.

• Is there not glory enough in living the days given to us? You should know there is adventure in simply being among those we love and the things we love, and beauty, too.
  • Lloyd Alexander, The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–1973), Book II: The Black Cauldron (1965), Chapter 8.

• Love is the answer, but while you're waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty interesting questions.
  • Woody Allen, reported in James Robert Parish, The Hollywood Book of Love, (2003), p. 35.

• Who sings of all of Love's eternity
  Who shines so bright
  In all the songs of Love's unending spells?
  Holy lightning strikes all that's evil
  Teaching us to love for goodness sake.
  Hear the music of Love Eternal
  Teaching us to reach for goodness sake.
  • Jon Anderson, in "Loved by the Sun", from movie Legend (1985) (YouTube video).

• We, unaccustomed to courage
  exiles from delight
  live coiled in shells of loneliness
  until love leaves its high holy temple
  and comes into our sight
  to liberate us into life.
  • Maya Angelou, A Brave and Startling Truth (1995).

• If we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.
  • Maya Angelou, A Brave and Startling Truth (1995).

• Love costs all we are
  and will ever be.
  Yet it is only love
  which sets us free.
  A Brave and Startling Truth.
  • Maya Angelou, A Brave and Startling Truth (1995).

• Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.
  • Aristotle, quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Book 5: The Peripatetics, "Aristotle," 9.

• Remember that time slurs over everything, let all deeds fade, blurs all writings and kills all memories. Exempt are only those which dig into the hearts of men by love.
  • Aristotle, Free Translation from the French version of a letter named "The Letter of Aristotle to Alexander on the Policy toward the Cities". Basis for translation: Lettre d’Aristote à Alexandre sur la politique envers les cités, Arabic text edition and translated/edited by Józef Bielawski and Marian Plezia (Warsaw: Polish Academy of Sciences, 1970), page 72.

• All our young lives we search for someone to love. Someone who makes us complete. We choose partners and change partners. We dance to a song of heartbreak and hope. All the while wondering if somewhere, somehow, there's someone perfect who might be searching for us.
  • Kevin Arnold (played by Daniel Stern) narrating in The Wonder Years (1988).

• Alas! is even love too weak
  To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
  Are even lovers powerless to reveal
  To one another what indeed they feel?
  I knew the mass of men conceal'd
  Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd
  They would by other men be met
  With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
  I knew they lived and moved
  Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest
  Of men, and alien to themselves — and yet
  The same heart beats in every human breast!
  • Matthew Arnold, "The Buried Life" (1852), st. 2.

• Ah, love, let us be true
  To one another! for the world, which seems
  To lie before us like a land of dreams,
  So various, so beautiful, so new,
  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
  And we are here as on a darkling plain
  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
  Where ignorant armies clash by night.
  • Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach (1867), St. 4.

• Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration.
  • Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), Ch. I, Sweetness and Light Full text online.

• What love will make you do
  All the things that we accept
  Be the things that we regret
  • Ashanti, Foolish (January 29, 2002) from the April 2, 2002 Ashanti.

• The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.
  • Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (1972) p. 107
  • Variant: The Eskimos had 52 names for snow because it was important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

• Hunger allows no choice
  To the citizen or the police;
  We must love one another or die.
  • W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939 (1939) Lines 78-88; for a 1955 anthology text the poet changed this line to "We must love one another and die" to avoid what he regarded as a falsehood in the original.

• Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
  • W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand, and other essays‎ (1962), p. 372.

• It is love that asks, that seeks, that knocks, that finds, and that is faithful to what it finds.
  • Augustine of Hippo, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 392.

• Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt: whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, through love cry out; whether thou correct, through love correct; whether thou spare, through love do thou spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.
  • Augustine of Hippo, In epistulam Ioannis ad Parthos, Tractatus VII, 8 (Homilies on the First Epistle of John, Homily 7)
  • Latin: "dilige et quod vis fac."; falsely often: "ama et fac quod vis."
  • Translation by Professor Joseph Fletcher: Love and then what you will, do.

• What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.
  • Augustine of Hippo, as quoted in Quote, Unquote (1977) by Lloyd Cory, p. 197.

• Quantum in te crescit amor, tantum crescit pulchritudo; quia ipsa charitas est animae pulchritudo.
  • Beauty grows in you to the extent that love grows, because charity itself is the soul's beauty.
    • Augustine of Hippo in Homilies on the First Epistle of John Ninth Homily, §9, as translated by Boniface Ramsey (2008) Augustinian Heritage Institute
  • Variant translations:
  • Inasmuch as love grows in you, in so much beauty grows; for love is itself the beauty of the soul.
    • Ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John (1995), The Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, Ninth Homily, §9, as translated by H. Browne and J. H. Meyers
  • Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.
    • As translated in The Little Book of Bathroom Philosophy : Daily Wisdom from the Greatest Thinkers (2004) by Gregory Bergman, p. 50.
• Nondum amabam, et amare amabam...quaerebam quid amarem, amans amare.
  • I was not yet in love, yet I loved to love...I sought what I might love, in love with loving.
    • Augustine of Hippo in Confessions (c. 397), III, 1.

• Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! et ecce intus eras et ego foris, et ibi te quaerebam.
  • Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! Late have I loved you! And, behold, you were within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you.
    • Augustine of Hippo in Confessions (c. 397), X, 27, as translated in Theology and Discovery: Essays in honor of Karl Rahner, S.J. (1980) edited by William J. Kelly
  • Variant translations:
    • So late I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! So late I loved you!
      • The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett‎ (2007), by Lee Oser, p. 29
    • Too late I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! Too late I loved you! And, behold, you were within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you.
      • Introduction to a Philosophy of Religion (1970) by Alice Von Hildebrand.

• Love all men, even your enemies; love them, not because they are your brothers, but that they may become your brothers. Thus you will ever burn with fraternal love, both for him who is already your brother and for your enemy, that he may by loving become your brother.
  • Augustine of Hippo in On the Mystical Body of Christ, p. 436. From The Whole Christ: The Historical Development of the Doctrine of the Mystical Body in Scripture and Tradition, 1938, 1962, Fr. Emile Mersch, S. J., (1890-1940), John R. Kelly, S.J., tr., London, Dennis Dobson LTD. [1]

• Choose to love whomsoever thou wilt: all else will follow. Thou mayest say, "I love only God, God the Father." Wrong! If Thou lovest Him, thou dost not love Him alone; but if thou lovest the Father, thou lovest also the Son. Or thou mayest say, "I love the Father and I love the Son, but these alone; God the Father and God the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ who ascended into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of the Father, the Word by whom all things were made, the Word who was made flesh and dwelt amongst us; only these do I love." Wrong again! If thou lovest the Head, thou lovest also the members; if thou lovest not the members, neither dost thou love the Head.
  • Augustine of Hippo in On the Mystical Body of Christ, p. 438. From The Whole Christ: The Historical Development of the Doctrine of the Mystical Body in Scripture and Tradition, 1938, 1962, Fr. Emile Mersch, S. J., (1890-1940), John R. Kelly, S.J., tr., London, Dennis Dobson LTD. [2]

• We cannot help loving what is beautiful.
  • Augustine of Hippo, On Music (387–391), VI, 13.

• Only the beautiful is loved.
  • Augustine of Hippo, Confessions (c. 397), IV, 13.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Happiest is he who expects no happiness from others. Love delights and glorifies in giving, not receiving. So learn to love and give, and not to expect anything from others.
  • Meher Baba, Meher Prabhu: Lord Meher, The Biography of the Avatar of the Age, Meher Baba (1986) by Bhau Kalchuri, 7:2457.

• The opposite of loneliness, it's not togetherness. It is intimacy.
  • Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A Lovestory (1989), p. 184.

• If the learned and worldly-wise men of this age were to allow mankind to inhale the fragrance of fellowship and love, every understanding heart would apprehend the meaning of true liberty, and discover the secret of undisturbed peace and absolute composure.
  • Bahá'u'lláh, Lawh-i-Maqsúd (Tablet of Maqsúd)

• It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens.
  • Bahá'u'lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh, p. 250.

• Ask not of me, love, what is love?
  Ask what is good of God above;
  Ask of the great sun what is light;
  Ask what is darkness of the night;
  Ask sin of what may be forgiven;
  Ask what is happiness of heaven;
  Ask what is folly of the crowd;
  Ask what is fashion of the shroud;
  Ask what is sweetness of thy kiss;
  Ask of thyself what beauty is.
  • Philip James Bailey, Festus (1813), scene A Party and Entertainment.

• Could I love less, I should be happier now.
  • Philip James Bailey, Festus (1813), scene Garden and Bower by the Sea.

• I cannot love as I have loved,
  And yet I know not why;
  It is the one great woe of life
  To feel all feeling die.
  • Philip James Bailey, Festus (1813), scene A Party and Entertainment.

• Love spends his all, and still hath store.
  • Philip James Bailey, Festus (1813), scene A Party and Entertainment.

• The sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love.
  • Philip James Bailey, Festus (1813), scene Alcove and Garden.

• If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.
  • Jean Baudrillard, Cool memories‎ (1990), p. 153.

• Bright are the stars that shine
  Dark is the sky
  I know this love of mine
  Will never die
  And I love her
  • The Beatles, And I Love Her (1964)from the 1964 album A Hard Day's Night.

• One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.
  • Simone de Beauvoir, As quoted in Successful Aging : A Conference Report (1974) by Eric Pfeiffer, p. 142.

• Love — caritas — is an extraordinary force which leads people to opt for courageous and generous engagement in the field of justice and peace. It is a force that has its origin in God, Eternal Love and Absolute Truth. Each person finds his good by adherence to God's plan for him, in order to realize it fully: in this plan, he finds his truth, and through adherence to this truth he becomes free (cf. Jn 8:32). To defend the truth, to articulate it with humility and conviction, and to bear witness to it in life are therefore exacting and indispensable forms of charity. Charity, in fact, “rejoices in the truth” (1 Cor 13:6).
  • Pope Benedict XVI, in Encyclical Letter Caritas in Veritate (29 June 2009).

• Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity. That light is both the light of reason and the light of faith, through which the intellect attains to the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as gift, acceptance, and communion. Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word “love” is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite. Truth frees charity from the constraints of an emotionalism that deprives it of relational and social content, and of a fideism that deprives it of human and universal breathing-space.
  • Pope Benedict XVI, in Encyclical Letter Caritas in Veritate (29 June 2009).

• Nature expresses a design of love and truth.
  • Pope Benedict XVI, in Encyclical Letter Caritas in Veritate (29 June 2009).

• Authentic love is obviously something good. When we love we become most fully human. But people often consider themselves loving when actually they are possessive or manipulative. People sometimes treat others as objects to satisfy their own needs. How easy it is to be deceived by the many voices in our society that advocate a permissive approach to sexuality, without regard for modesty, self-respect or the moral values that bring quality into human relationships! This is worship of a false god; instead of bringing life, it brings death.
  • Pope Benedict XVI, Disadvantaged Youth (18 July 2007) at World Youth Day 2008 in Australia.

• Love has a particular trait: it has a task or purpose to fulfill - to abide. By its nature, love is enduring. The Holy Spirit offers our world love that dispels uncertainty; love that overcomes the fear of betrayal; love that carries eternity within; the true love that draws us into a unity that abides!
  • Pope Benedict XVI, Youth Day Vigil (19 July 2007) at World Youth Day 2008 in Australia.

• Dear young people, we have seen that it is the Holy Spirit who brings about the wonderful communion of believers in Jesus Christ. True to his nature as giver and gift alike, he is even now working through you. Let unifying love be your measure; abiding love your challenge; self-giving love your mission!
  • Pope Benedict XVI, Youth Day Vigil (19 July 2007) at World Youth Day 2008 in Australia.

• A new generation of Christians is being called to help build a world in which God's gift of life is welcomed, respected and cherished-not rejected, feared as a threat and destroyed. A new age in which love is not greedy or self-seeking, but pure, faithful and genuinely free, open to others, respectful of their dignity, seeking their good, radiating joy and beauty - a new age in which hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption that deaden our souls and poison our relationships.
  • Pope Benedict XVI, Closing Mass (19 July 2007) at World Youth Day 2008 in Australia.

• Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world.
  • Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (1990), chapter The Responsibility of the Poet.

• I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.
  • Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank (1996), chapter Health is Membership.

• We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.
  • Wendell Berry, Life Is A Miracle : An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000).

• Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by the removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease, like caries and many other ailments, is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.
  • Ambrose Bierce in The Devil's Dictionary.

• Love seeketh not itself to please,
  Nor for itself hath any care,
  But for another gives its ease,
  And builds a heaven in hell’s despair.
  • William Blake, The Clod and the Pebble, st. 1 in: Songs of Experience (1794).

• Man, you got to have love just to set it straight
  Take control of your mind and meditate
  Let your soul gravitate to the love y'all
  • The Black Eyed Peas, Where Is the Love? (2003).

• If you never know truth then you never know love.
  • The Black Eyed Peas, Where Is the Love? (2003).

• The mightiest love was granted him
  Love that does not expect to be loved.
  • Jorge Luis Borges, of Baruch Spinoza in "Baruch Spinoza", as translated in Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason (1989) by Yirmiyahu Yovel

• Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
  • Jorge Luis Borges, "The Threatened", The Book of Sand [El Libro de arena] (1975).

• There is only one thing infamous in love, and that is a falsehood.
  • Paul Bourget, Cosmopolis (1892), Ch. 5 "Countess Steno".

• There is no such thing as an age for love … because the man capable of loving — in the complex and modern sense of love as a sort of ideal exaltation — never ceases to love.
  • Paul Bourget, The Age for Love (Whether or not the interview with Pierre Fauchery by "Jules Labarthe" in this short story represents an actual one by Bourget is not known.) Full text online.

• I have been thinking about our conversation and about your book, and I am afraid that I expressed myself badly yesterday. When I said that one may love and be loved at any age I ought to have added that sometimes this love comes too late. It comes when one no longer has the right to prove to the loved one how much she is loved, except by love's sacrifice.
  • Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
  • Paul Bourget, The Age for Love (Whether or not the interview with Pierre Fauchery by "Jules Labarthe" in this short story represents an actual one by Bourget is not known.) Full text online.

• We have common cause against the night... Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear the music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokecherry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain... We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul.
  • Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), p. 145.

• At the center of religion is love. I love you and I forgive you. I am like you and you are like me. I love all people. I love the world. I love creating. Everything in our life should be based on love.
  • Ray Bradbury, as quoted in "Sci-fi legend "Ray Bradbury on God, 'monsters and angels'" by John Blake, CNN : Living (2 August 2010), p. 1.

• In that film Love Story, there’s a line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Love means saying you’re sorry every day for some little thing or other.
  • Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury, Interviewed by Sam Geller The Art of Fiction No. 203, The Paris Review; Spring, 2010.

• If you want to know what love is, have a child. If you want to know what pain is, bury him.
  • Giannina Braschi in Yo-Yo Boing!

• I love hiccups and I love sneezes and I love blinks and I love belches and I love gluttons. I love hair. I love bears. For me, the round. For me, the world.
  • Giannina Braschi in "Empire of Dreams" (1988).

• War is like love, it always finds a way.
  • Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), The Chaplain, in Scene 6, p. 76.

• Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.
  • Phillips Brooks, as quoted in Primary Education (1916) by Elizabeth Peabody, p. 190.

• There is musick, even in the beauty and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument.
  • Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1642), Part II, Section IX.

• If thou must love me, let it be for nought
  Except for love's sake only. Do not say
  "I love her for her smile — her look — her way
  Of speaking gently, — for a trick of thought
  That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
  A sense of pleasant ease on such a day" —
  For these things in themselves, Beloved, may
  Be changed, or change for thee, — and love, so wrought,
  May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
  Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry, —
  A creature might forget to weep, who fbore
  Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
  But love me for love's sake, that evermore
  Thou may'st love on, through love's eternity.
  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portugese, No. XIV.

• How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
  I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
  My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
  For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
  I love thee to the level of everyday's
  Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
  I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
  I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
  I love thee with the passion put to use
  In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
  I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
  With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
  Smiles, tears, of all my life! —and, if God choose,
  I shall but love thee better after death.
  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese, No. XLIII.

• Whoever lives true life, will love true love.
  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856), Book I, line 1,096.

• I would not be a rose upon the wall
  A queen might stop at, near the palace-door,
  To say to a courtier, "Pluck that rose for me,
  It's prettier than the rest." O Romney Leigh!
  I'd rather far be trodden by his foot,
  Than lie in a great queen's bosom.
  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856), Book IV.

• But I love you, sir:
  And when a woman says she loves a man,
  The man must hear her, though he love her not.
  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856), Book IX.

• The game of love is whatever you make it to be.
  • Michelle Branch, "The Game of Love" (September 2002), by Santana, Shaman.

• For life, with all it yields of joy and woe,
  And hope and fear (believe the aged friend),
  Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love,—
  How love might be, hath been indeed, and is.
  • Robert Browning, A Death in the Desert (1864).

• Le temps, qui fortifie les amitiés, affaiblit l'amour.
  • Time, which strengthens friendship, weakens love.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, Du Coeur, ["Of the Heart" also translated as "Of the Affections"], Aphorism 4.

• L'amour qui naît subitement est le plus long à guérir.
  • Sudden love takes the longest time to be cured.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, Du Coeur, ["Of the Heart" also translated as "Of the Affections"], Aphorism 13.

• Le commencement et le déclin de l'amour se font sentir par l'embarras où l'on est de se trouver seuls.
  • We can recognize the dawn and the decline of love by the uneasiness we feel when alone together.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, Du Coeur, ["Of the Heart" also translated as "Of the Affections"], Aphorism 33.

• L'on veut faire tout le bonheur, ou si cela ne se peut ainsi, tout le malheur de ce qu'on aime.
  • One seeks to make the loved one entirely happy, or, if that cannot be, entirely wretched.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, Du Coeur, ["Of the Heart" also translated as "Of the Affections"], Aphorism 39.

• Regretter ce que l'on aime est un bien, en comparaison de vivre avec ce que l'on hait.
  • Grief at the absence of a loved one is happiness compared to life with a person one hates.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, Du Coeur, ["Of the Heart" also translated as "Of the Affections"], Aphorism 40.

• Loveliest of lovely things are they,
  On earth, that soonest pass away.
  The rose that lives its little hour
  Is prized beyond the sculptured flower.
  • William Cullen Bryant, A Scene on the Banks of the Hudson, st. 3 (1828).

• Every morning
  I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
  Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No
  And pressing forward honor reality.

  We cannot avoid
  Using power,
  Cannot escape the compulsion
  To afflict the world,
  So let us, cautious in diction
  And mighty in contradiction,
  Love powerfully.

  • Martin Buber, in "Power and Love" (1926).

• Hatred has never stopped hatred. Only love stops hate. This is the eternal law.
  • Gautama Buddha, Dhammapada, chapter 1, verse 3-5, The Still Point: Dhammapada - Living the Buddha’s Essential Teachings - A Contemporary Rendering and Stories by Geri Larkin (2003), Harper SanFrancisco

• Just as a mother with her own life
  Protects her child, her only child, from harm,
  So within yourself let grow
  A boundless love for all creatures.

  Let your love flow outward through the universe,
  To its height, its depth, its broad extent,
  A limitless love, without hatred or enmity.

  Then as you stand or walk,
  Sit or lie down,
  As long as you are awake,
  Strive for this with a one-pointed mind;
  Your life will bring heaven to earth.

  • Buddha Discourse on Goodwill, From the Metta Sutta, part of the Sutta Nipata, a collection of dialogues with the Buddha said to be among the oldest parts of the Pali Buddhist canon.

• Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.
  • Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory (1996)

• Love is the greatest advantage a parent can give.
  • Warren Buffett, as quoted in "Should You Leave It All to the Children?" by Richard I. Kirkland Jr, in Fortune (29 September 1986).

• And this is that Homer's golden chain, which reacheth down from heaven to earth, by which every creature is annexed, and depends on his Creator.
  • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III, Section 1. Memb. 1. Subsec. 7.

• No cord nor cable can so forcibly draw, or hold so fast, as love can do with a twined thread.
  • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III, Section 2. Memb. 1. Subsec. 2.

• The falling out of lovers is the renewing of love.
  • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III, Section 2. Terence—Andria, III. 23.

• To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk pain. To try is to risk failure, but risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
  • Leo Buscaglia, Living, Loving, and Learning (1985).

• A life of love is one of continual growth, where the doors and windows of experience are always open to the wonder and magic that life offers. To love is to risk living fully.
  • Leo Buscaglia, in interview with Veronica M. Hay, in A Magazine of People and Possibilities (1998).

• We needed you
  To love us too.
  We wait for your move.
  • Kate Bush, The Dreaming (1982), All The Love.

• Only tragedy allows the release
  Of love and grief never normally seen.
  I didn't want to let them see me weep,
  I didn't want to let them see me weak,
  But I know I have shown
  That I stand at the gates alone.
  • Kate Bush, The Dreaming (1982), All The Love.

• I needed you
  To love me too.
  I wait for your move.
  • Kate Bush, The Dreaming (1982), All The Love.

• All the love, all the love,
  All the love we should have given.
  All the love, all the love,
  All the love you could have given.
  All the love...
  • Kate Bush, The Dreaming (1982), All The Love.

• Do you know what I really need?
  I need love love love love love, yeah!
  • Kate Bush, Hounds of Love (1985), Hounds of Love.

• The light
  Begin to bleed,
  Begin to breathe,
  Begin to speak.
  D'you know what?
  I love you better now.
  • Kate Bush, Hounds of Love (1985), side two of the album called The Ninth Wave, song The Morning Fog.

• We let it in
  We give it out
  And in the end
  What's it all about?
  It must be love.
  • Kate Bush, The Red Shoes (1993), And So Is Love.

• We used to say
  "Ah Hell, we're young"
  But now we see that life is sad
  And so is love.
  • Kate Bush, The Red Shoes (1993), And So Is Love.

• What am I singing?
  A song of seeds
  The food of love.
  Eat the music.
  • Kate Bush, The Red Shoes (1993), Eat the Music.

• Excuse me I'm sorry to bother you,
  But don't I know you?
  There's just something about you.
  Haven't we met before?

  We've been in love forever.

  • Kate Bush, 50 Words for Snow (2011), Snowed In at Wheeler Street.

• There's someone who's loved you forever but you don't know it.
  You might feel it and just not show it.
  • Kate Bush, 50 Words for Snow (2011), Among Angels.

• * I love my
  Beloved, ooh,
  All and everywhere,
  Only the fools blew it.
  You and me
  Knew life itself is
  Breathing...
  • Kate Bush, Never for Ever (1980), Breathing.

• It is love that alone gives life, and the truest life is that which we live not in ourselves but vicariously in others, and with which we have no concern. Our concern is so to order ourselves that we may be of the number of them that enter into life — although we know it not.
  • Samuel Butler, Ramblings In Cheapside (1890), First published in Universal Review (December 1890).

• To live is like to love — all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.
  • Samuel Butler, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy, Life and Love.

• A pair of lovers are like sunset and sunrise: there are such things every day but we very seldom see them., Chapter 11.
  • Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903).

• Love in your hearts as idly burns
  As fire in antique Roman urns.
  • Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part II (1664), Canto I.

• Love is a boy by poets styl'd:
  Then spare the rod and spoil the child.
  • Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part II (1664), Canto I, line 843.

• What mad lover ever dy'd,
  To gain a soft and gentle bride?
  Or for a lady tender-hearted,
  In purling streams or hemp departed?
  • Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part III (1678), Canto I.

• Oh Love! young Love! bound in thy rosy band,
  Let sage or cynic prattle as he will,
  These hours, and only these, redeem Life's years of ill.
  • Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto II (1812), Stanza 81.

• The cold in clime are cold in blood,
  Their love can scarce deserve the name.
  • Lord Byron, The Giaour (1813), line 1,099.

• Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven;
  A spark of that immortal fire
  With angels shared, by Allah given
  To lift from earth our low desire.
  • Lord Byron, The Giaour (1813), line 1,131.

• Why did she love him? Curious fool!—be still—
  Is human love the growth of human will?
  • Lord Byron, Lara, A Tale (1814), Canto II, Stanza 22.

• And to his eye
  There was but one beloved face on earth,
  And that was shining on him.
  • Lord Byron, The Dream (1816), Stanza 2.

• She knew she was by him beloved,—she knew
  For quickly comes such knowledge, that his heart
  Was darken'd with her shadow.
  • Lord Byron, The Dream (1816), Stanza 3.

• Who loves, raves—'tis youth's frenzy—but the cure
  Is bitterer still.
  • Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818), Stanza 123.

• O! that the Desert were my dwelling place,
  With one fair Spirit for my minister,
  That I might all forget the human race,
  And, hating no one, love but only her!
  • Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818), Stanza 177.

• Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,
  'Tis woman's whole existence: man may range
  The court, camp, church, the vessel, and the mart,
  Sword, gown, gain, glory, offer in exchange
  Pride, fame, ambition, to fill up his heart,
  And few there are whom these cannot estrange;
  Men have all these resources, we but one,
  To love again, and be again undone.
  • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1818-24), Canto I, Stanza 194.

• Alas! the love of women! it is known
  To be a lovely and a fearful thing.
  • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1818-24), Canto II, Stanza 199.

• In her first passion woman loves her lover;
  In all the others, all she loves is love.
  • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1818-24), Canto III, Stanza 3. La Rochefoucauld. Maxims. No. 497.

• All I have is my love of love and love is not loving.
  • David Bowie, Soul Love (song) (1972).

• "You are at the begining of your life, perhaps you will have many loves, but if you are fortunate, you will have only one love."
  • Jolee Bindo, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, version 1.03.

• "If everything is imperfect in this imperfect world, love is most perfect in its perfect imperfection."
  • Gunar Björnstrand, The Seventh Seal (1957).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Sad hours and glad hours, and all hours, pass over;
  One thing unshaken stays:
  Life, that hath Death for spouse, hath Chance for lover;
  Whereby decays
    Each thing save one thing: — mid this strife diurnal
  Of hourly change begot,
  Love that is God-born, bides as God eternal,
  And changes not; —

  Nor means a tinseled dream pursuing lovers
  Find altered by-and-bye,
  When, with possession, time anon discovers
  Trapped dreams must die, —
  For he that visions God, of mankind gathers
  One manlike trait alone,
  And reverently imputes to Him a father's
  Love for his son.

  • James Branch Cabell, The Certain Hour (1916), "To Robert Gamble Cabell II: In Dedication of The Certain Hour".

• What really matters is that there is so much faith and love and kindliness which we can share with and provoke in others, and that by cleanly, simple, generous living we approach perfection in the highest and most lovely of all arts. . . . But you, I think, have always comprehended this.
  • James Branch Cabell, The Certain Hour (1916), "Auctorial Induction".

• Love, I take it, must look toward something not quite accessible, something not quite understood.
  • James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest (1917), Horvendile, in Ch. 2 : Introduces the Ageless Woman.

• There is no gift more great than love.
  • James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion (1926), Morvyth, in Book Two : The Mathematics of Gonfal, Ch. X : Relative to Gonfal's Head.

• Love is the substance of all life. Everything is connected in love, absolutely everything.
  • Julia Cameron, Blessings : Prayers and Declarations for a Heartful Life (1998).

• When I listen to love, I am listening to my true nature. When I express love, I am expressing my true nature. All of us love. All of us do it more and more perfectly. The past has brought us both ashes and diamonds. In the present we find the flowers of what we've planted and the seeds of what we are becoming. I plant the seeds of love in my heart. I plant the seeds of love in the hearts of others.
  • Julia Cameron, Blessings : Prayers and Declarations for a Heartful Life (1998).

• The growth of one blesses all. I am commited to grow in love. All that I touch, I leave in love. I move through this world consciously and creatively.
  • Julia Cameron, Blessings : Prayers and Declarations for a Heartful Life (1998).

• Love is not love if it compelled by reason and driven by logic — love exists in spite of those things, not because of them. It is a emotion which needs no fuel to fire it or oxygen to feed it; if you have to look for the why, then stop looking; it was never there at all.
  • Julia Cameron, Blessings : Prayers and Declarations for a Heartful Life (1998).

• Amor é um fogo que arde sem se ver,
  É ferida que dói, e não se sente;
  É um contentamento descontente,
  É dor que desatina sem doer.
  É um não querer mais que bem querer;
  É um andar solitário entre a gente;
  É nunca contentar-se de contente;
  É um cuidar que ganha em se perder.
  É querer estar preso por vontade;
  É servir a quem vence, o vencedor;
  É ter com quem nos mata, lealdade.
  Mas como causar pode seu favor
  Nos corações humanos amizade,
  Se tão contrário a si é o mesmo Amor?
  • Love is a fire that burns, but is never seen;
    a wound that hurts, but is never perceived;
    a pleasure that starts a pain that’s unrelieved;
    a pain that maddens without any pain; a serene
    desire for nothing, but wishing her only the best;
    a lonely passage through the crowd; the resentment
    of never being content with one’s contentment;
    a caring that gains only when losing; an obsessed
    desire to be bound, for love, in jail;
    a capitulation to the one you’ve conquered yourself;
    a devotion to your own assassin every single day.
    So how can Love conform, without fail,
    every captive human heart, if Love itself
    is so contradictory in every possible way?
  • Luís de Camões, Amor é fogo que arde sem se ver, translated by William Baer.

• Nous nous trompons toujours deux fois sur ceux que nous aimons: d`abord à leur avantage, puis à leur désavantage.
  • We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
  • Albert Camus, quoted in Robertson, Connie (1998). ""Camus, Albert 1913–1960". The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations. Wordsworth Editions. pp. page 73. ISBN 185326489X. 

• There is not love of life without despair about life.
  • Albert Camus, Preface, Lyrical and Critical Essays (1970).

• There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.
  • Albert Camus, The Plague (1947).

• * In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.
  • Albert Camus, The Plague (1947).

• The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.
  • Albert Camus, A Happy Death (1971).

• That's love too. It ain't sex, and maybe that's too bad, but you know, Cindy, when a man and a woman care for each other, that doesn't always mean they have to sleep together or live together.
  • Orson Scott Card in Homebody (1998).

• For love is ever the beginning of Knowledge, as fire is of light.
  • Thomas Carlyle, Essays, Death of Goethe. Quote reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 419-23.

• Where there is the greatest love, there are always miracles.
  • Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Book I, Ch. 4.

• I have often had occasion to observe, that a warm blundering man does more for the world than a frigid wise man.
  • Richard Cecil, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 394.

• Isn't everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?
  • "Celine" (played by Julie Delpy), in Before Sunrise (1995).

• “Love the others and you will be loved!” is a saying that might sound as a terrible and unjust accusation against all the innocents that have been hated and perhaps even tortured and killed.
  • Fausto Cercignani in: Brian Morris, Simply Transcribed. Quotations from Writings by Fausto Cercignani, 2014, quote 58.

• The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
  • G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News (16 July 1910).

• Forget the haters 'cause somebody loves ya.
  • Miley Cyrus, performed in the song W:We Can't Stop (2013) which is written by various songwriters.

• There's no love lost between us.
  • Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605-15), Book IV, Chapter 13. Also used by Henry Fielding, Grub Street, Act I, scene 4; David Garrick, Correspondence (1759); Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer (1771), Act IV. Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour, Act II, scene 1. Alain-René Lesage, Gil Blas (1715-1735), Book IX, Chapter VII, as translated by Tobias Smollett.

• Each one gave the other the only assistance one man can expect from another: that his friend support him and ask only that he remain himself. It is no great accomplishment to take people as they are, and we must always do so eventually, but to wish them to be as they are, that is a genuine love.
  • Émile Chartier, Alain On Happiness (1973), Poets.

• Try not to change the world. You will fail. Try to love the world. Lo, the world is changed. Changed forever.
  • Sri Chinmoy, Meditations: Food For The Soul (1970), August 31.

• What is love? From the spiritual and inner point of view, love is self-expansion. Human love binds and is bound. Divine Love expands, enlarges itself.
  • Sri Chinmoy, My Rose Petals (1971).

• First of all, let us try to know what love is. If love means to possess someone or something, then that is not real love, not pure love. If loves means to give oneself, to become one with everything and everyone, then that is real love. Real love is total oneness with the object loved and with the Possessor of love.
  • Sri Chinmoy, Rainbow-Flowers (1973).

• Where love is thick, faults are thin. If you really love someone, then it is difficult to find fault with him. His faults seem negligible, for love means oneness.
  • Sri Chinmoy, Fifty Freedom-Boats To One Golden Shore (1974), Citation- ffb-132, Part 4.

• Love the world. Otherwise, you will be forced to carry the heaviest load: your own bitter self.
  • Sri Chinmoy, Ten Thousand Flower Flames Part 1-100 (1979), #1908, Part 20.

• Hatred is a disguised form of love. You can only hate someone whom you really wish to love, because if you were totally indifferent to that person, you could not even get up enough energy to hate him.
  • Sri Chinmoy, The Wings of Joy (1997).

• If you really want to love humanity, then you have to love humanity as it is now.
  • Sri Chinmoy, The Wings of Joy (1997).

• Life is nothing but the expansion of love. We can cultivate divine love by entering into the Source. The Source is God, who is all Love.
  • Sri Chinmoy, The Wings of Joy (1997).

• 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, The Wings of Joy (1997).

• Is the world so unbearable? No! What we need is only a little more love for the world.
  • Sri Chinmoy, Seventy Seven Thousand Service-Trees series 1-50 (1998), #4386, Part 5.

• Love is something that never cared to learn how to judge anybody.
  • Sri Chinmoy, Seventy Seven Thousand Service-Trees series 1-50 (1998),#7310, Part 8.

• Instead of creating a reason why you cannot love the world, try to create a reason why you should and must love the world.
  • Sri Chinmoy, Seventy Seven Thousand Service-Trees series 1-50 (1998), #14550, Part 15.

• World-peace can be achieved when the power of love replaces the love of power.
  • Sri Chinmoy, Words of Wisdom (2010).

• Do not judge but love and be loved, if you want to be really happy.
  • Sri Chinmoy, Words of Wisdom (2010).

• Love is a special word, and I use it only when I mean it. You say the word too much and it becomes cheap.
  • Ray Charles, Brother Ray : Ray Charles' Own Story (1978) by Ray Charles and David Ritz, (2003 edition), For the Love of Women, p. 239.

• "There have been women I have loved … A lot, as discreetly as possible."
  • Jacques Chirac, undated, quoted in "'Affair' story will continue to rumble" Christian Fraser, BBC News, 14 January 2014.

• So mourn'd the dame of Ephesus her love.
  • Colley Cibber, Richard III (1700), Act II. Altered from Shakespeare.

• What have I done? What horrid crime committed?
  To me the worst of crimes—outliv'd my liking.
  • Colley Cibber, Richard III (1700), Act III, scene 2. Altered from Shakespeare.

• There are no signs,
  There are no stars aligned,
  No amulets no charms,
  To bring you back to my arms.
  There's just this human heart.
  That's built with this human fault.
  What was your question?
  Love is the answer.
  • Annie Clark (St. Vincent), in "All My Stars Aligned" on Marry Me (2007).

• Years! Years, ye shall mix with me!
  Ye shall grow a part
  Of the laughing Sea;
  Of the moaning heart
  Of the glittered wave
  Of the sun-gleam's dart
  In the ocean-grave.

  Fair, cold, and faithless wert thou, my own!
  For that I love
  Thy heart of stone!
  From the heights above
  To the depths below,
  Where dread things move,

  There is naught can show
  A life so trustless! Proud be thy crown!
  Ruthless, like none, save the Sea, alone!

  • Voltairine de Cleyre, "The Dirge of the Sea" (April 1891).

• And sometimes when I am weary,
  When the path is thorny and Wild,
  I'll look back to the Eyes in the twilight,
  Back to the eyes that smiled.

  And pray that a wreath like a rainbow
  May slip from the beautiful past,
  And Crown me again with the sweet, strong love
  And keep me, and hold me fast.

  • Voltairine de Cleyre, And Thou Too (1888).

• The wise are wise only because they love.
  • Paulo Coelho, As quoted in Elders on Love: Dialogues on the Consciousness, Cultivation, and Expression of Love (1999) by Kenneth R. Lakritz and Thomas M. Knoblauch
  • Unsourced variant: The wise are wise only because they love. The fools are fools only because they think they can understand love.

• One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.
  • Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist, p. 128

• Love is the force that transforms and improves the Soul of the World. … It is we who nourish the Soul of the World, and the world we live in will be either better or worse, depending on whether we become better or worse. And that's where the power of love comes in. Because when we love, we always strive to become better than we are.
  • Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (1988), p. 157.

• We must never forget that spiritual experience is above all a practical experience of love. And with love, there are no rules.
  • Paulo Coelho, By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994)
  • As translated by Alan R. Clarke (1996).

• The gods throw the dice, and they don't ask whether we want to be in the game or not. They don't care if when you go, you leave behind a lover, a home, a career, or a dream. The gods don't care whether you have it all, whether it seems that your every desire can be met through hard work and persistence. The gods don't want to know about your plans and your hopes. Somewhere they're throwing the dice — and you are chosen. From then on, winning or losing is only a question of luck.
  The gods throw the dice, freeing love from its cage. And love can create or destroy — depending on the direction of the wind when it is set free.
  • Paulo Coelho, By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994).

• Lovers need to know how to lose themselves and then how to find themselves again.
  • Paulo Coelho, By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994).

• There's nothing deeper than love. In fairy tales, the princesses kiss the frogs, and the frogs become princes. In real life, the princesses kiss princes, and the princes turn into frogs.
  • Paulo Coelho, By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994).

• Love is always new. Regardless of whether we love once, twice, or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand-new situation. Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere. We simply have to accept it, because it is what nourishes our existence. If we reject it, we die of hunger, because we lack the courage to reach out a hand and pluck the fruit from the branches of the tree of life. We have to take love where we find it, even if it means hours, days, weeks of disappointment and sadness.
  The moment we begin to seek love, love begins to seek us.
  And to save us.
  • Paulo Coelho, By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994)

• Even if loving meant leaving, or solitude, or sorrow, love was worth every penny of its price.
  • Paulo Coelho, By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994).

• I am going to sit here with you by the river. If you go home to sleep, I will sleep in front of your house. And if you go away, I will follow you — until you tell me to go away. Then I'll leave. But I have to love you for the rest of my life.
  • Paulo Coelho, By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994)
• Love is much like a dam: if you allow a tiny crack to form through which only a trickle of water can pass, that trickle will quickly bring down the whole structure, and soon no one will be able to control the force of the current. For when those walls come down, then love takes over, and it no longer matters what is possible or impossible; it doesn't even matter whether we can keep the loved one at our side. To love is to lose control.
  • Paulo Coelho, By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994).

• When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly? Life moves very fast. It rushes from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.
  • Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes (2003), page 9.

• My aim is to understand love. I know how alive I felt when I was in love, and I know that everything I have now, however interesting it might seem, doesn't really excited me.
  But love is a terrible thing: I've seen my girlfriends suffer and I don't want the same thing to happen to me. … Although my aim is to understand love, and although I suffer to think of people to whom I gave my heart, I see that those who touched my heart failed to arouse my body, and that those who aroused my body failed to touch my heart.
  • Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes (2003), Maria's diary entry at the age of 17, p. 16.

• In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel. It hurt when I lost each of the various men I fell in love with. Now, though, I am convinced that no one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.
  • Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes (2003), p. 90.

• Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they're not. When two bodies meet, it is just the cup overflowing. They can stay together for hours, even days. They begin the dance one day and finish it the next, or — such is the pleasure they experience — they may never finish it. No eleven minutes for them.
  • Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes (2003), p. 164.

• Love simply is. That is the testament of Athena or Sherine or Hagia Sofia — love is. No definitions. Love and don't ask too many questions. Just love.
  • Paulo Coelho, The Witch of Portobello (2007), p. 258.

• The light of love flows out of my soul, but it can go nowhere because it’s blocked by pain. I could inhale and exhale every morning for the rest of my life, but that wouldn’t solve anything.
  • Paulo Coelho, Aleph (2011).

• No one can learn to love by following a manual, and no one can learn to write by following a course. I’m not telling you to seek out other writers but to find people with different skills from yourself, because writing is no different from any other activity done with joy and enthusiasm.
  • Paulo Coelho, Aleph (2011).

• Love is the only thing that will save us, independent of any mistakes we may make. Love is always stronger.
  • Paulo Coelho, Aleph (2011).

• Love always triumphs over what we call death. That’s why there’s no need to grieve for our loved ones, because they continue to be loved and remain by our side.
  • Paulo Coelho, Aleph (2011).

• I love you like a river that creates the right conditions for trees and bushes and flowers to flourish along its banks. I love you like a river that gives water to the thirsty and takes people where they want to go.
  • Paulo Coelho, Aleph (2011).

• I love you like a river that understands that it must learn to flow differently over waterfalls and to rest in the shallows. I love you because we are all born in the same place, at the same source, which keeps us provided with a constant supply of water. And so, when we feel weak, all we have to do is wait a little. The spring returns, and the winter snows melt and fill us with new energy.
  • Paulo Coelho, Aleph (2011).

• I love you like a river that begins as a solitary trickle in the mountains and gradually grows and joins other rivers until, after a certain point, it can flow around any obstacle in order to get where it wants.
  • Paulo Coelho, Aleph (2011).

• I receive your love, and I give you mine. Not the love of a man for a woman, not the love of a father for a child, not the love of God for his creatures, but a love with no name and no explanation, like a river that cannot explain why it follows a particular course but simply flows onward. A love that asks for nothing and gives nothing in return; it is simply there. I will never be yours, and you will never be mine; nevertheless, I can honestly say: I love you, I love you, I love you.
  • Paulo Coelho, Aleph (2011).

• What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.
  • Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966).

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

• When they lay down beside me I made my confession to them.
  They touched both my eyes and I touched the dew on their hem.
  If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn,
  They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.
  • Leonard Cohen, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967), Sisters of Mercy.

• I swept the marble chambers,
  But you sent me down below.
  You kept me from believing
  Until you let me know:
  That 'I am not the one who loves —
  It's love that chooses me.
  When hatred with his package comes,
  You forbid delivery.
  • Leonard Cohen, Ten New Songs (2001), You Have Loved Enough.

• The light came through the window,
  Straight from the sun above,
  And so inside my little room
  There plunged the rays of Love.

  In streams of light I clearly saw
  The dust you seldom see,
  Out of which the Nameless makes
  A Name for one like me.

  • Leonard Cohen, Ten New Songs (2001), "Love Itself".

• Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love — and to put its trust in life!!
  • Joseph Conrad, Victory: An Island Tale, part IV, chap. 14.

• Anything that's worth havin'
  Sure enough worth fighting for
  Quittin's out of the question
  When it gets tough, gotta fight some more
  [...] We gotta fight, fight, fight, fight, fight for this love
  If its woth having, it's worth fightin for
  • Cheryl Cole, Fight for This Love (2009).

• Now everyday ain't gonna be no picnic
  Love ain't no walk in the park
  All you can do is make the best of it now
  Can't be afraid of the dark
  Just know that you're not in this thing alone
  There's always a place in me that you can call home.
  • Cheryl Cole, Fight for This Love (2009).

• All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
  Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
  All are but ministers of Love,
  And feed his sacred flame.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Love, st. 1 (1799).

• And in Life's noisiest hour,
  There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee,
  The heart's Self-solace and soliloquy.

  You mould my Hopes, you fashion me within.

  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Presence of Love (1807), lines 1-4.

• And looking to the Heaven, that bends above you,
  How oft! I bless the Lot, that made me love you.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Presence of Love (1807), lines 10-11.

• Flowers are lovely; love is flower-like;
  Friendship is a sheltering tree;
  Oh the joys that came down shower-like,
  Of friendship, love, and liberty,
  Ere I was old!
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Youth and Age, st. 2 (1823-1832).

• In many ways doth the full heart reveal
  The presence of the love it would conceal.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems Written in Later Life, motto (1826).

• * I am dying, but without expectation of a speedy release. Is it not strange that very recently by-gone images, and scenes of early life, have stolen into my mind, like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope — those twin realities of this phantom world! I do not add Love, — for what is Love but Youth and Hope embracing, and so seen as one? I say realities; for reality is a thing of degrees, from the Iliad to a dream.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T. Coleridge (1835) by Henry N. Coleridge. The remark was made on 10 July 1834.

• To know, to esteem, to love, and then to part,
  Makes up life's tale to many a feeling heart!
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge,'Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), On taking Leave of ———— (1817).

• I have heard of reasons manifold
  Why Love must needs be blind,
  But this the best of all I hold,—
  His eyes are in his mind.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), To a Lady, Offended by a Sportive Observation.

• Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
  To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
  He prayeth well, who loveth well
  Both man and bird and beast.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1817), Stanza 22.

• He prayeth best, who loveth best
  All things both great and small;
  For the dear God who loveth us,
  He made and loveth all.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1817), Stanza 22.

• Our love is principle, and has its root
  In reason, is judicious, manly, free.
  • William Cowper, The Task (1785), Book V, line 353.

• Be loving, and you will never want for love; be humble, and you will never want for guiding.
  • Dinah Craik, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 394.

• When faith and hope fail, as they do sometimes, we must try charity, which is love in action. We must speculate no more on our duty, but simply do it. When we have done it, however blindly, perhaps Heaven will show us why.
  • Dinah Craik, Christian's Mistake (1865). p. 64.

• Mine to the core of the heart, my beauty!
  Mine, all mine, and for love, not duty:
  Love given willingly, full and free,
  Love for love's sake — as mine to thee.
  Duty's a slave that keeps the keys,
  But Love, the master, goes in and out
  Of his goodly chambers with song and shout,
  Just as he please — just as he please.
  • Dinah Craik, Poems (1866), "Plighted".

• You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover's arms can only come later when you're sure they won't laugh if you trip.
  • Jonathan Samuel Carroll, Outside the Dog Museum (1991).

• Love's for a lifetime not for a moment.
  • The Corrs, All The Love In The World (2001).

• I was searching for an answer
  In a world so full of strangers
  But what I found was never really enough
  Now that I've found you
  I'm looking in the eyes of love (In the eyes of love)
  
  Baby you've been good to me
  Oh, so much more that you could know, yeah, yeah
  I never thought that I would find
  Someone who's so sweet and kind
  Like you...
  
  Please believe me when I say
  This time I won't run away
  I swear by all the heaven's stars above
  Now that I've found you
  I'm looking in the eyes of love
  
  Looking in the eyes of love...
  I can see forever, yeah...
  I can see you and me
  Walking in this world together
  
  Oh, my heart's found a hope...
  I've been dreaming of...
  Now that I've found you
  I'm looking in the eyes of love
  • The Corrs, Looking in the Eyes of Love from the In Blue (2004).

• Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star...
  • E. E. Cummings, "being to timelessness as it's to time" (1958).

• and nothing quite so least as truth
  —i say though hate were why men breathe—
  because my father lived his soul
  love is the whole and more than all
  • E. E. Cummings, 50 Poems (1940), Poem #34.

• love is the every only god
  • E. E. Cummings, 50 Poems (1940), Poem #38.

• love is more thicker than forget
  …it is more sane and sunly
  and more it cannot die
  than all the sky which only
  is higher than the sky
  • E. E. Cummings, 50 Poems (1940), Poem #42.

• measureless our pure living complete love
  whose doom is beauty and its fate to grow
  • E. E. Cummings, 50 Poems (1940), Poem #50.

• 'and liars kill their kind
  but' her,my 'love creates love only' our
  • E. E. Cummings, 1 x 1 (1944), XXXII.

• nothing false and possible is love
  (who's imagined, therefore limitless)
  love's to giving as to keeping's give; as yes is to if, love is to yes
  • E. E. Cummings, 1 x 1 (1944), XXXIV.

• true lovers in each happening of their hearts
  live longer than all which and every who;
  • E. E. Cummings, 1 x 1 (1944), XXXVI.

• yes is a pleasant country…
  love is a deeper season
  than reason
  • E. E. Cummings, 1 x 1 (1944), XXXVIII.

• i feel that(false and true are merely to know)
  Love only has ever been,is,and will ever be,So
  • E. E. Cummings, XAIPE (1950), 33.

• no evil is
  so worse than worst you fall in hate with love

  —human one mortally immortal i
  can turn immense all time's because to why

  • E. E. Cummings, 95 poems (1958), poem #7.

• lovers alone wear sunlight
  • E. E. Cummings, 95 poems (1958), poem #91.

• The whole truth…
  sings only —and all lovers are the song
  • E. E. Cummings, 95 poems (1958), poem #91.

• it's love by whom (my beautiful friend) the gift to live is without until:
  …love was and shall be this only truth (a dream of a deed, born not to die)
  • E. E. Cummings, 73 poems (1963), poem#4.

• the axis of the universe
  —love
  • E. E. Cummings, 73 poems (1963), poem#73.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Surely goodness and loyal love will pursue me all the days of my life,

And I will dwell in the house of Jehovah for all my days.

• David, Psalms 23:6, NWT

• He loves righteousness and justice.

The earth is filled with Jehovah’s loyal love.

• David, Psalms 33:5, NWT

• For you, O Jehovah, are good and ready to forgive;

You abound in loyal love for all those who call on you.

• David, Psalm 86:5, NWT

• Love, Fear, and Esteem, — Write these on three stones.
  • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), X Studies and Sketches for Pictures and Decorations, "Of servants", as translated by Edward MacCurdy.

• The acquisition of any knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.
  • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations, as translated by Edward MacCurdy.

• The lover is moved by the beloved object as the senses are by sensual objects; and they unite and become one and the same thing. The work is the first thing born of this union; if the thing loved is base the lover becomes base.
  • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations, as translated by Edward MacCurdy.

• When that which loves is united to the thing beloved it can rest there; when the burden is laid down it finds rest there. There will be eternal fame also for the inhabitants of that town, constructed and enlarged by him.
  • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations, as translated by Edward MacCurdy.

• The Caladrius is a bird of which it is related that, when it is carried into the presence of a sick person, if the sick man is going to die, the bird turns away its head and never looks at him; but if the sick man is to be saved the bird never loses sight of him but is the cause of curing him of all his sickness. Like unto this is the love of virtue. It never looks at any vile or base thing, but rather clings always to pure and virtuous things and takes up its abode in a noble heart; as the birds do in green woods on flowery branches. And this Love shows itself more in adversity than in prosperity; as light does, which shines most where the place is darkest.
  • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XX Humorous Writings, as translated by Edward MacCurdy.

• L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.
  • The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.
  • Dante Alighieri, Paradiso XXXIII, 145.

• Amor, ch'al cor gentil ratto s'apprende.
  • Love, that all gentle hearts so quickly know.
  • Dante Alighieri, Inferno, V. 100.

• Amor ch' a nullo amato amar perdona.
  • Love, which insists that love shall mutual be.
  • Dante Alighieri, Inferno, V. 103.

• If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual.
  • Robertson Davies, "The Pleasures of Love," in Saturday Night (23 December 1961); reprinted in The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (1990).

• Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end: we fancy that we have always possessed what we love, so difficult is it to imagine how we could have lived without it.
  • Anne Louise Germaine de Staël, Corinne (1807), Bk. 8, Ch. 2, as translated by Isabel Hill (1833)
  • Variant translation: It is certainly through love that eternity can be understood; it confuses all thoughts about time; it destroys the ideas of beginning and end; one thinks one has always been in love with the person one loves, so difficult is it to conceive that one could live without him.
    • As translated by Sylvia Raphael (1998).

• The mystery of the poor is this: That they are Jesus, and what you do for them you do for Him. It is the only way we have of knowing and believing in our love. The mystery of poverty is that by sharing in it, making ourselves poor in giving to others, we increase our knowledge of and belief in love.
  • Doris Day, Catholic Worker (April 1964).

• We are not expecting Utopia here on this earth. But God meant things to be much easier than we have made them. A man has a natural right to food, clothing, and shelter. A certain amount of goods is necessary to lead a good life. A family needs work as well as bread. Property is proper to man. We must keep repeating these things. Eternal life begins now. "All the way to heaven is heaven, because He said, "I am the Way." The cross is there, of course, but "in the cross is joy of spirit." And love makes all things easy.
  • Doris Day, On Pilgrimage (1948).

• The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe.
  • Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "The Evolution of Chastity" (1934), as translated by René Hague in Toward the Future (1975).

• What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but expressing them. And so we cannot avoid this conclusion: it is biologically evident that to gain control of passion and so make it serve spirit must be a condition of progress. Sooner or later, then, the world will brush aside our incredulity and take this step : because whatever is the more true comes out into the open, and whatever is better is ultimately realized. The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
  • Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "The Evolution of Chastity" (February 1934), as translated in Toward the Future (1975) edited by by René Hague, who also suggests "space" as an alternate translation of "the ether."
  • Variants:
  • "One day after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity" — after all the scientific and technological achievements — "we shall harness for God the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."
    • As quoted by R. Sargent Shriver, Jr. in his speech accepting the nomination as the Democratic candidate for vice president, in Washington, D. C. (8 August 1972); this has sometimes been published as if Shriver's interjection "after all the scientific and technological achievements" were part of the original statement, as in The New York Times (9 August 1972), p. 18
  • What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but identifying them.
    • As translated in The The Ignatian Tradition (2009) edited by Kevin F. Burke, Eileen Burke-Sullivan and Phyllis Zagano, p. 86
  • Love is the only force which can make things one without destroying them. … Some day, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
    • As quoted in Seed Sown : Theme and Reflections on the Sunday Lectionary Reading (1996) by Jay Cormier, p. 33
  • The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered fire.
    • As quoted in Fire of Love : Encountering the Holy Spirit (2006) by Donald Goergen, p. 92
  • The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
    • As quoted in Read for the Cure (2007) by Eileen Fanning, p. v.

• Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves. All we need is to imagine our ability to love developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth. .

• A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love.
  • Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1955).

• If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level — indeed in the molecule itself — it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominized form. . . . Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.
  • Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1955).

• I somehow see what's beautiful
  In things that are ephemeral
  I'm my only friend of mine
  And love is just a piece of time
  in the world
  in the world.
  And I couldn't help but fall in love again.
  • Zooey Deschanel, She & Him : Volume One (2008), "I Thought I Saw Your Face Today".

• O-o-old habits die hard when you got, when you got a sentimental heart
  Piece of the puzzle, you're my missing part
  Oh what can you do with a sentimental heart?
  • Zooey Deschanel, She & Him : Volume One (2008), "Sentimental Heart".

• Love is not a feeling to pass away
  Like the balmy breath of a Summer's day.......
  Love is not a passion of earthly mould
  As a thirst for honour, or fame, or gold
  • Charles Dickens, From Lucy's Song in The Poems and Verses of Charles Dickens, Chapman & Hall, London 1903.

• [A] loving heart was better and stronger than wisdom...
  • Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850), Chapter 9. Often quoted as "A loving heart is the truest wisdom".

• It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.
  • Denis Diderot, Paradoxe sur le Comédien (1773 - 1777).

• Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone-but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
  • Bette Davis, U.S. screen actor. The Lonely Life, ch. 19 (1962).

• Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists. . . . When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.
  • Edmond de Goncourt (1822-96) and Jules de Goncourt (1830-70), French writers. The Goncourt Journals (1888-96; repr. in Pages from the Goncourt Journal, ed. by Robert Baldick, 1962), entry for 15 Nov. 1859.

• We are all born for love.
  It is the principle of existence and its only end.
  • Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil (1845), Book V, Chapter IV.

• The daily actions of religious people have accomplished uncounted good deeds throughout history, alleviating suffering, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick. Religions have brought the comfort of belonging and companionship to many who would otherwise have passed through this life all alone, without glory or adventure. They have not just provided first aid, in effect, for people in difficulties; they have provided the means for changing the world in ways that remove those difficulties. As Alan Wolfe says, "Religion can lead people out of cycles of poverty and dependency just as it led Moses out of Egypt". There is much for religion lovers to be proud of in their traditions, and much for all of us to be grateful for.

  The fact that so many people love their religions as much as, or more than, anything else in their lives is a weighty fact indeed. I am inclined to think that nothing could matter more than what people love. At any rate, I can think of no value that I would place higher. I would not want to live in a world without love. Would a world with peace, but without love, be a better world? Not if the peace was achieved by drugging the love (and hate) out of us, or by suppression. Would a world with justice and freedom, but without love, be a better world? Not if it was achieved by somehow turning us all into loveless law-abiders with none of the yearnings or envies or hatreds that are wellsprings of injustice and subjugation.

  It is hard to consider such hypotheticals, and I doubt if we should trust our first intuitions about them, but, for what it is worth, I surmise that we almost all want a world in which love, justice, freedom, and peace are all present, as much as possible, but if we had to give up one of these, it wouldn't — and shouldn't — be love. But, sad to say, even if it is true that nothing could matter more than love, it wouldn't follow from this that we don't have reason to question the things that we, and others, love. Love is blind, as they say, and because love is blind, it often leads to tragedy: to conflicts in which one love is pitted against another love, and something has to give, with suffering guaranteed in any resolution.

  • Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (2006).

• The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.
  • Benjamin Disraeli, Henrietta Temple (1837), Book 4, chapter 1. Often misquoted as "The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can never end".

• It is so important for us to have faith, trust, confidence in one another. It is the only way we can communicate. Without faith there is no communication, there is no love, or if there was a little love, it will die without hope, trust, and confidence. Even if it doesn't die right away, it will be so weak, so ill, and so tired that communication will be miserable as well.
  • Catherine Doherty, Poustinia (1975), Ch. 12.

• … What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
  • Dostoevsky, Fyodor M. (1999) [1880]. The Brothers Karamazov. Constance Garnett, translator. Signet Classic. pp. p. 312. ISBN 0451527348. 
  • Variant: Hell is the suffering of being unable to love.

• A purple robe he wore, o'erwrought with gold
  With the device of a great snake, whose breath
  Was a fiery flame: which when I did behold
  I fell a-weeping and I cried, "Sweet youth,
  Tell me why, sad and sighing, thou dost rove
  These pleasant realms? I pray thee speak me sooth
  What is thy name?" He said, "My name is Love."
  Then straight the first did turn himself to me
  And cried, "He lieth, for his name is Shame,
  But I am Love, and I was wont to be
  Alone in this fair garden, till he came
  Unasked by night; I am true Love, I fill
  The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame."
  Then sighing said the other, "Have thy will,
  "I am the Love that dare not speak its name."

• Lord Alfred Douglas from Two Loves (1894).

• Love is a passion
  Which kindles honor into noble acts.
  • John Dryden, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 392.

• Love taught him shame, and shame with love at strife
  Soon taught the sweet civilities of life.
  • John Dryden, Cymon and Iphigenia (1700), line 134.

• Pains of love be sweeter far
  Than all other pleasures are.
  • John Dryden, Tyrannick Love (1669), Act IV, scene i.

• For pity melts the mind to love.
  • John Dryden, Alexander’s Feast (1697), l. 96.

• Joy rul'd the day, and Love the night.
  • John Dryden, The Secular Masque (1700), Line 82.

• You can't be wise and in love at the same time.
  • Bob Dylan, No Direction Home (2005).

• "There are only four questions of value in life, Don Octavio: What is sacred? Of what is spirit made? What is worth living for? What is worth dying for? The answer to each is only love."
  • Don Juan, Don Juan DeMarco, (1995).

• "They were renewed by love. The heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other."
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and punishment (1866), chapter II.

• 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 Dostoevsky, The Idiot (1868).

• On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other sort of love. I want suffering in order to love. I long, I thirst, this very instant, to kiss with tears the earth that I have left, and I don't want, I won't accept life on any other!"
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), III.

• Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted — you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it's an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times — but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness — that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), V.

• If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a sinner even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God have pity upon you. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and cleanse not only your own sins but the sins of others.
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880), Book II, ch. 3 (trans. Constance Garnett).

• "It's just the same story as a doctor once told me," observed the elder. "He was a man getting on in years, and undoubtedly clever. He spoke as frankly as you, though in jest, in bitter jest. 'I love humanity,' he said, 'but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,' he said, 'I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he's too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.'"
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880), Book II, ch. 4 (trans. Constance Garnett).

• Brothers, have no fear of men's sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God's creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love all God's creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day, and you will come at last to love the world with an all-embracing love. Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and untroubled joy. So do not trouble it, do not harass them, do not deprive them of their joy, do not go against God's intent. Man, do not exhale yourself above the animals: they are without sin, while you in your majesty defile the earth by your appearance on it, and you leave the traces of your defilement behind you — alas, this is true of almost every one of us! Love children especially, for like the angels they too are sinless, and they live to soften and purify our hearts, and, as it were, to guide us. Woe to him who offends a child.
  My young brother asked even the birds to forgive him. It may sound absurd, but it is right none the less, for everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else: touch one place, and you set up a movement at the other end of the world. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but, then, it would be easier for the birds, and for the child, and for every animal if you were yourself more pleasant than you are now. Everything is like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds, too, consumed by a universal love, as though in ecstasy, and ask that they, too, should forgive your sin. Treasure this ecstasy, however absurd people may think it.
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880), Book VI, chapter 3: "Conversations and Exhortations of Father Zossima; Of Prayer, of Love, and of Contact with other Worlds" (translated by Constance Garnett).

• Fathers and teachers, I ponder, "What is hell?" I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
  • Dostoevsky (1999) [1880]. The Brothers Karamazov. Constance Garnett, translator. Signet Classic. pp. p. 312. ISBN 0451527348. 

• To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880).

• Love one another. My final lesson of history is the same as that of Jesus.
  You may think that's a lot of lollipop but just try it. Love is the most practical thing in the world. If you take an attitude of love toward everybody you meet, you'll eventually get along.
  • Will Durant, When asked, at the age of 92, if he could summarize the lessons of history into a single sentence. As quoted in "Durants on History from the Ages, with Love," by Pam Proctor, Parade (6 August 1978) p. 12. Durant is quoting Jesus (from John 13:34) here, and might also be quoting Jiddu Krishnamurti: "Love is the most practical thing in the world. To love, to be kind, not to be greedy, not to be ambitious, not to be influenced by people but to think for yourself — these are all very practical things, and they will bring about a practical, happy society."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Love is so exquisitely elusive. It cannot be bought, cannot be badgered, cannot be hijacked. It is available only in one rare form: as the natural response of a healthy mind and healthy heart.
  • Eknath Easwaran, Original goodness: On the beatitudes of the sermon on the mount (1989).

• To know me is to love me. This cliche is popular for a reason, because most of us, I imagine, believe deep in our hearts that if anyone truly got to know us, they'd truly get to love us - or at least know why we're the way we are. The problem in life, maybe the central problem, is that so few people ever seem to have sufficient curiosity to do the job on us that we know we deserve.
  • Roger Ebert, Review of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (25 May 1990).

• I was not, I lived and loved, I am not.
  • Eric Rücker Eddison, A Fish Dinner in Memison, published 1941.

• Love is no ingredient in a merely speculative faith, but it is the life and soul of a practical faith... A speculative faith consists only in the assent of the understanding, but in a saving faith there is also the consent of the heart.
  • Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits (1738).

• Love is the active, working principle in all true faith. It is its very soul, without which it is dead. "Faith works by love."
  • Jonathan Edwards, Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 396.

• Nothing truly valuable arises from ambition or from a mere sense of duty; it stems rather from love and devotion towards men and towards objective things.
  • Albert Einstein, Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann, Albert Einstein, The Human Side: New Glimpses From His Archives (1979), p. 46 - 30 July 47 - letter.

• Falling in love is not at all the most stupid thing that people do — but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.
  • Albert Einstein, Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann, Albert Einstein, The Human Side: New Glimpses From His Archives (1979), p. 56 - Jotted (in German) on the margins of a letter to him (1933).
  • Unsourced variants: Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love. / You can't blame gravity for falling in love.

• I believe that we don't need to worry about what happens after this life, as long as we do our duty here—to love and to serve.
  • Albert Einstein, as quoted by William Hermanns Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man (1983), p. 94.

• But is it what we love, or how we love,
  That makes true good?
  • George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Book I.

• 'Tis what I love determines how I love.
  • George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Book I.

• Women know no perfect love:
  Loving the strong, they can forsake the strong;
  Man clings because the being whom he loves
  Is weak and needs him.
  • George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Book III.

• I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.
  • George Eliot, Letter to Georgiana Burne-Jones, wife of the artist Edward Burne-Jones (1875).

• Affection is the broadest basis of a good life.
  • George Eliot, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 393.

• Lady of silences
  Calm and distressed
  Torn and most whole
  Rose of memory
  Rose of forgetfulness
  Exhausted and life-giving
  Worried reposeful
  The single Rose
  Is now the Garden
  Where all loves end
  Terminate torment
  Of love unsatisfied
  The greater torment
  Of love satisfied
  End of the endless
  Journey to no end
  Conclusion of all that
  Is inconclusible
  Speech without word and
  Word of no speech
  Grace to the Mother
  For the Garden
  Where all love ends.
  • T. S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday (1930).

• Can we only love
  Something created in our own imaginations?
  Are we all in fact unloving and unloveable?
  Then one is alone, and if one is alone
  Then lover and beloved are equally unreal
  And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams.
  • T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (1949).

• Desire itself is movement
  Not in itself desirable;
  Love is itself unmoving,
  Only the cause and end of movement,
  Timeless, and undesiring
  Except in the aspect of time
  Caught in the form of limitation
  Between un-being and being.
  • T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Burnt Norton (1935), (V).

• Love is most nearly itself
  When here and now cease to matter.
  Old men ought to be explorers
  Here or there does not matter
  We must be still and still moving
  Into another intensity
  For a further union, a deeper communion
  Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
  The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
  Of the petrel and the porpoise.
  • T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, East Coker (1940), (V).

• Who then devised the torment? Love.
  Love is the unfamiliar Name
  Behind the hands that wove
  The intolerable shirt of flame
  Which human power cannot remove.
  We only live, only suspire
  Consumed by either fire or fire. (IV)
  • T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets,Little Gidding (1942), (IV).

• Even as the Sun doth not wait for prayers and incantations to rise, but shines forth and is welcomed by all: so thou also wait not for clapping of hands and shouts and praise to do thy duty; nay, do good of thine own accord, and thou wilt be loved like the Sun.
  • Epictetus, Fragments, Fragment xxii.

• Let no man think that he is loved by any who loveth none.
  • Epictetus, Fragments, Fragment xxiii.

• L’expérience nous montre qu’aimer ce n’est point nous regarder l’un l’autre mais regarder ensemble dans la même direction. (Page 203)
  • Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. (Translated by Lewis Galantière in "Wind, Sand and Stars")
  • Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Terre des Hommes (1939), translated into English as Wind, Sand and Stars (1939).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Old sundial, you stand here for Time:
  For Love, the vine that round your base
  Its tendrils twines, and dares to climb
  And lay one flower-capped spray in grace
  Without the asking on your cold
  Unsmiling and unfrowning face.
  • Eleanor Farjeon, Pan-Worship and Other Poems (1908), Time And Love.

• Upon your shattered ruins where
  This vine will flourish still, as rare,
  As fresh, as fragrant as of old.
  Love will not crumble.
  • Eleanor Farjeon, Pan-Worship and Other Poems (1908), Time And Love.

• Dropt tears have hastened your decay
  And brought you one step nigher death;
  And you have heard, unthrilled, unmoved,
  The music of Love's golden breath
  And seen the light in eyes that loved.
  You think you hold the core and kernel
  Of all the world beneath your crust,
  Old dial? But when you lie in dust,
  This vine will bloom, strong, green, and proved.
  Love is eternal.
  • Eleanor Farjeon, Pan-Worship and Other Poems (1908), Time And Love.

• Every man's life (and … every woman's life), awaits the hour of blossoming that makes it immortal … love is a divinity above all accidents, and guards his own with extraordinary obstinacy.
  • Eleanor Farjeon, Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard‎ (1922).

• 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, Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard‎ (1922).

• I will fight for you, yes, and you will fight for me. And if you have sacrificed joy and courage and beauty and wisdom for my sake, I will give them all to you again; and yet you must also give them to me, for they are things in which without you I am wanting. But together we can make them.
  • Eleanor Farjeon, Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard‎ (1922).

• 'In love there are no penalties and no payments, and what is given is indistinguishable from what is received.' And he bent his head and kissed her long and deeply, and in that kiss neither knew themselves, or even each other, but something beyond all consciousness that was both of them.
  • Eleanor Farjeon, Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard‎ (1922).

• He loved her, both for her fault and her redemption of it, more than he had ever thought that he could love her; for he had believed that in their kiss love had reached its uttermost. But love has no uttermost, as the stars have no number and the sea no rest.
  • Eleanor Farjeon, Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard‎ (1922), p. 172.

• Women are so strangely constructed that they have in them darkness as well as light, though it be but a little curtain hung across the sun. And love is the hand that takes the curtain down, a stronger hand than fear, which hung it up. For all the ill that is in us comes from fear, and all the good from love.
  • Eleanor Farjeon, Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard‎ (1922), p. 174.

• Prometheus, I have no Titan's might,
  Yet I, too, must each dusk renew my heart,
  For daytime's vulture talons tear apart
  The tender alcoves built by love at night.
  • Philip José Farmer, "In Common" in Starlanes #14 (April 1954); re-published in Pearls From Peoria (2006).

• One thing is sure, O comrades, that the love
  That fights to keep us rooted in the earth,
  But also urges us to dare the stars,
  This irresistible, this ancient power
  Wedged in the soul, unshakable, is the light
  That burns our roots and leaves us free for Space.
  • Philip José Farmer, Sestina of the Space Rocket (1953), first published in Startling Stories (February 1953); re-published in Pearls From Peoria (2006).

• The way is open, comrades, free as Space
  Alone is free. The only gold is love,
  A coin that we have minted from the light
  Of others who have cared for us on Earth
  And who have deposited in us the power
  That nerves our nerves to seize the burning stars.
  • Philip José Farmer, Sestina of the Space Rocket (1953), first published in Startling Stories (February 1953); re-published in Pearls From Peoria (2006).

• Yes, we hope to seed a new, rich earth.
  We hope to breed a race of men whose power
  Dwells in hearts as open as all Space
  Itself, who ask for nothing but the light
  That rinses the heart of hate so that the stars
  Above will be below when man has Love.
  • Philip José Farmer, Sestina of the Space Rocket (1953), first published in Startling Stories (February 1953); re-published in Pearls From Peoria (2006).

• God, Whose hand holds stars, as we lump earth
  In our fingers, give us power, give us light
  To hold all love within our breast's small space.
  • Philip José Farmer, Sestina of the Space Rocket (1953), first published in Startling Stories (February 1953); re-published in Pearls From Peoria (2006).

• Tell your son to stop trying to fill your head with science — for to fill your heart with love is enough!
  • Richard Feynman, Note to the mother of Marcus Chown, who had admired the profile of Feynman presented in the BBC TV Horizon program "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" (1981). Written after Chown asked Feynman to write her a birthday note, hoping it would increase her interest in science.
  • Photo of note published in No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman (1996), by Christopher Sykes, page 161.
  • In a "Quantum theory via 40-tonne trucks", The Independent (17 January 2010), and in a audio interview on BBC 4 (September 2010), Chown recalled the note as: "Ignore your son's attempts to teach you physics. Physics is not the most important thing, love is."

• Just one step at a time
  And closer to destiny
  I knew at a glance
  There'd always be a chance for me
  With someone I could live for
  Nowhere I would rather be.
  Is your love strong enough
  Like a rock in the sea?
  Am I asking too much?
  Is your love strong enough?
  • "Is Your Love Strong Enough?" by Bryan Ferry (YouTube Video).

• At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), "The Diamond As Big As The Ritz".

• All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase— 'I love you.'
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald, Short Stories, The Offshore Pirate.

• I believe that a woman should love a man for what he is, not for what she wants him to be.
  • Weebo in film Flubber

• I wish I could take what I'm feeling right now and put it in the water system so everybody could drink it and we would all love each other.
  • Jamie Foxx, at the Golden Globes ceremony (2005).

• I love love
  I love being in love
  I don't care what it does to me
  • The Format, in "Inches and Failing".

• Masood, a young lady has fallen in love with me—at least so I judge from her letters. Awkward is it not—awkward and surprising. You would be flattered and twirl your moustache, but I am merely uncomfortable. I wish she would stop, as she is very nice, and I enjoyed being friends. What an ill constructed world this is! Love is always being given where it is not required.
  • E. M. Forster, Selected Letters: Letter 137, to Syed Ross Masood, 5 December 1914.

• En art comme en amour, l'instinct suffit.
  • In art as in love, instinct is enough.
    • Anatole France, Le Jardin d'Épicure [The Garden of Epicurus] (1894).

• Un conte sans amour est comme du boudin sans moutarde; c’est chose insipide.
  • A tale without love is like beef without mustard: insipid.
    • Anatole France, La Révolte des Anges [The Revolt of the Angels], (1914), ch. VIII.

• Les amants qui aiment bien n'écrivent pas leur bonheur.
  • Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.
    • Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881), La Bûche [The Log] (November 30, 1859).

• A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
  • Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946; 1959).

• If you would be loved, love and be lovable.
  • Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard (1755).

• How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.
  • Sigmund Freud in a letter to his fiancée Martha Bernays (27 June 1882); published in Letters of Sigmund Freud 1873-1939 (1961), 10-12.

• Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.
  • Sigmund Freud in a letter to Carl Jung (1906), as quoted in Freud and Man's Soul (1984) by Bruno Bettelheim

• ...three of life's most important areas: work, love, and taking responsibility.
  • Sigmund Freud in From The Wolf-man and Sigmund Freud Muriel Gardiner, p. 365 (cf. books.google.com).

• Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state — admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological — in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that "I" and "you" are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.
  • Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Ch. 1, as translated by Joan Riviere (1961).

• It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive manifestations of their aggressiveness.
  • Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Ch. 5, as translated by James Strachey and Anna Freud (1961).

• Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness. Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his individuality and uniqueness. To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibilty would be blind if they were not guided by the knowledge of the person's individuality.
  • Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (1947), Ch. 3
  • In Ch. 2 of his later work The Art of Loving (1956) a similar statement is made:

Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.

• Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. "Patriotism” is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by "patriotism” I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one’s own nation, which is the concern with the nation’s spiritual as much as with its material welfare — never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
  • Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955), Ch. 3: The Human Situation, Sect. C "Rootedness — Brotherliness vs. Incest”

• I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.
  • Erich Fromm, Art of Loving (1956).

• Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.
  • Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956).

• Only if he [man] develops his reason and his love, if he can experience the natural and the social world in a human way, can he feel at home, secure in himself, and the master of his life.
  • Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955), Ch. 4: Mental Health and Society, p. 68.

• Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.
  • Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955), Ch. 5: Man in Capitalistic Society, p. 147.

• It is considered immoral to keep one "love" partner beyond a relatively short period of time. "Love" is short-lived sexual desire, which must be satisfied immediately.
  • Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955), Ch. 4: Mental Health and Society, Ch. 5: Man in Capitalistic Society, p. 165.

• Envy, jealousy, ambition, any kind of greed are passions; love is an action, the practice of human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as a result of compulsion.
  Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a "standing in," not a "falling for." In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.
  • Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956), Ch. 1.

• Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."
  • Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956), Ch. 2.

• In spite of the universalistic spirit of the monotheistic Western religions and of the progressive political concepts that are expressed in the idea "that all men are created equal," love for mankind has not become a common experience. Love for mankind is looked upon as an achievement which, at best, follows love for an individual or as an abstract concept to be realized only in the future. But love for man cannot be separated from love for one individual. To love one person productively means to be related to his human core, to him as representing mankind. Love for one individual, in so far as it is divorced from love for man, can refer only to the superficial and to the accidental; of necessity it remains shallow.
  • Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956), Ch. 2.

• If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
  • Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956).

• The spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself sufficiently against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.
  • Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956).

• Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves. All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have become ends; man is an automaton — well fed, well clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function. If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place. The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serve it. He must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, share in profits. Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature.
  • Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956)
  • The portion of this statement, "Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence" has been widely quoted alone, resulting in a less reserved expression, and sometimes the portion following it has been as well: "Any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature."

• To speak of love is not "preaching," for the simple reason that it means to speak of the ultimate and real need of every human being. That this need has been obscured does not mean it does not exist. To analyze the nature of love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social conditions which are responsible for this absence. To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man.
  • Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956).

• I believe that love is the main key to open the doors to the "growth" of man. Love and union with someone or something outside of oneself, union that allows one to put oneself into relationship with others, to feel one with others, without limiting the sense of integrity and independence. Love is a productive orientation for which it is essential that there be present at the same time: concern, responsibility, and respect for and knowledge of the object of the union.
  I believe that the experience of love is the most human and humanizing act that it is given to man to enjoy and that it, like reason, makes no sense if conceived in a partial way.
  • Erich Fromm, Credo (1965).

• I believe that one can and must hope for a sane society that furthers man’s capacity to love his fellow men, to work and create, to develop his reason and his objectivity of a sense of himself that is based on the experience of his productive energy.
  I believe that one can and must hope for the collective regaining of a mental health that is characterized by the capacity to love and to create...
  • Erich Fromm, Credo (1965).

• 'Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
  • Robert Frost, as quoted in a review of A Swinger of Birches (1957) by Sydney Cox in Vermont History, Vol. 25 (1957), p. 355.

• Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it. Bitterness paralyzes life; love empowers it. Bitterness sours life; love sweetens it. Bitterness sickens life; love heals it. Bitterness blinds life; love anoints its eyes.
  • Harry Emerson Fosdick, Riverside Sermons (1958), p. 100.

• I got love, I got so much love, love in my heart, and this feeling I can't let it go.
  • Jonny 'Itch' Fox of The King Blues, in "I Got Love" from Save the World. Get the Girl (2008).

• I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge —
  That myth is more potent than history.
  I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts —
  That hope always triumphs over experience —
  That laughter is the only cure for grief.
  And I believe that love is stronger than death.
  • Robert Fulghum, "Credo" at his official website; this may be partly influenced by remarks of Albert Einstein in "What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck" The Saturday Evening Post (26 October 1929): I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

• 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.
  • Robert Fulghum, True Love (1998).

• Love the battle between chaos and imagination.
  Remember: Acting is living truthfully in imaginary circumstances.
  Remember: Acting is the way to live the greatest number of lives.
  Remember: Acting is the same as real life, lived intentionally.
  Never forget: The Fruit is out on the end of the limb. Go there.
  • Robert Fulghum, "Alice-Alice" in Third Wish (2006).

• Truth is cosmically total: synergetic. Verities are generalized principles stated in semimetaphorical terms. Verities are differentiable. But love is omniembracing, omnicoherent, and omni-inclusive, with no exceptions. Love, like synergetics, is nondifferentiable, i.e., is integral.
  • Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics : Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975) 1005.54.

• The highest of generalizations is the synergetic integration of truth and love.
  • Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics : Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975) 1005.56.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• It isn't enough to love people because they're good to you, or because in some way or other you're going to get something by it. We have to love because we love loving.
  • John Galsworthy, A Bit O' Love (1915).

• Only love makes fruitful the soul. The sense of form that both had in such high degree prevented much demonstration; but to be with him, do things for him, to admire, and credit him with perfection; and, since she could not exactly wear the same clothes or speak in the same clipped, quiet, decisive voice, to dislike the clothes and voices of other men — all this was precious to her beyond everything.
  • John Galsworthy, Beyond (1917).

• Love! Beyond measure — beyond death — it nearly kills. But one wouldn't have been without it.
  • John Galsworthy, Beyond (1917).

• Car, vois-tu, chaque jour je t'aime davantage,
  Aujourd'hui plus qu'hier et bien moins que demain.
  • For, you see, each day I love you more,
    Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.
  • Rosemonde Gérard, "L'éternelle chanson", IX, Les Pipeaux; in P. Dupré, Encyclopédie des Citations (1959), p. 176.

• Love has power that dispels Death; charm that conquers the enemy.
  • Khalil Gibran, "Peace", Tears and Laughter, trans. Anthony R. Ferris (1949), p. 30.

• Love is a universal migraine.
  A bright stain on the vision
  Blotting out reason.
  • Robert Graves, "Symptoms of Love," lines 1-3, from More Poems (1961).

• New beginnings and new shoots
  Spring again from hidden roots
  Pull or stab or cut or burn,
  Love must ever yet return.
  • Robert Graves, Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), "Marigolds".

• Lovers to-day and for all time
  Preserve the meaning of my rhyme:
  Love is not kindly nor yet grim
  But does to you as you to him.
  • Robert Graves, Country Sentiment (1920), "Advice To Lovers".

• Then all you lovers have good heed
  Vex not young Love in word or deed:
  Love never leaves an unpaid debt,
  He will not pardon nor forget.
  • Robert Graves, Country Sentiment (1920), "Advice To Lovers".

• Nothing is impossible for pure love.
  • Mahatma Gandhi, An Autobiography (1927), Part I, Chapter 4, Playing the Husband.

• When love beckons to you, follow him,
  Though his ways are hard and steep.
  • Khalil Gibran, in The Prophet (1923), chapter On Love, page 11.

• All these things shall love do unto you
  that you may know the secrets of your heart,
  and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.
  • Khalil Gibran, in The Prophet (1923), chapter On Love, page 12.

• Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love.
  • Khalil Gibran, in The Prophet (1923), chapter On Love, page 13.

• And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
  • Khalil Gibran, in The Prophet (1923), chapter On Love, page 13.

• Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
  But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
  To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
  To know the pain of too much tenderness.
  To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
  And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
  To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
  To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy; to return home at eventide with gratitude;
  And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.
  • Khalil Gibran, in The Prophet (1923), chapter On Love, page 13.

• Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
  Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
  Fill each other’s cup, but drink not from one cup.
  Give one another of your bread, but eat not from the same loaf.
  Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each of you be alone,
  Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

  Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
  For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
  And stand together yet not too near together:
  For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
  And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

  • Khalil Gibran, in The Prophet (1923), chapter On Marriage, page 15.

• And is not time even as love is, undivided and paceless?
  • Khalil Gibran, in The Prophet (1923), chapter On Time.

• He stood up and looked at me even as the seasons might look down upon the field, and He smiled. And He said again: "All men love you for themselves. I love you for yourself.
  • Khalil Gibran, Jesus, The Son of Man (1928).

• Love is a sacred mystery.
  To those who love, it remains forever wordless;
  But to those who do not love, it may be but a heartless jest.
  • Khalil Gibran, Jesus, The Son of Man (1928).

• Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.
  • Khalil Gibran, Chapter: Children of Gods, Scions of Apes in The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul (1994), Edited by Robin H. Waterfield, translated by Juan R. I. Cole.

• My Soul gave me good counsel, teaching me to love what the people abhor and to show good will toward the one they hate. It showed me that Love is a property not of the lover but of the beloved. Before my Soul taught me, Love was for me a delicate thread stretched between two adjacent pegs, but now it has been transformed into a halo; its first is its last, and its last is its first. It encompasses every being, slowly expanding to embrace all that ever will be.
  • Khalil Gibran, The Vision : Reflections on the Way of the Soul (1994) edited by Robin H. Waterfield, translated by Juan R. I. Cole.

• Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love.
  • Khalil Gibran, in The Prophet (1923).

• Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
  Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.
  • Emma Goldman, "Marriage and Love" in Anarchism and Other Essays (1911).

• The bashful virgin's sidelong looks of love.
  • Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770), line 29.

• How long will I love you?
  As long as stars are above you,
  And longer if I may
  • Ellie Goulding, How Long Will I Love You (10 November 2013) from the 2013 album Halcyon Days.

• Love is like a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the snow weasels come.
  • Matt Groening in the book, Love is Hell (1986).

• Che mai
  Non v'avere ò provate, ò possedute.

  Far worse it is
  To lose than never to have tasted bliss.

  • Giovanni Battista Guarini, Il pastor fido (1590).

• At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. Perhaps it is one of the great dramas of the leader that he or she must combine a passionate spirit with a cold intelligence and make painful decisions without flinching. Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, of the most sacred causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the level where ordinary people put their love into practice.
  The leaders of the revolution have children just beginning to talk, who are not learning to call their fathers by name; wives, from whom they have to be separated as part of the general sacrifice of their lives to bring the revolution to its fulfilment; the circle of their friends is limited strictly to the number of fellow revolutionists. There is no life outside of the revolution.
  In these circumstances one must have a great deal of humanity and a strong sense of justice and truth in order not to fall into extreme dogmatism and cold scholasticism, into isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.
  • Excerpts from the two paragraphs above have sometimes been quoted in abbreviated form: At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality... We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.
  • Variant translation: One must have a large dose of humanity, a large dose of a sense of justice and truth in order to avoid dogmatic extremes, cold scholasticism, or an isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity is transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.
  • Che Guevara, Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965), A letter to Carlos Quijano, editor of Marcha a radical weekly published in Montevideo, Uruguay; published as "From Algiers, for Marcha : The Cuban Revolution Today" (12 March 1965); also published in Verde Olivo, the magazine of the Cuban armed forces "Socialism and Man in Cuba" - Variant translation by Margarita Zimmermann

• Love of consciousness evokes the same in response
  Love of feeling evokes the opposite
  Love of body depends only on type and polarity.
  • G. I. Gurdjieff, All and Everything: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (1950).

• Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.
  • Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama in Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great Perfection (2004); also quoted in A Small Drop of Ink: A Collection of Inspirational and Moving Quotations of the Ages (2003) by Linda Pendleton.

• If there is love, there is hope that one may have real families, real brotherhood, real equanimity, real peace. If the love within your mind is lost and you see other beings as enemies, then no matter how much knowledge or education or material comfort you have, only suffering and confusion will ensue
  • Tenzin Gyatso, The Little Book of Buddhism (2000) ISBN 0712602402

 

 

 

 

 

• Your first love has no beginning or end. Your first love is not your first love, and it is not your last. It is just love. It is one with everything.
  • Nhat Hanh, Cultivating the Mind of Love (2005) Full Circle Publishing ISBN 81-216-0676-4

• Love is the capacity to take care, to protect, to nourish. If you are not capable of generating that kind of energy toward yourself — if you are not capable of taking care of yourself, of nourishing yourself, of protecting yourself — it is very difficult to take care of another person.
  • Nhat Hanh, Quoted on his official website (30 December 2008).

• I need your love
  I need your time
  When everything's wrong
  You make it right
  I feel so high
  I come alive
  I need to be free with you tonight
  I need your love
  • Calvin Harris feat. Ellie Goulding, I Need Your Love (2013) from the 2012 album 18 Months

• The principal difference between love and hate is that love is an irradiation, and hate is a concentration. Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred. All the fearful counterfeits of love — possessiveness, lust, vanity, jealousy — are closer to hate: they concentrate on the object, guard it, suck it dry.
  • Sydney J. Harris, Strictly Personal (1953), "Love and Its Loveless Counterfeits".

• Freud's prescription for personal happiness as consisting of work and love must be taken with the proviso that the work has to be loved, and the love has to be worked at.
  • Sydney J. Harris, Pieces of Eight (1982).

• When I'm not near the girl I love,
  I love the girl I'm near.
  • Yip Harburg, "When I'm Not Near the Girl I Love" in Finian's Rainbow (1946) - Tommy Steele version

• Love, whether newly-born or aroused from a death-like slumber, must always create a sunshine, filling the hearts so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter (1850), p. 153.

• Love is that 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.'"
  • Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961, 1991), chapter His Scandalous Career.

• Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy — in fact, they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other.
  • Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), chapter His Scandalous Career.

• The more you love, the more you can love — and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had time enough, he could love all of that majority who are decent and just.
  • Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973).

• Love, which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb.
  Love, which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom.
  Love, which is lust, is the Main of Desire.
  Love, which is lust, is the Centric Fire.
  So man and woman will keep their trust,
  Till the very Springs of the Sea run dust.
  Yea, each with the other will lose and win,
  Till the very Sides of the Grave fall in.
  For the strife of Love's the abysmal strife,
  And the word of Love is the Word of Life.
  And they that go with the Word unsaid,
  Though they seem of the living, are damned and dead.
  • William Ernest Henley, Hawthorn and Lavender (1901), XXI.

• The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved.
  • Matthew Henry in Commentary on the Whole Bible, Vol. 1, under Genesis 2:21. [3].

• Love your neighbor, yet pull not down your hedge.
  • George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum (1651).

• Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.
  • Hermann Hesse, Peter Camenzind (1904).

• That's the way it is when you love. It makes you suffer, and I have suffered much in the years since. But it matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die!
  • Hermann Hesse, Peter Camenzind (1904).

• Love does not entreat; or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.'
  • Hermann Hesse, Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth (1919), first published under the pseudonym "Emil Sinclair".

• Here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that Love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.
  • Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (1922).

• If I know what love is, it is because of you.
  • Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund (1930).

• Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.
  • Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund (1930).

• The love that gushes for all is the real elixir of life — the fountain of bodily longevity. It is the lack of this that always produces the feeling of age.
  • Josiah Gilbert Holland, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 393.

• The most beautiful sight this earth affords is a man or woman so filled with love that duty is only a name, and its performance the natural outflow and expression of the love which has become the central principle of their life.
  • Josiah Gilbert Holland, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 394.

• Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear. How terrible is the one fact of beauty!
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., A Mortal Antipathy (1885) This statement is often misquoted as "Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness".

• Love is the irreconcilable foe of the prevailing rationality, for lovers preserve and protect neither themselves nor the collectivity. They throw themselves away; that is why wrath is heaped upon them. Romeo and Juliet died in conflict with society for that which was heralded by this society. In unreasonably surrendering themselves to one another they sustained the freedom of the individual as against the dominion of the world of things.
  • Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1982), p. 43

• Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.
  • Jean Valjean in Les Misérables (1862) by Victor Hugo, Book IX - Supreme Shadow, Supreme Dawn, Ch. V - Night Behind Which Is Dawn.

• Aimer, c'est agir
  • To love is to act
    • Victor Hugo, Last words of his diary, written two weeks before his death. Victor Hugo complete writings, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, editor, 1970.

 

• Hold the person that you love closely if they're next to you, the one you love, not the person that'll simply have sex with you.
  • Immortal Technique, "You Never Know", Revolutionary Vol. 2 (2003).

• Love is the only bow on Life's dark cloud. It is the morning and the evening star. It shines upon the babe, and sheds its radiance on the quiet tomb. It is the mother of art, inspirer of poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart — builder of every home, kindler of every fire on every hearth. It was the first to dream of immortality. It fills the world with melody — for music is the voice of love. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to Joy, and makes royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods.
  • Robert G. Ingersoll, Orthodoxy, Works, Vol. II (1884), p. 420.

• Love is natural. Back of all ceremony burns and will forever burn the sacred flame. There has been no time in the world's history when that torch was extinguished. In all ages, in all climes, among all people, there has been true, pure, and unselfish love.
  • The Writings of Robert G. Ingersoll (1900), Dresden Edition, publishing house: C.P. Farrell, chapter: Is Divorce Wrong (1889), page 426

 

 

 

 

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• Eja, Mater, fons amoris,
  me sentire vim doloris
    fac, ut tecum lugeam;
  Fac, ut ardeat cor meum
  in amando Christum Deum,
    ut sibi complaceam.
  • O Mother, fountain of love,
    make me feel the power of sorrow,
    that I may grieve with you
    Grant that my heart may burn
    in the love of Christ my Lord,
    that I may greatly please Him.
  • Stabat Mater, authorship unknown, variously attributed to Jacopone da Todi and to Pope Innocent III.

• Better get ready gonna see the light
  Love, love is the answer and that's all right
  So don't you give up now so easy to find
  Just look to your soul and open your mind
  • Tommy James, Eddie Gray and Mike Vale, Crystal Blue Persuasion (1969).

• Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.
  • William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 1 : The Scope of Psychology.

• If you say that this is absurd, that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such person know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically absurd.
  • William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals, 1911.

• Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
  • Jesus Christ in Matthew 6:21

• Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
  • Jesus Christ in Matthew 22:37-40

• Because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.
  • Jesus Christ in Matthew 24:5

• I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
  • Jesus Christ in Matthew 5:44-45

• But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for He is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.
  • Jesus Christ in Luke 6:34–35

• A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.
  • Jesus Christ, in John 13:34-35

• My Father is glorified in this, that you keep bearing much fruit and prove yourselves my disciples. Just as the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; remain in my love. If you observe my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have observed the commandments of the Father and remain in his love. “These things I have spoken to you, so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be made full. This is my commandment, that you love one another just as I have loved you. No one has love greater than this, that someone should surrender his life in behalf of his friends. You are my friends if you do what I am commanding you. I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master does. But I have called you friends, because I have made known to you all the things I have heard from my Father.
  • 15:8-15, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures

• Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
  • Jesus Christ, in John 15:13

• So I tell you this. Her many sins have been forgiven. She has loved a lot. But the one who has been forgiven little loves only a little.
  • Jesus Christ, from Parable of the Two Debtors in Luke 7:47

• Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
  • Steve Jobs, Stanford University commencement address (12 June 2005).

• Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.
  • Steve Jobs, Stanford University commencement address (12 June 2005).

• At the evening of life, we shall be judged on our love.
  • John of the Cross, reported in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2002), p. 231.

• In search of my Love
  I will go over mountains and strands;
  I will gather no flowers,
  I will fear no wild beasts;
  And pass by the mighty and the frontiers.
  • John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom, stanza 3

My sole occupation is love.

• • John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom, stanza 28.

• I have said that God is pleased with nothing but love; but before I explain this, it will be as well to set forth the grounds on which the assertion rests. All our works, and all our labours, how grand soever they may be, are nothing in the sight of God, for we can give Him nothing, neither can we by them fulfil His desire, which is the growth of our soul. As to Himself He desires nothing of this, for He has need of nothing, and so, if He is pleased with anything it is with the growth of the soul; and as there is no way in which the soul can grow but in becoming in a manner equal to Him, for this reason only is He pleased with our love. It is the property of love to place him who loves on an equality with the object of his love. Hence the soul, because of its perfect love, is called the bride of the Son of God, which signifies equality with Him. In this equality and friendship all things are common, as the Bridegroom Himself said to His disciples: I have called you friends, because all things, whatsoever I have heard of my Father, I have made known to you.
  • John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom, Notes to the Stanzas, Note to Stanza 27.

• My sole occupation is love.
  All my occupation now is the practice of the love of God, all the powers of soul and body, memory, understanding, and will, interior and exterior senses, the desires of spirit and of sense, all work in and by love. All I do is done in love; all I suffer, I suffer in the sweetness of love.
  • John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom, Notes to the Stanzas, Explanation of Stanza 28 part 8.

• There is nothing better or more necessary than love.
  • John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom, Notes to the Stanzas, Note to Stanza, 28 part 1.

• When the soul, then, in any degree possesses the spirit of solitary love, we must not interfere with it. We should inflict a grievous wrong upon it, and upon the Church also, if we were to occupy it, were it only for a moment, in exterior or active duties, however important they might be. When God Himself adjures all not to waken it from its love, who shall venture to do so, and be blameless? In a word, it is for this love that we are all created. Let those men of zeal, who think by their preaching and exterior works to convert the world, consider that they would be much more edifying to the Church, and more pleasing unto God — setting aside the good example they would give if they would spend at least one half their time in prayer, even though they may have not attained to the state of unitive love.
  • John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom, Notes to the Stanzas, Note to Stanza 28 part 3.

• Love consists not in feeling great things but in having great detachment and in suffering for the Beloved.
  • John of the Cross, The Sayings of Light and Love, Dichos de Luz y Amor, as translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (1991).

• No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
  • John the Evangelist, in 1 John 4:12

• There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.
  • John the Evangelist, in 1 John 4:18

• She's the goddess of all things sweaty and sticky.
  • Arthur M. Jolly Cupid (referring to Venus) in The Waiting Room of the Gods (2009).

• Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. . . . It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more.
  • Erica Jong in How to Save Your Own Life (1977).

• Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul.
  • Notes (1913) made by James Joyce, for his play Exiles.

• One of his sentences, written two months after his last interview with Mrs. Sinico, read: Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.
  • James Joyce, Dubliners (1914), chapter "A Painful Case".

• Love loves to love love.
  • James Joyce, Ulysses (1946), ch. 12: Cyclops, p. 327.

• He that made all things for love, by the same love keepeth them, and shall keep them without end.
  • Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Ch. 8.

• Love was without beginning, is, and shall be without ending.
  • Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Ch. 22.

• Peace and love are ever in us, being and working; but we be not alway in peace and in love.
  • Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Ch. 39.

• We give our intent to love and meekness, by the working of mercy and grace we are made all fair and clean.
  • Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Ch. 40.

• Truth seeth God, and Wisdom beholdeth God, and of these two cometh the third: that is, a holy marvellous delight in God; which is Love. Where Truth and Wisdom are verily, there is Love verily, coming of them both. And all of God’s making: for He is endless sovereign Truth, endless sovereign Wisdom, endless sovereign Love, unmade; and man’s Soul is a creature in God which hath the same properties made, and evermore it doeth that it was made for: it seeth God, it beholdeth God, and it loveth God. Whereof God enjoyeth in the creature; and the creature in God, endlessly marvelling.
  In which marvelling he seeth his God, his Lord, his Maker so high, so great, and so good, in comparison with him that is made, that scarcely the creature seemeth ought to the self. But the clarity and the clearness of Truth and Wisdom maketh him to see and to bear witness that he is made for Love, in which God endlessly keepeth him.
  • Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Ch. 44.

• The ground of mercy is love, and the working of mercy is our keeping in love. And this was shewed in such manner that I could not have perceived of the part of mercy but as it were alone in love; that is to say, as to my sight.
  • Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Ch. 48.

• Mercy is a sweet gracious working in love, mingled with plenteous pity: for mercy worketh in keeping us, and mercy worketh turning to us all things to good. Mercy, by love, suffereth us to fail in measure and in as much as we fail, in so much we fall; and in as much as we fall, in so much we die: for it needs must be that we die in so much as we fail of the sight and feeling of God that is our life. Our failing is dreadful, our falling is shameful, and our dying is sorrowful: but in all this the sweet eye of pity and love is lifted never off us, nor the working of mercy ceaseth.
  For I beheld the property of mercy, and I beheld the property of grace: which have two manners of working in one love.
  • Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Ch. 48.

• Our life is all grounded and rooted in love, and without love we may not live.
  • Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Ch. 48.

• Love and Dread are brethren, and they are rooted in us by the Goodness of our Maker, and they shall never be taken from us without end. We have of nature to love and we have of grace to love: and we have of nature to dread and we have of grace to dread.
  • Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Ch. 70.

• All that is contrary to love and peace is of the Fiend and of his part.
  • Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Ch. 77.

• Where I say that He abideth sorrowfully and moaning, it meaneth all the true feeling that we have in our self, in contrition and compassion, and all sorrowing and moaning that we are not oned with our Lord. And all such that is speedful, it is Christ in us. And though some of us feel it seldom, it passeth never from Christ till what time He hath brought us out of all our woe. For love suffereth never to be without pity.
  • Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Ch. 80.

• If any such lover be in earth which is continually kept from falling, I know it not: for it was not shewed me. But this was shewed: that in falling and in rising we are ever preciously kept in one Love.
  • Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Ch. 82.

• Charity keepeth us in Faith and Hope, and Hope leadeth us in Charity. And in the end all shall be Charity.
  • Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Ch. 84.

• Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same. But thou shalt never know nor learn therein other thing without end. Thus was I learned that Love was our Lord’s meaning.
  • Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Ch. 84.

• I saw full surely that ere God made us He loved us; which love was never slacked, nor ever shall be. And in this love He hath done all His works; and in this love He hath made all things profitable to us; and in this love our life is everlasting. In our making we had beginning; but the love wherein He made us was in Him from without beginning: in which love we have our beginning. And all this shall we see in God, without end.
  • Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), Ch. 86.

• Wo die Liebe herrscht, da gibt es keinen machtwillen, und wo die macht den vorrang hat, da fehlt die Liebe. Das eine ist der Schatten des andern.
  • Translation: Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
  • Carl Jung, The Psychology of the Unconscious (1943), P. 97

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• You are what you love, not what loves you.
  • "Donald Kaufman" (Nicolas Cage) in Adaptation (2001 film).

• The heart unites whatever the mind separates, pushes on beyond the arena of necessity and transmutes the struggle into love.
  • Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God (1923), "Italy", Ch. 18, p. 182.

• I possess no weapon but love. With that I have come to do battle. Help me!
  • Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (1951), p. 249.

• I said only one word, brought only one message: Love. Love — nothing else.
  • Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (1951), p. 478.

• When I have fears that I may cease to be
  Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
  Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
  Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
  When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
  Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
  And think that I may never live to trace
  Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
  And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
  That I shall never look upon thee more,
  Never have relish in the faery power
  Of unreflecting love! — then on the shore
  Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
  Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
  • John Keats, "When I have fears that I may cease to be" (1817).

• A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
  Its loveliness increases; it will never
  Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
  A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
  Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
  • John Keats, Endymion (1818), Bk. I, l. 1.

• Ghosts of melodious prophesyings rave
  Round every spot where trod Apollo's foot;
  Bronze clarions awake, and faintly bruit,
  Where long ago a giant battle was;
  And, from the turf, a lullaby doth pass
  In every place where infant Orpheus slept.
  Feel we these things? — that moment have we stept
  Into a sort of oneness, and our state
  Is like a floating spirit's. But there are
  Richer entanglements, enthralments far
  More self-destroying, leading, by degrees,
  To the chief intensity: the crown of these
  Is made of love and friendship, and sits high
  Upon the forehead of humanity.
  • John Keats, Endymion (1818), Bk. I, l. 789.

• Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
  Is — Love, forgive us! — cinders, ashes, dust.
  • John Keats, Poems (1820), "Lamia", Pt. II, l. 1.

• And there shall be for thee all soft delight
  That shadowy thought can win,
  A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
  To let the warm Love in!
  • John Keats, Poems (1820), "Ode to Psyche", st. 5.

• Ruth is so loyal and gentle-hearted, we cannot help loving her, as she stands with the reapers amid the waving corn. Her beautiful, unselfish spirit shines out like a bright star in the night of a dark and cruel age. Love like Ruth's, love which can rise above conflicting creeds and deep-seated racial prejudices, is hard to find in all the world.
  • Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (1903), Ch. 21.

• The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched, but just felt in the heart.
  • Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (1905), p. 203.

• Why only hate? Where does love remain? Or at least a little decency toward other people?
  • Friedrich Kellner, diary entry (30 March 1940).

• Love feels no burden, regards not labors, strives toward more than it attains, argues not of impossibility, since it believes that it may and can do all things. Therefore it avails for all things, and fulfils and accomplishes much where one not a lover falls and lies helpless.
  • Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471), in The Imitation of Christ, pt. 3, ch. 6 (1471).

• Love will come find you
  Just to remind you
  Of who you are
  [...] See that's the thing about love
  [...] Then life
  It will embrace you
  Totally amaze you
  So you don't give up
  • Alicia Keys, The Thing About Love from the 2007 album As I Am

• Baby lets go have that wreckless love, that crazy love
  That off the wall, wont stop till I get enough kind of love
  I need that love
  
  So baby lets go have that wreckless love, that crazy love
  That I dont really care we can have it anywhere kind of love
  That wreckless love
  • Alicia Keys, Wreckless Love from the 2007 album As I Am

• Our souls are brought together so that we could love each other.
  • Alicia Keys, We Are Here (15 September 2014).

• Love is a word, what matters is the connection that word implies.
  • Rama Chandra (Bernard White), The Matrix Revolutions.

• Ah Love! could you and I with him conspire
  To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire
  Would we not shatter it to bits—and then
  Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire?
  • Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1120), Stanza IX. FitzGerald's Trans.

• The resolving of the ethical, is freedom; the negative resolution also has this, but the freedom, blank and bare, is as if tongue-tied, hard to express, and generally has something hard in its nature. Falling in love, however, promptly sets it to music, even if this composition contains a very difficult passage.
  • Soren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way, Hong p. 111.

• When one has once fully entered the realm of Love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for Love.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (1847).

• In order to eliminate misunderstandings, the main point is that marriage is a τέλος, yet not for nature’s striving so that we touch on the meaning of the τέλος in the mysteries, but for the individuality. But if it is a τέλος, it is not something immediate but an act of freedom, and belonging under freedom as it does, the task is actualized only through a resolution. Erotic love or falling in love is altogether immediate; marriage is a resolution; yet falling in love must be taken up into marriage or into the resolution; to will to marry-that is the most immediate of all immediacies must also be the freest resolution, that which is so inexplicable in its immediacy that it must be attributed to a deity must also come about by virtue of deliberation, and such exhaustive deliberation that from it a resolution results. Furthermore, the one must not follow the other; the resolution must not come slinking along behind but must occur simultaneously; both parts must be present in the moment of decision. If deliberation has not exhausted thought, then I make no resolution; I act either on inspiration or on the basis of a whim.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Stages On Life's Way, 1845, Hong p. 101-102.

• The eternal fears no future, hopes for no future, but love possesses everything without ceasing, and there is no shadow of variation. As soon as he returns to himself, he understands this no more. He understands what bitter experiences have only all too unforgettably inculcated, the self-accusation, if the past has the kind of claim upon his soul that no repentance can entirely redeem, no trusting in God can entirely wipe out, but only God himself in the inexpressible silence of beatitude. The more of the past a person’s soul can still keep when he is left to himself, the more profound he is.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Four Upbuilding Discourses, 1844 p. 338 (Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses).

• Above all do not forget your duty to love yourself.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Letter to Hans Peter, Kierkegaard's cousin (1848).

• Oh, can I really believe the poet's tales, that when one first sees the object of one's love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual. … it seems to me that I should have to possess the beauty of all girls in order to draw out a beauty equal to yours; that I should have to circumnavigate the world in order to find the place I lack and which the deepest mystery of my whole being points towards, and at the next moment you are so near to me, filling my spirit so powerfully that I am transfigured for myself, and feel that it's good to be here.
  • ** Søren Kierkegaard, On Regine Olsen, (2 February 1839).

• What is it that makes a person great, admired by creation, well pleasing in the eyes of God? What is it that makes a person strong, stronger than the whole world; what is it that makes him weak, weaker than a child? What is it that makes a person unwavering, unwavering as a rock; what is it that makes him soft, softer than wax? –It is love! What is it that is older than everything? It is love. What is it that outlives everything? It is love. What is it that cannot be taken but itself takes all? It is love. What is it that cannot be given but itself gives all? It is love. What is it that perseveres when everything falls away? It is love. What is it that comforts when all comfort fails? It is love. What is it that endures when everything is changed? It is love. What is it that remains when the imperfect is abolished? It is love. What is it that witnesses when prophecy is silent? It is love. What is it that does not cease when the vision ends? It is love. What is it that sheds light when the dark saying ends? It is love. What is it that gives blessing to the abundance of the gift? It is love. What is it that gives pith to the angel’s words? It is love. What is it that makes the widow’s gift an abundance? It is love. What is it that turns the words of the simple person into wisdom? It is love. What is it that is never changed even though everything is changed? It is love; and that alone is love, that which never becomes something else. It is love!
  • Søren Kierkegaard,Three Upbuilding Discourses, Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins, p. 55.

• What is it that is never changed even though everything is changed? It is love. And only that which never becomes something else is love, that which gives away everything and for that reason demands nothing, that which demands nothing and therefore has nothing to lose, that which blesses and blesses when it is cursed, that which loves its neighbor but whose enemy is also its neighbor, that which leaves revenge to the Lord because it takes comfort in the thought that he is even more merciful.
  • Søren Kierkegaard,Three Upbuilding Discourses, Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins, p. 57.

• When love lives in the heart, the eye is shut and does not discover the open act of sin, to say nothing of the concealed act … When love lives in the heart, the ear is shut and does not hear what the world says, does not hear the bitterness of blasphemy, because he who says, “you fool”, to his brother is guilty before the council, but he who hears it when it is said to him is not perfect in love. … When rashness lives in the heart, a person is quick to discover the multiplicity of sin, then he understands splendidly a fragmentary utterance, hastily comprehends at a distance something scarcely enunciated. When love lives in the heart, a person understands slowly and does not hear at all words said in haste and does not understand them when repeated because he assigns them good position and a good meaning. He does not understand a long angry and insulting verbal assault, because he is waiting for one more word that will give it meaning. When fear lives in the heart, a person easily discovers the multiplicity of sin, discovers deceit and delusion and disloyalty and scheming, discovers that; Every heart is a net, Every rogue like a child, Every promise like a shadow. But the love that hides a multitude of sins is never deceived.
  • Søren Kierkegaard,Three Upbuilding Discourses, Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins, p. 60-61.

• When stinginess lives in the heart, when one gives with one eye and looks with seven to see what one obtains in return one readily discovers the multiplicity of sin. But when love lives in the heart, then the eye is never deceived, because when love gives, it does not watch the gift but keeps its eye on the Lord. When envy lives in the heart, the eye has the power to elicit the impure even from the pure; but when love lives in the heart, the eye has the power to love forth the good in the impure, but his eye sees not the impure but the pure, which it loves, and loves forth by loving it. Yes, there is a power in this world that in its language translates good into evil, but there is power from above that translates evil into good-it is the love that hides a multitude of sins. … When hate lives in the heart, sin is right there at the door of a human being, and the multitude of its cravings is present to him. But when love lives in the heart, then sin flees far away and he does not even catch a glimpse of it.
  • Søren Kierkegaard,Three Upbuilding Discourses, Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins, p. 61.

• But with love it is most joyous of all. For there is a love, that blazes up and is forgotten; there is a love that unites and divides -- a love until death. But then -- in death, in death’s decision, there is born a love that does not flame up, that is not equivocal, that is not -- until death, but beyond death, a love that endures. In this love under the pain of the wish, the sufferer is committed to the Good. Oh, you sufferer, whoever you may be, will you then with doubleness of mind seek the relief that temporal existence can give, the relief that permits you to forget your suffering (yes, so you think) but rather that allows you to forget the Eternal! Will you in doubleness of mind despair, because all is lost (yes, so you think) yet with the Eternal all is to be won! Will you in doubleness of mind despair? Have you considered what it is to despair? Alas, it is to deny that God is love! Think that over properly, one who despairs abandons himself (yes, so you think); nay, he abandons God! Oh, weary not your soul with that which is passing and with momentary relief. Grieve not your spirit with forms of comfort which this world affords. Do not in suicidal fashion murder the wish; but rather win the highest by hope, by faith, by love -- as the mightiest of all are able to do: commit yourself to the Good!
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (1847), Steere p. 149-151.

• Every human being can come to know everything about love, just as every human being can come to know that he, like every human being, is loved by God. Some find this thought adequate for the longest life others find this thought so insignificant ...
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (1847), Hong 1995 Princeton University Press p. 364.

• The intoxication of self-feeling is the most intense, and the height of this intoxication is most admired. Love and friendship are the very height of self-feeling, the I intoxicated in the other-I. The more securely the two I's come together to become one I, the more this united I selfishly cuts itself off from all others.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (1847).

• Perfection in the object is not perfection in the love. Erotic love is determined by the object; friendship is determined by the object; only love of one’s neighbor is determined by love. Therefore genuine love is recognizable by this, that its object is without any of the more definite qualifications of difference, which means that this love is recognizable only by love.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (1847).

• Someone absolutely in love does not know whether he is more in love or less in love than others, because anyone who knows that is definitely not absolutely in love. Neither does he know that he is the only person who has truly been in love, because if he knew that, he would not be absolutely in love-and yet he knows that a third party cannot understand him, because a third party will understand him generally in relation to an object of passion but not in relation to the absoluteness of passion.
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments P. 509.

• It will be easy for us once we receive the ball of yarn from Ariadne (love) and then go through all the mazes of the labyrinth (life) and kill the monster. But how many are there who plunge into life (the labyrinth) without taking that precaution?
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Journal entry, August 1, 1835.

• For, once he thrilled with high romance
  And tuned to love his eager voice.
  Like any cavalier of France
  He wooed the maiden of his choice.
  And now deep in his weary heart
  Are sacred flames that whitely burn.
  He has of Heaven's grace a part
  Who loves, who is beloved in turn.
  • Joyce Kilmer, Trees and Other Poems (1914), Delicatessen.

• The song within your heart could never rise
  Until love bade it spread its wings and soar.
  • Joyce Kilmer, Main Street and Other Poems (1917), In Memory.

• Love is made out of ecstasy and wonder;
  Love is a poignant and accustomed pain.
  It is a burst of Heaven-shaking thunder;
  It is a linnet's fluting after rain.
  • Joyce Kilmer, Main Street and Other Poems (1917), In Memory.

• Tonight You're mine completely,
  You give your love so sweetly
  Tonight the light of love is in your eyes,
  But will you love me tomorrow?
  • Carole King, Will You Love Me Tomorrow (1961).

• I'd like to know that your love
  Is love I can be sure of,
  So tell me now and I won't ask again,
  Will you still love me tomorrow?
  • Carole King, Will You Love Me Tomorrow (1961).

• You've got to get up every morning with a smile on your face
  And show the world all the love in your heart
  The people gonna treat you better,
  You're gonna find, yes you will,
  That you're beautiful as you feel.
  • Carole King, Tapestry (1971), Beautiful

• If there's any answer, maybe love can end the madness
  Maybe not, oh, but we can only try.
  • Carole King, Tapestry (1971), Beautiful

• We must meet hate with love. We must meet physical force with soul force. There is still a voice crying out through the vista of time, saying: "Love your enemies , bless them that curse you , pray for them that despitefully use you." Then, and only then, can you matriculate into the university of eternal life. That same voice cries out in terms lifted to cosmic proportions: "He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword." And history is replete with the bleached bones of nations that failed to follow this command. We must follow nonviolence and love.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., “Give Us the Ballot” Address (1957) Delivered at the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom (Call to Conscience) Washington, D.C.

• Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., in "Loving Your Enemies" Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, (17 November 1957).

• But there is another way. And that is to organize mass non-violent resistance based on the principle of love. It seems to me that this is the only way as our eyes look to the future. As we look out across the years and across the generations, let us develop and move right here. We must discover the power of love, the power, the redemptive power of love. And when we discover that we will be able to make of this old world a new world. We will be able to make men better. Love is the only way.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., Loving Your Enemies (November 1957), Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, on 17 November 1957.

• Agape is something of the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love; it’s what theologians would call the love of God working in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are likeable, but because God loves them.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., in "Loving Your Enemies" Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, (17 November 1957).

• Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Love your enemy." This is the way to do it. When the opportunity presents itself when you can defeat your enemy, you must not do it.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., in "Loving Your Enemies" Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, (17 November 1957).

• There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963).

• Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love (1963), Last paragraph of section III of Antidotes for fear, page 122 (see link at top of the section).

• We can no longer afford to worship the God of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. Love is the key to the solution of the problems of the world.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Nobel Lecture, delivered in the Auditorium of the University of Oslo at (11 December 1964).

• Love is basic for the very survival of mankind. I’m convinced that love is the only absolute ultimately; love is the highest good. He who loves has somehow discovered the meaning of ultimate reality. He who hates does not know God; he who hates has no knowledge of God. Love is the supreme unifying principle of life.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., Keep Moving From This Mountain, Sermon at Temple Israel of Hollywood (25 February 1965).

• When love leaves the world, all hearts are still. Tell them of my love and tell them of my pain and tell them of my hope, which still lives. For this is all I have and all I am and all I ask.
  • Stephen King, The Dark Tower Vol I: The Gunslinger

• But I believe in love, you know; love is a uniquely portable magic. I don’t think it’s in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind and heart to heart.
  • Stephen King, 11/22/63 Chapter Final Notes, page 1030

• It's love that holds it all together...it's love thats holding back the weather and the same will let it go.
  • King's X, "It's Love".

• It takes a great deal of Christianity to wipe out uncivilized Eastern instincts, such as falling in love at first sight.
  • Rudyard Kipling, Lispeth in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888).

• The heart of a man to the heart of a maid—
  Light of my tents, be fleet—
  Morning awaits at the end of the world,
  And the world is all at our feet.
  • Rudyard Kipling, The Gypsy Trail (1892).

• The white moth to the closing vine,
  The bee to the open clover,
  And the Gypsy blood to the Gypsy blood
  Ever the wide world over.
  • Rudyard Kipling, The Gypsy Trail (1892).

• The wild hawk to the wind-swept sky
  The deer to the wholesome wold;
  And the heart of a man to the heart of a maid,
  As it was in the days of old.
  • Rudyard Kipling, The Gypsy Trail (1892).

• Feelings of love and gratitude arise directly and spontaneously in the baby in response to the love and care of his mother.
  • Melanie Klein (1937, p. 311) as cited in: David Mann (2013) Love and Hate: Psychoanalytic Perspectives. p. 79.

• Agape's object is always the concrete individual, not some abstraction called humanity. Love of humanity is easy because humanity does not surprise you with inconvenient demands. You never find humanity on your doorstep, stinking and begging.
  • Peter Kreeft, Fundamentals of the Faith: Essays in Christian Apologetics, II.A.30: "Love" [4].

• What brings understanding is love. When your heart is full, then you will listen to the teacher, to the beggar, to the laughter of children, to the rainbow, and to the sorrow of man. Under every stone and leaf, that which is eternal exists. But we do not know how to look for it. Our minds and hearts are filled with other things than understanding of "what is". Love and mercy, kindliness and generosity do not cause enmity. When you love, you are very near truth. For, love makes for sensitivity, for vulnerability. That which is sensitive is capable of renewal. Then truth will come into being. It cannot come if your mind and heart are burdened, heavy with ignorance and animosity.
  • Jiddu Krishnamurti, "Ninth Talk in Bombay, (14 March 1948), J.Krishnamurti Online, JKO Serial No. BO48Q1, published in The Collected Works, Vol. IV, p. 200.

• Learning in the true sense of the word is possible only in that state of attention, in which there is no outer or inner compulsion. Right thinking can come about only when the mind is not enslaved by tradition and memory. It is attention that allows silence to come upon the mind, which is the opening of the door to creation. That is why attention is of the highest importance. Knowledge is necessary at the functional level as a means of cultivating the mind, and not as an end in itself. We are concerned, not with the development of just one capacity, such as that of a mathematician, or a scientist, or a musician, but with the total development of the student as a human being. How is the state of attention to be brought about? It cannot be cultivated through persuasion, comparison, reward or punishment, all of which are forms of coercion. The elimination of fear is the beginning of attention. Fear must exist as long as there is an urge to be or to become, which is the pursuit of success, with all its frustrations and tortuous contradictions. You can teach concentration, but attention cannot be taught just as you cannot possibly teach freedom from fear; but we can begin to discover the causes that produce fear, and in understanding these causes there is the elimination of fear. So attention arises spontaneously when around the student there is an atmosphere of well-being, when he has the feeling of being secure, of being at ease, and is aware of the disinterested action that comes with love. Love does not compare, and so the envy and torture of "becoming" cease.
  • Jiddu Krishnamurti, "Life Ahead : On Learning and the Search for Meaning" (1963), Introduction, J.Krishnamurti Online, JKO Serial No. 261, p. 13, 2005 edition ISBN 978-1577315179

• You know, actually we have no love — that is a terrible thing to realize. Actually we have no love; we have sentiment; we have emotionality, sensuality, sexuality; we have remembrances of something which we have thought as love. But actually, brutally, we have no love. Because to have love means no violence, no fear, no competition, no ambition. If you had love you will never say, "This is my family." You may have a family and give them the best you can; but it will not be "your family" which is opposed to the world. If you love, if there is love, there is peace. If you loved, you would educate your child not to be a nationalist, not to have only a technical job and look after his own petty little affairs; you would have no nationality. There would be no divisions of religion, if you loved. But as these things actually exist — not theoretically, but brutally — in this ugly world, it shows that you have no love. Even the love of a mother for her child is not love. If the mother really loved her child, do you think the world would be like this? She would see that he had the right food, the right education, that he was sensitive, that he appreciated beauty, that he was not ambitious, greedy, envious. So the mother, however much she may think she loves her child, does not love the child. So we have not that love.
  • Jiddu Krishnamurti, Varanasi 5th Public Talk (28 November 1964), The Collected Works, Vol. XV.

• Only the free mind knows what Love is.
  • Jiddu Krishnamurti, Speech at the University of California, Berkley, as broadcast by Pacifica Radio (4 January 1969).

• Can't you fall in love and not have a possessive relationship? I love someone and she loves me and we get married — that is all perfectly straightforward and simple, in that there is no conflict at all. (When I say we get married I might just as well say we decide to live together — don't let's get caught up in words.) Can't one have that without the other, without the tail as it were, necessarily following? Can't two people be in love and both be so intelligent and so sensitive that there is freedom and absence of a centre that makes for conflict? Conflict is not in the feeling of being in love. The feeling of being in love is utterly without conflict. There is no loss of energy in being in love. The loss of energy is in the tail, in everything that follows — jealousy, possessiveness, suspicion, doubt, the fear of losing that love, the constant demand for reassurance and security. Surely it must be possible to function in a sexual relationship with someone you love without the nightmare which usually follows. Of course it is.
  • Jiddu Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Bulletin 3 (1969), and Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Bulletin 4, (1969).

• The whole of Asia believes in reincarnation, in being reborn in another life. When you enquire what it is that is going to be born in the next life, you come up against difficulties. What is it? Yourself? What are you? a lot of words, a lot of opinions, attachments to your possessions, to your furniture, to your conditioning. Is all that, which you call the soul, going to be reborn in the next life? Reincarnation implies that what you are today determines what you will be again in the next life. Therefore behave! — not tomorrow, but today, because what you do today you are going to pay for in the next life. People who believe in reincarnation do not bother about behavior;t all; it is just a matter of belief, which has no value. Incarnate today, afresh not in the next life! Change it now completely, change with great passion, let the mind strip itself of everything, of every conditioning, every knowledge, of everything it thinks is "right" — empty it. Then you will know what dying means; and then you will know what love is. For love is not something of the past, of thought, of culture; it is not pleasure. A mind that has understood the whole movement of thought becomes extraordinarily quiet, absolutely silent. That silence is the beginning of the new.
  • Jiddu Krishnamurti, 6th Public Talk, Saanen (28 July 1970) 'The Mechanical Activity of Thought" in The Impossible Question (1972) Part I, Ch. 6.

• It is utterly and irrevocably possible to empty all hurts and, therefore, to love, to have compassion. To have compassion means to have passion for all things, not just between two people, but for all human beings, for all things of the earth, the animals, the trees, everything the earth contains. When we have such compassion we will not despoil the earth as we are doing now, and we will have no wars.
  • Jiddu Krishnamurti, Talks in Saanen (1974), p. 71.

• The only thing that really matters is that there be an action of goodness, love and intelligence in living. Is goodness individual or collective, is love personal or impersonal, is intelligence yours, mine or somebody else? If it is yours or mine then it is not intelligence, or love, or goodness. If goodness is an affair of the individual or of the collective, according to one's particular preference or decision, then it is no longer goodness.
  • Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Urgency of Change (1970), Conversation 5.

• The very nature of intelligence is sensitivity, and this sensitivity is love. Without this intelligence there can be no compassion. Compassion is not the doing of charitable acts or social reform; it is free from sentiment, romanticism and emotional enthusiasm. It is as strong as death. It is like a great rock, immovable in the midst of confusion, misery and anxiety. Without this compassion no new culture or society can come into being. Compassion and intelligence walk together; they are not separate. Compassion acts through intelligence. It can never act through the intellect. Compassion is the essence of the wholeness of life.
  • Jiddu Krishnamurti, Letters to the Schools (1981, 1985), Vol. I, p. 113

• Questioner: Can one love truth without loving man? Can one love man without loving truth? What comes first?
  Krishnamurti: Love comes first. To love truth, you must know truth. To know truth is to deny truth. What is known is not truth. What is known is already encased in time and ceases to be truth. Truth is an eternal movement, and so cannot be measured in words or in time. It cannot be held in the fist. You cannot love something which you do not know. But truth is not to be found in books, in images, in temples. It is to be found in action, in living. The very search for the unknown is love itself, and you cannot search for the unknowable away from relationship. You cannot search for reality, or for what you will, in isolation. It comes into being only in relationship, only when there is right relationship between man and man. So the love of man is the search for reality.
  • Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Collected Works, Vol. IV, p. 172.

• Please let us be clear on this point — that you cannot by any process, through any discipline, through any form of meditation, go to truth, God, or whatever name you like to give it. It is much too vast, it cannot possibly be conceived of; no description will cover it, no book can hold it, nor any word contain it. So you cannot by any devious method, by any sacrifice, by any discipline or through any guru, go to it. You must await it, it will come to you, you cannot go to it. That is the fundamental thing one has to understand, that not through any trick of the mind, not through any control, through any virtue, any compulsion, any form of suppression, can the mind possibly go to truth. All that the mind can do is be quiet but not with the intention of receiving it. And that is one of the most difficult things of all because we think truth can be experienced right away through doing certain things. Truth is not to be bought any more than love can be bought.
  • Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Collected Works, Second Talk in Poona (10 September 1958), J.Krishnamurti Online, JKO Serial No. 580910, Vol. XI, p. 20.

• We know only fragmentarily this extraordinary thing called life; we have never looked at sorrow, except through the screen of escapes; we have never seen the beauty, the immensity of death, and we know it only through fear and sadness. There can be understanding of life, and of the significance and beauty of death, only when the mind on the instant perceives “what is”.You know, sirs, although we differentiate them, love, death, and sorrow are all the same; because, surely, love, death, and sorrow are the unknowable. The moment you know love, you have ceased to love. Love is beyond time; it has no beginning and no end, whereas knowledge has; and when you say, “I know what love is”, you don’t. You know only a sensation, a stimulus. You know the reaction to love, but that reaction is not love. In the same way, you don’t know what death is. You know only the reactions to death, and you will discover the full depth and significance of death only when the reactions have ceased.
  • Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Collected Works, Vol. XI, p. 288.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• If you want something very, very badly, let it go free. If it comes back to you, it’s yours forever. If it doesn’t, it was never yours to begin with.
  • Jess Lair, an educator, published this saying In 1969, which he obtained from a junior or senior college student according to the Quote Investigator.

• These blossoms, gathered in familiar paths,
  With dear companions now passed out of sight,
  Shall not be laid upon their graves. They live,
  Since love is deathless. Pleasure now nor pride
  Is theirs in mortal wise, but hallowing thoughts
  Will meet the offering, of so little worth,
  Wanting the benison death has made divine.
  • Lucy Larcom, Poems (1869), Introductory poem.

• Give in to love, or live in fear.
  • Jonathan Larson, "Another Day", Rent (1996).

• Well, love is a gift, a lot of people don't remember that. So, you two better brace yourselves for a whole lotta ugly comin' at you from a neverending parade of stupid.
  • "Motormouth Maybelle" Queen Latifah's character in "Hairspray" (2007)

• He was a boy, she was girl. Can I make it any more obvious? We are in love, haven't you heard? How, we rock each other's world!
  • Avril Lavigne, "Sk8er Boi" (2002), Let Go (June 2002), Arista Records.

• Now the Spirit of Love has this Original. God, as considered in himself in his Holy Being, before any thing is brought forth by him or out of him, is only an eternal Will to all Goodness. This is the one eternal immutable God, that from Eternity to Eternity changeth not, that can be neither more nor less nor any thing else but an eternal Will to all the Goodness that is in himself, and can come from him. The Creation of ever so many Worlds or Systems of Creatures adds nothing to, nor takes any thing from this immutable God. He always was and always will be the same immutable Will to all Goodness. So that as certainly as he is the Creator, so certainly is he the Blesser of every created Thing, and can give nothing but Blessing, Goodness, and Happiness from himself because he has in himself nothing else to give. It is much more possible for the Sun to give forth Darkness, than for God to do, or be, or give forth anything but Blessing and Goodness. Now this is the Ground and Original of the Spirit of Love in the Creature; it is and must be a Will to all Goodness, and you have not the Spirit of Love till you have this Will to all Goodness at all Times and on all Occasions. You may indeed do many Works of Love and delight in them, especially at such Times as they are not inconvenient to you, or contradictory to your State or Temper or Occurrences in Life. But the Spirit of Love is not in you till it is the Spirit of your Life, till you live freely, willingly, and universally according to it. For every Spirit acts with Freedom and Universality according to what it is. It needs no command to live its own Life, or be what it is, no more than you need bid Wrath be wrathful. And therefore when Love is the Spirit of your Life, it will have the Freedom and Universality of a Spirit; it will always live and work in Love, not because of This or That, Here or There, but because the Spirit of Love can only love, wherever it is or goes or whatever is done to it. As the Sparks know no Motion but that of flying upwards, whether it be in the Darkness of the Night or in the Light of the Day, so the Spirit of Love is always in the same Course; it knows no Difference of Time, Place, or Persons, but whether it gives or forgives, bears or forbears, it is equally doing its own delightful Work, equally blessed from itself. For the Spirit of Love, wherever it is, is its own Blessing and Happiness because it is the Truth and Reality of God in the Soul, and therefore is in the same Joy of Life and is the same Good to itself, everywhere and on every Occasion.
  • William Law, The Spirit of Love (1752).

• The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one's wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great-quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it.
  • D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), British author. Letter, 2 June 1912 (published in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. 1, ed. by James T. Boulton, 1979). Lawrence wrote the letter after eloping to Germany with Frieda von Richthofen, wife of his old university professor, whom he later married.

• Those that go searching for love
  only make manifest their own lovelessness,
  and the loveless never find love,
  only the loving find love,
  and they never have to seek for it.
  • D. H. Lawrence, Search for Love.

• If one loves, one need not have an ideology of love.
  • Bruce Lee, The Warrior Within : The Philosophies of Bruce Lee (1996), p. 64.

• 'Cause all of me
  Loves all of you
  Love your curves and all your edges
  All your perfect imperfections
  Give your all to me
  I'll give my all to you
  You're my end and my beginning
  • John Legend, All of Me (12 August 2013) from the August 2013 album Love in the Future

• Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.
  • Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Ch. 10.

• What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.
  • Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan (1971), Chapter 8, "The Children of the Open Sea" (Ged).

• All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that’s the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it’s life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?
  • Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind (2001), Chapter 1 “Mending the Green Pitcher” (pp. 47-48).

• The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.
  • Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind (2001), Chapter 4 “Dolphin” (p. 231).

• A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
  • Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 18 “On the Ice” (p. 249).

• TO LOVE is to find pleasure in the happiness of others.
  • Gottfried Leibniz, A Dialogue (c. 1696).

• There's nothing you can do that can't be done
  Nothing you can sing that can't be sung
  Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
  It's easy.

  All you need is love.

  • John Lennon, in "All You Need Is Love" from Magical Mystery Tour (1967).

• We all been playing those mind games forever
  Some kinda druid dudes lifting the veil.
  Doing the mind guerrilla,
  Some call it magic — the search for the grail.

  Love is the answer and you know that for sure.
  Love is a flower, you got to let it — you got to let it grow.

  • John Lennon, in "Mind Games" on Mind Games (1973).

• I want you to make love, not war, I know you've heard it before.
  • John Lennon, in his final fading statement in "Mind Games" on Mind Games (1973).

• How can I give love when I don't know what it is I'm giving?
  • John Lennon, in" How?" from "Imagine", (1971).

• It seems to me like this. It's not a terrible thing — I mean, it may be terrible, but it's not damaging, it's not poisoning, to do without something one really wants. It's not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, I'm capable of doing something bigger. Or I'm a person who needs love, and I'm doing without it. What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.
  • Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 2" by Doris Lessing from The Golden Notebook (1962).

• Say you'll love, love me forever
  Never stop, not for whatever
  Near and far and always and
  Everywhere and everything.
  I love you, always forever
  Near and far, close and together
  Everywhere, I will be with you
  Everything, I will do for you
  I love you, always forever
  Near and far, close and together
  Everywhere, I will be with you
  Everything, I will do for you.
  • Donna Lewis, I Love You Always Forever (1996) from the 1996 album Now in a Minute

• Without love I mean nothing to you
  Without love broken in two
  Without love give me some value some worth
  Without love no life left on earth.
  • Donna Lewis, Without Love (1996) from the 1996 album Now in a Minute

• The power of love is a curious thing
  Make a one man weep, make another man sing
  Change a hawk to a little white dove
  More than a feeling that's the power of love
  Tougher than diamonds, rich like cream
  Stronger and harder than a bad girl's dream
  Make a bad one good make a wrong one right
  Power of love that keeps you home at night
  • Huey Lewis and the News, The Power of Love (1985).

• You don't need money, don't take fame
  Don't need no credit card to ride this train
  It's strong and it's sudden and it's cruel sometimes
  But it might just save your life
  That's the power of love
  • Huey Lewis and the News, The Power of Love (1985).

• Love is so simple and spiritual. It is not related to social status, age, or even sexual identity.
  • Li Yinhe [5]

• He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.
  • H 10
  • Variant translation: He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage — he won't encounter many rivals.
  • Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook H (1784-1788). This quote comes from Wikiquote's Lichtenberg Aphorisms section which was begun primarily with translations by R. J. Hollingdale, augmented by other sources, including Selected Writings of Georg C. Lichtenberg (1893) edited by Adolf Wilbrandt.

• I suppose the most radical part of my teaching at present is that love is not a feeling. Everybody suffers from love, or the fear of it, or the lack of it. Why? Why is love so universally and inevitably heart-breaking, whether it be through the end of a love affair, the death of a loved one or being locked in with the habitual casualness or grim indifference of a partner? The answer is because we've been taught and conditioned by the world to believe that love is a feeling.
  • Barry Long, Love is not a feeling ~ The Article by Barry Long, published in What is Enlightenment magazine, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1995.

• Feelings are constantly changing. None is dependable for long. You can love someone intensely today, and tomorrow or next month not feel a thing. Except perhaps for the feeling of doubt or depression that what was so beautiful could change so quickly.
  • Barry Long, Love is not a feeling ~ The Article by Barry Long, published in What is Enlightenment magazine, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1995.

• Love is the state of enlightenment and enlightenment is the state of love. You can't make any separation between them. Enlightenment is the state of no feelings and pure knowledge and so is love.
  • Barry Long, Love is not a feeling ~ The Interview An interview of Barry Long by Hal Blacker, editor of What is Enlightenment magazine, published in What is Enlightenment magazine, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1995.

• Love is the state of enlightenment and enlightenment is the state of love. You can't make any separation between them. Enlightenment is the state of no feelings and pure knowledge and so is love.
  • Barry Long, Love is not a feeling ~ The Interview An interview of Barry Long by Hal Blacker, editor of What is Enlightenment magazine, published in What is Enlightenment magazine, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1995.

• Love is not a feeling; it's a sensation. Drinking water when you're thirsty is a sensation, not a feeling. Being in nature or swimming in the sea is a sensation, not a feeling. Lying down when you're tired is sensational, not a feeling, although you may say it feels good. Feeling is an emotional interpretation of experience and these sensations don't need interpretation; they are just good or right. Making physical love rightly is a sensation, not a feeling. So is the love of God. The same goes for joy and beauty; both are sensational.'
  • Barry Long, Love is not a feeling ~ The Article by Barry Long, published in What is Enlightenment magazine, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1995.

• Love is beyond description; but not beyond demonstrating. Love is beyond the mind because it is always new. Any product of the mind is a reaction of the past, a synthesis of what is old. So the mind is a modifier, a reactor; a renovator, but it cannot create the new.
  • Barry Long, Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (Barry Long Books, 1996).

• Love is a power, a mighty principle that exists in its own right independent of any individual. Man changes, but the principle of love does not and cannot. Love does not leave men and women. Men and women leave love.
  • Barry Long, Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (Barry Long Books, 1996).

• Love is all around you like the air and is the very breath of your being. But you cannot know it, feel its unfeeling touch, until you pause in your busy-ness, are still and poised and empty of your wanting and desiring. When at rest the air is easily offended and will flee even from the fanning of a leaf, as love flees from the first thought. But when the air or love moves of its own accord it is a hurricane that drives all before it.
  • Barry Long, Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (Barry Long Books, 1996).

• All love - love of children, love of parents, love of God or life - comes out of making physical love. Without the making of love there is no body to love anything.
  • Barry Long, The Way In (2000).

• Human love is not love. Love is natural to every body but it becomes human love as the person learns from society to confuse love with sex.
  • Barry Long, The Way In (2000).

• O, there is nothing holier, in this life of ours, than the first consciousness of love,—the first fluttering of its silken wings.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion (1839), Book III, Chapter VI.

• Ah, how skillful grows the hand
  That obeyeth Love's command!
  It is the heart, and not the brain,
  That to the highest doth attain,
  And he who followeth Love's behest
  Far excelleth all the rest!
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Building of the Ship" in Voices of the Night: The Seaside and the Fireside; and Other Poems (1846), p. 34.

• That was the first sound in the song of love!
  Scarce more than silence is, and yet a sound.
  Hands of invisible spirits touch the strings
  Of that mysterious instrument, the soul,
  And play the prelude of our fate. We hear
  The voice prophetic, and are not alone.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Spanish Student (1843), Act I, scene 3, line 109.

• I love thee, as the good love heaven.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Spanish Student (1843), Act I, scene 3, line 146.

• Love keeps the cold out better than a cloak.
  It serves for food and raiment.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Spanish Student (1843), Act I, scene 5, line 52.

• How can I tell the signals and the signs
  By which one heart another heart divines?
  How can I tell the many thousand ways
  By which it keeps the secret it betrays?
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863-1874), Part III. Student's Tale. Emma and Eginhard, line 75.

• Love makes its record in deeper colors as we grow out of childhood into manhood; as the Emperors signed their names in green ink when under age, but when of age, in purple.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Table-Talk (1857), First published in the Blue and Gold edition of Drift-Wood (1857).

• Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
  • James Russell Lowell, Literary Essays, vol. II (1870-1890), Rousseau and the Sentimentalists.

• "Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do."
  • Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door, (1973).

• The words "God is love" have this deep meaning: that everything that is against love is ultimately doomed and damned.
  • Halford E. Luccock, Keeping Life Out of Confusion Sermon (11 September 1938), as quoted in "Disguised Fascism Seen As A Menace" in The New York Times (12 September 1938), p. 15; also in "Fascism comes wrapped in the flag" (with online facsimile of article).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• "But tell me how it is that she could be so beautiful without any heart at all — without any place even for a heart to live in." "I cannot quite tell," she said; "but I am sure she would not look so beautiful if she did not take means to make herself look more beautiful than she is. And then, you know, you began by being in love with her before you saw her beauty … But the chief thing that makes her beautiful is this: that, although she loves no man, she loves the love of any man; and when she finds one in her power, her desire to bewitch him and gain his love (not for the sake of his love either, but that she may be conscious anew of her own beauty, through the admiration he manifests), makes her very lovely—with a self-destructive beauty..."
  • George MacDonald, Phantastes (1858), On the Alder Tree.

• I knew now, that it is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, and not the being loved by each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness. I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over any soul beloved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit; a power that cannot be but for good; for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies. Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return. All true love will, one day, behold its own image in the eyes of the beloved, and be humbly glad. This is possible in the realms of lofty Death.
  • George MacDonald, Phantastes (1858).

• For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds.
  • George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind (1871), chapter 18.

• To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.
  • George MacDonald, The Marquis of Lossie (1877).

• Now there's no point in placing the blame
  And you should know I'd suffer the same
  If I lose you my heart will be broken
  
  Love is a bird... she needs to fly
  Let all the hurt inside of you die
  You're frozen when your heart's not open
  
  If I could melt your heart
  We'd never be apart
  Give yourself to me
  You hold the key
  • Madonna, Frozen (February 23, 1998) from the album Ray of Light (March 3, 1998).

• One plus one equals both.
  • Gregory Maguire, Wicked.

• No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
  • Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (1995).

• I will make love my greatest weapon and none on whom I call can defend against its force.
  My reasoning they may counter; my speech they may distrust; my apparel they may disapprove; my face they may reject; and even my bargains may cause them suspicion; yet my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest clay.
  I will greet this day with love in my heart.
  • Og Mandino, The Greatest Salesman in the World (1968), Ch. 9 : The Scroll Marked II, p. 58.

• Henceforth I will look upon all things with love and I will be born again. I will love the sun for it warms my bones; yet I will love the rain for it cleanses my spirit. I will love the light for it shows me the way; yet I will love the darkness for it shows me the stars. I will welcome happiness because it enlarges my heart; yet I will endure sadness because it opens my soul. I will acknowledge rewards because they are my due; yet I will welcome obstacles because they are my challenge.
  I will greet this day with love in my heart.
  • Og Mandino, The Greatest Salesman in the World (1968), Ch. 9 : The Scroll Marked II, p. 58.

• Contrary to Pascal's saying, we don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
  • Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America‎ (1958), p. 20.

• To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.
  • Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera‎ (1985; translated by Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 100.

• He drew a circle that shut me out —
  Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
  But Love and I had the wit to win:
  We drew a circle that took him in.
  • Edwin Markham, "Outwitted", from The Shoes of Happiness, and Other Poems (1913).

• Life on earth is a hand-to-hand mortal combat... between the law of love and the law of hate.
  • José Martí, Letter (1881), as quoted in The Conscience of Worms and the Cowardice of Lions : Cuban Politics and Culture in an American Context (1993) by Irving Louis Horowit, p. 11.

• In the majority of cases which are brought to me as a consulting psychologist for love and marital adjustment, there are self-deceptions to be uncovered as well as attempts to deceive other people. Beneath such love conflicts there is almost always a festering psychological core of dishonesty.
  • William Moulton Martson, Lie Detector Test, p. 119 [6]

• Love is... born with the pleasure of looking at each other, it is fed with the necessity of seeing each other, it is concluded with the impossibility of separation!
  • José Martí, Amor (1881).

• Mankind is composed of two sorts of men — those who love and create, and those who hate and destroy.
  • José Martí, "Letter to a Cuban Farmer" (1893).

• Peoples are made of hate and of love, and more of hate than love. But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything.
  • José Martí, My Race (1893), "Mi Raza", first published in Patria (16 April 1893) Full translation online.

• Men of action, above all those whose actions are guided by love, live forever. Other famous men, those of much talk and few deeds, soon evaporate. Action is the dignity of greatness.
  • José Martí, My Race (1893), "Mi Raza", first published in Patria (16 April 1893) Full translation online.

• There is happiness in duty, although it may not seem so. To fulfill one's duty elevates the soul to a state of constant sweetness. Love is the bond between men, the way to teach and the center of the world.
  • José Martí, My Race (1893), "Mi Raza", first published in Patria (16 April 1893) Full translation online.

• I found the greatest love of all inside of me. The greatest love of all is easy to achieve. Learning to love yourself, it is the greatest love of all.
  • Michael Masser and Linda Creed, songwriters of "The Greatest Love of All".

• The tragedy of love is indifference.
  • W. Somerset Maugham, The Trembling of a Leaf, ch. 4.

• But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
  • W. Somerset Maugham, [w:Of Human Bondage|Of Human Bondage]] Ch. 70.

• There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.
  • W. Somerset Maugham, [w:Of Human Bondage|Of Human Bondage]], Ch. 71.

• Life isn't long enough for love and art.
  • W. Somerset Maugham, [w:Of Human Bondage|Of Human Bondage]], Ch. 21, p. 83 (estimated).

• We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.
  • W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930), p. 306.

• The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.
  • W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook (1946), p. 13.

• When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence, a mien which seems to say, "You are looking at somebody now." … this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.
  • Rollo May, Love and Will (1969), p. 84.

• When we "fall" in love, as the expressive verb puts it, the world shakes and changes around us, not only in the way it looks but in our whole experience of what we are doing in the world. Generally, the shaking is consciously felt in its positive aspects … Love is the answer, we sing. … our Western culture seems to be engaged in a romantic — albeit desperate — conspiracy to enforce the illusion that that is all there is to eros.
  • Rollo May, Love and Will (1969), p. 100.

• To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive — to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before.
  • Rollo May, Love and Will (1969), p. 100.

• And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.
  • Paul McCartney, in "The End" from Abbey Road (1969).

• Love is the root of all joy and sorrow.
  • Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart’s Sermons, translated into English by Claud Field (1909), Sermon III: The Angel's Greeting

• All true morality, inward and outward, is comprehended in love, for love is the foundation of all the commandments.
  All outward morality must be built upon this basis, not on self-interest. As long as man loves something else than God, or outside God, he is not free, because he has not love. Therefore there is no inner freedom which does not manifest itself in works of love. True freedom is the government of nature in and outside man through God; freedom is essential existence unaffected by creatures. But love often begins with fear; fear is the approach to love: fear is like the awl which draws the shoemaker's thread through the leather.
  • Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart’s Sermons, translated into English by Claud Field (1909), Sermon VII : Outward and Inward Morality.

• To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that Love is the reason for my existence, for God is love.
  Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.
  • Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation (1949).

• Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action.
  • Thomas Merton, in a letter to Dorothy Day (20 December 1961).

• Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
  Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
  Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
  And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
  Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
  Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
  Yet many a man is making friends with death
  Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
  • Edna St. Vincent Millay, in "Sonnet XXX" from Fatal Interview (1931).

• I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it.
  • Arthur Miller, Quentin in After the Fall (1964), Act II.

• I saw clearly only when I saw with love. Or can one ever remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume. And that's the truth of roses, isn't it? — The perfume?
  • Arthur Miller, Quentin in After the Fall (1964), Act II.

• Love means to look at yourself
  The way one looks at distant things
  For you are only one thing among many.
  And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
  Without knowing it, from various ills —
  A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
  • Czesław Miłosz , Rescue (1945), "The World": Love (1943), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz

• Imparadis'd in one another's arms.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book IV, line 50.

• Hail wedded love, mysterious law, true source
  Of human offspring.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book IV, line 750-751.

• Freely we serve,
  Because we freely love, as in our will
  To love or not; in this we stand or fall.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book V, lines 538-540.

• So dear I love him, that with him all deaths
  I could endure, without him live no life.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book IX, line 832.

• It is not virtue, wisdom, valour, wit,
  Strength, comeliness of shape, or amplest merit,
  That woman's love can win, or long inherit;
  But what it is, hard is to say,
  Harder to hit.
  • John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671), line 1,010.

• Love would master self; and having made the mastery stretch onward and upward toward infinitude.
  • Donald G. Mitchell, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 394.

• Do you know how you make someone into a Dalek? Subtract Love, add Anger.
  • Steven Moffat, in lines written for Oswin Oswald, in Asylum of the Daleks (1 September 2012).

• Love, it's not an emotion — Love is a promise!
  • Steven Moffat, in lines for the Twelfth incarnation of the Doctor in Doctor Who : Death in Heaven (8 November 2014).

• Give love and forget that you gave it.
  • Sun Myung Moon The Way of God's Will Chapter 2-3 Character Translated 1980

• Love on through all ills, and love on till they die!
  • Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh (1817), The Light of the Harem, line 653.

• The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.
  • Mother Teresa, Interview by Edward W. Desmond in TIME magazine (4 December 1989).

• Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within reach of every hand. Anyone may gather it and no limit is set. Everyone can reach this love through meditation, spirit of prayer, and sacrifice, by an intense inner life.
  • Mother Teresa in: Teresa, Mother; Dorothy S. Hunt (1987). Love, a fruit always in season: Daily meditations from the words of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. ISBN 9780898701678. 

• Spread love everywhere you go; first of all in your house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next door neighbor. Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier.
  • Mother Teresa, as quoted in Worldwide Laws of Life : 200 Eternal Spiritual Principles‎ (1998) by John Templeton, p. 448.

• Don't look for big things, just do small things with great love....The smaller the thing, the greater must be our love.
  • Mother Teresa, as quoted in Mother Teresa : Come Be My Light (2007) by Brian Kolodiejchuk.

• My love for you is past the mind, beyond my heart, and into my soul.
  • Boris Kodjoe, Madea's Family Reunion.

• Bessie: I've been lucky to have so much love in my life.
  Lee: Yes, Marvin and Ruth love you so much.
  Bessie: No, I’ve been lucky to be able to love them so much.
  • Marvin's Room

• If we are to express the love in our own hearts, we must also understand what love meant to Socrates and Saint Francis, to Dante and Shakespeare, to Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, to the explorer Shackleton and to the intrepid physicians who deliberately exposed themselves to yellow fever. These historic manifestations of love are not recorded in the day's newspaper or the current radio program: they are hidden to people who possess only fashionable minds.
  • Lewis Mumford, Values for Survival (1946)

 

 

 

 

 

• I've made the most important discovery of my life. It's only in the mysterious equation of love that any logical reasons can be found.
  • John Forbes Nash (portrayed by Russell Crowe, A Beautiful Mind (2001).

• Abel was righteous & Noah was a preacher of righteousness & by his righteousness he was saved from the flood. Christ is called the righteous & by his righteousness we are saved & except our righteousness exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees we shall not enter into the kingdome of heaven. Righteousness is the religion of the kingdom of heaven & even the property of God himself towards man. Righteousness & Love are inseparable for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.
  • Sir Isaac Newton, A short Schem of the true Religion, Undated manuscript: Keynes Ms. 7: '"A short Schem of the true Religion'"

• Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.
  • Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, Charles Scribner’s Sons (1952)
• Why is love intensified by absence?
  • Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife.

• If only we could all escape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other, if only I could save you all from yourselves.
  • Anaïs Nin, House of Incest (1936).

• Love reduces the complexity of living.
  • Anaïs Nin, in June 1932 entry in her journal; published in Henry and June : from a journal of love : the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1990), p. 178.

• You cannot save people, you can only love them.
  • Anaïs Nin, The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939).

• Someday I'll be locked up for love insanity. "She loved too much."
  • Anaïs Nin, The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939).

• Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst.
  • Anaïs Nin (30 May 1934), in The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939).

• No one but a woman in love ever sees the maximum of men's greatness .
  • Anaïs Nin (18 June 1934), in The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939).

• Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance — that is all!
  • Anaïs Nin (21 October 1934), in The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939).

• You are like a person who consumes herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are born of this.
  • Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love (1954).

• The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.
  • Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love (1954).

• I think that natural truths will cease to be spat at us like insults, that aesthetics will once more be linked with ethics, and that people will become aware that in casting out aesthetics that they also cast out a respect for human life, a respect for creation, a respect for spiritual values. Aesthetics was an expression of man's need to be in love with his world. The cult of ugliness is a regression. It destroys our appetite, our love for our world.
  • Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future (1969).

• Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
  • Anaïs Nin, as quoted in French Writers of the Past (2000) by Carol A. Dingle, p. 126.

• Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.
  • Novalis, Blüthenstaub-Fragmente (1798), Fragment No. 51; Jeder geliebte Gegenstand ist der Mittelpunkt eines Paradieses.
  • Variant translations:

Every beloved object is the centre of a Paradise.

• As quoted by Thomas Carlyle in "Novalis" (1829)

Every beloved object is the midpoint to paradise.

• Love works magic.
  It is the final purpose
  Of the world story,
  The Amen of the universe.
  • Novalis, Blüthenstaub-Fragmente (1798).

• We have come by curious ways
  To the Light that holds the days;
  We have sought in haunts of fear
  For that all-enfolding sphere:
  And lo! it was not far, but near.

  We have found, O foolish-fond,
  The shore that has no shore beyond.

  Deep in every heart it lies
  With its untranscended skies;
  For what heaven should bend above
  Hearts that own the heaven of love?

  • Alfred Noyes, The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907), The Flower of Old Japan, Epilogue.

• Your dreamers may dream it
  The shadow of a dream,
  Your sages may deem it
  A bubble on the stream;
  Yet our kingdom draweth nigher
  With each dawn and every day,
  Through the earthquake and the fire
  "Love will find out the way."
  • Alfred Noyes, Drake, an English Epic (1908), Song, Book VIII, p. 146.

• Heart of my heart, the world is young;
  Love lies hidden in every rose!
  Every song that the skylark sung
  Once, we thought, must come to a close:
  Now we know the spirit of song,
  Song that is merged in the chant of the whole,
  Hand in hand as we wander along,
  What should we doubt of the years that roll?
  • Alfred Noyes, Unity, § I, Unity, § I.

• Heart of my heart, we are one with the wind,
  One with the clouds that are whirled o'er the lea,
  One in many, O broken and blind,
  One as the waves are at one with the sea!
  Ay! when life seems scattered apart,
  Darkens, ends as a tale that is told,
  One, we are one, O heart of my heart,
  One, still one, while the world grows old.
  • Alfred Noyes, Unity, § I, Unity, § III.

• Your God still walks in Eden, between the ancient trees,
  Where Youth and Love go wading through pools of primroses.
  And this is the sign we bring you, before the darkness fall,
  That Spring is risen, is risen again,
  That Life is risen, is risen again,
  That Love is risen, is risen again, and
  Love is Lord of all.
  • Alfred Noyes, The Lord of Misrule and Other Poems (1915), The Lord of Misrule.

 

 

• Nobody can teach you love. Love you have to find yourself, within your being, by raising your consciousness to higher levels. And when love comes, there is no question of responsibility. You do things because you enjoy doing them for the person you love. You are not obliging the person, you are not even wanting anything in return, not even gratitude. On the contrary, you are grateful that the person has allowed you to do something for him. It was your joy, sheer joy. Love knows nothing of responsibility. It does many things, it is very creative; it shares all that it has, but it is not a responsibility, remember. Responsibility is an ugly word in comparison to love. Love is natural. Responsibility is created by the cunning priests, politicians who want to dominate you in the name of God, in the name of the nation, in the name of family, in the name of religion -- any fiction will do. But they don't talk about love. On the contrary, they are all against love, because love is unable to be controlled by them. A man of love acts out of his own heart, not according to any moral code. A man of love will not join the army because it is his responsibility to fight for his nation. A man of love will say there are no nations, and there is no question of any fight.
  • Osho Sat Chit Anand

• Militat omnis amans.

  Every lover is a soldier. (Love is a warfare).

  • Ovid, Amorum (16 BC), I. 9. 1.

• Qui non vult fieri desidiosus, amet.

  Let the man who does not wish to be idle, fall in love.

  • Ovid, Amorum (16 BC), I. 9. 46.

• Sic ego nec sine te nec tecum vivere possum
  Et videor voti nescius esse mei.

  Thus I am not able to exist either with you or without you; and I seem not to know my own wishes.

  • Ovid, Amorum (16 BC), Book III. 10. 39.

• Qui finem quaeris amoris/Cedit amor rebus; res age, tutus eris.

  Love yields to business. If you seek a way out of love, be busy; you'll be safe then.

  • Ovid, Remedia Amoris, 143.

• Ut ameris, amabilis esto.
  • If you want to be loved, be lovable.

    Variant: To be loved, be lovable.

  • Ovid, Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), II, 107.

• Intret amicitiae nomine tectus amor.

  Let love steal in disguised as friendship.

  • Variant: Love will enter cloaked in friendship's name.
  • Context: Cool off; don't let her think you too importunate. Do not betray the hope of too swift a victory; let Love steal in disguised as Friendship. I've often seen a woman thus disarmed, and friendship ripen into love.
  • Ovid, The Art of Love, Book 1, line 720, translated by J. Lewis May in The Love Books of Ovid, 1930.

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Then again, it’s not easy at all. It can be the hardest thing, because loving other people starts with loving ourselves and accepting ourselves. I know many of you have struggled with this. I draw upon your strength and your support, and have, in ways you will never know. I’m here today because I am gay. And because… maybe I can make a difference. To help others have an easier and more hopeful time. Regardless, for me, I feel a personal obligation and a social responsibility. I also do it selfishly, because I am tired of hiding and I am tired of lying by omission. I suffered for years because I was scared to be out. My spirit suffered, my mental health suffered and my relationships suffered. And I’m standing here today, with all of you, on the other side of all that pain.
  • Ellen Page, Coming Out speech as a lesbianat the Human Rights Campaign's Time to Thrive conference to promote the welfare of LGBT youth held at Bally's Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada on February 14, 2014.

• I am young, yes, but what I have learned is that love, the beauty of it, the joy of it and yes, even the pain of it, is the most incredible gift to give and to receive as a human being. And we deserve to experience love fully, equally, without shame and without compromise.
  • Ellen Page, Coming Out speech as a lesbianat the Human Rights Campaign's Time to Thrive conference to promote the welfare of LGBT youth held at Bally's Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada on February 14, 2014.

• When once the mind has raised itself to grasp and to delight in excellence, those who love most will be found to love most wisely.
  • Francis Turner Palgrave, Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics (1861) Summary of Book Fourth.

• When a natural discourse paints a passion or an effect, one feels within oneself the truth of what one reads, which was there before, although one did not know it. Hence one is inclined to love him who makes us feel it, for he has not shown us his own riches, but ours. ...such community of intellect that we have with him necessarily inclines the heart to love.
  • Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Section I Thoughts on Mind and Style (1-59), 14

• Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point. On le sent en mille choses. C'est le cœur qui sent Dieu, et non la raison. Voilà ce que c'est que la foi parfaite, Dieu sensible au cœur.
  • The heart has its reasons, which Reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart which feels God, and not Reason. This, then, is perfect faith: God felt in the heart.
  • Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Section IV On the Means of the Belief (242-290), 277; The first sentence is widely quoted in English as "The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of." Also as "'The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know."
  • Variant translations:
  • The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing. We find this in a thousand instances. It is the heart which feels God, and not the reasoning powers. And this is faith made perfect : — God realized by feeling in the heart.

• Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.
  Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
  Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.
  When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.
  And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
  • Paul of Tarsus, I Corinthians Ch. 13 (NKJV)
  • Variant translation: Love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud, it is not rude, it is not self seeking. It is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrong. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perservers. Love never fails.
    • 1 Corinthians 13:4-8.

• The three most important things to have are faith, hope and love. But the greatest of them is love.
  • Paul of Tarsus, in 1 Corinthians 13:13 (New. International Readers Version).

• Love is the cheapest of religions.
  • Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living, 1939-12-21.

• Over the mountains,
  And over the waves,
  Over the fountains,
  And under the graves;
  Over the floods that are deepest,
  Which do Neptune obey;
  Over the rocks that are steepest,
  Love will find out the way.
  • Thomas Percy, "Love Will Find Out the Way" as published in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765); in its publshed form this is suspected to have been extensively written by Percy himself; it was later used by Pierre de Beaumarchais in Act III of The Marriage of Figaro (1778).

• O amor é que é essencial.
  O sexo é só um acidente.
  • It's love that is inescapable.
    Sex is the merest accident.
  • Fernando Pessoa, Poem (5 April 1935), reported in Poesias inéditas (1930-1935), p. 192.
  • Variant translation:

    Love is essential. Sex, a mere accident.

• Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.
  • Petrarch, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 392.

• To be able to say how much you love is to love but little.
  • Petrarch, To Laura in Life (c. 1327-1350), Canzone 37.

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

• Years of love have been forgot
  In the hatred of a minute.
  • Edgar Allan Poe, To M——— (1829), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• Thou wouldst be loved? — then let thy heart
  From its present pathway part not!
  Being everything which now thou art,
  Be nothing which thou art not.
  So with the world thy gentle ways,
  Thy grace, thy more than beauty,
  Shall be an endless theme of praise,
  And love — a simple duty.
  • Edgar Allan Poe, "To Frances S. Osgood" (1845).

• The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.
  • Edgar Allan Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition" (published 1846).

• How vast a memory has Love!
  • Alexander Pope, "Sappho to Phaon", line 52 (1712).

• Love seldom haunts the breast where learning lies,
  And Venus sets ere Mercury can rise.
  • Alexander Pope, "The Wife of Bath her Prologue, from Chaucer" (c.1704, published 1713), line 369.

• Curse on all laws but those which love has made.
  • Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard (1717), line 74.

• Fame, wealth, and honour! what are you to Love?
  • Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard (1717), line 77.

• Not grace, or zeal, love only was my call,
  And if I lose thy love, I lose my all.
  • Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard (1717), line 177.

• Of all affliction taught a lover yet,
  'Tis true the hardest science to forget.
  • Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard (1717), line 189.

• One thought of thee puts all the pomp to flight;
  Priests, tapers, temples, swim before my sight.
  • Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard (1717), line 273.

• When the heart stops for one beat it is desire, when it stops for one life time it is love
  • Lucy Powell, The Heart Yearns But Once (2004).

• In all of nature, a male belongs to a female that he fancies and who fancies him. And so among the animals there are no idiots. But with us!... I'm a Jew, so I musn't love a Christian woman... He's a merchant, so he's got no right to a countess... And you who've got no money, you've no rights to any woman at all...
  • Bolesław Prus, The Doll (1889).

• Kissing Agathon, I held my life on my lips.
  It wanted to pass over, poor thing, into him.
  • Plato, Anthologia Palatina V, p. 78.

• The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.
  • Plato, Phaedrus.

• "And what would humans be without love?"
  Rare, said Death.
  • Sir Terence David John "Terry" Pratchett, Sourcery (1988).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Love is our response to our highest values.
  • Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957).

• Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.
  • Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957).

• "Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself... The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer—because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut."
  • Francisco d'Anconia in Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957), Part Two: Either-Or, Chapter Four: The Sanction of the Victim.

• "Let a man corrupt his values and his view of existence, let him profess that love is not self-enjoyment but self-denial, that virtue consists, not of pride, but of pity or pain or weakness or sacrifice, that the noblest love is born, not of admiration, but of charity, not in response to values, but in response to flaws—and he will have cut himself in two. His body will not obey him, it will not respond, it will make him impotent toward the woman he professes to love and draw him to the lowest type of whore he can find. His body will always follow the ultimate logic of his deepest convictions; if he believes that flaws are values, he has damned existence as evil and only the evil will attract him. He has damned himself and he will feel that depravity is all he is worthy of enjoying."
  • Francisco d'Anconia in Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957), Part Two: Either-Or, Chapter Four: The Sanction of the Victim.

• One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name.
  • Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (1943).

• To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.'
  • Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (1943).

• "We never need to say anything to each other when we're together. This is- for the time when we won't be together. I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breath air. I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival. I've given you not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need. This is the only way you can wish to be loved. This is the only way I can want you to love me. If you married me now, I would become your whole existence. But I would not want you then. You would not want yourself-and so you would not love me long. To say 'I love you' one must first know how to say the 'I'. The kind of surrender I could have from you now would give me nothing but an empty hulk. If I demanded it, I'd destroy you. That's why I won't stop you. I'll let you go to your husband. I don't know how I'll live through tonight, but I will. I want you whole, as I am, as you'll remain in the battle you've chosen. A battle is never selfless. [...] You must learn not to be afraid of the world. Not to be held by it as you are now. Never to be hurt by it as you were in that courtroom. I must let you learn it. I can't help you. You must find your own way. When you have, you'll come back to me. They won't destroy me, Dominique. And they won't destroy you. You'll win, because you've chosen the hardest way of fighting for your freedom from the world. I'll wait for you. I love you. I'm saying this now for all the years we'll have to wait. I love you, Dominique."
  • Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1943), Part II.

• "...love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don't know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who've never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you've felt what it means to love as you and I know it--the total passion for the total height--you're incapable of anything less."
  • Gail Wynand, speaking to Dominique Keating in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1943), Part III.

• "...love is exception-making."
  • Gail Wynand, in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1943), Part IV.

• To get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. Your own action, not any possible object of your charity.
  • Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1943), Part IV, p. 578.

• "What you feel in the presence of a thing you admire is just one word--'Yes.' The affirmation, the acceptance, the sign of admittance. And that 'Yes' is more than an answer to one thing, it's a kind of 'Amen' to life, to the earth that holds this thing, to the thought that created it, to yourself for being able to see it. But the ability to say 'Yes' or 'No' is the essence of all ownership. It's your ownership of your own ego. Your soul, if you wish. Your soul has a single basic function--the act of valuing. 'Yes' or 'No,' 'I wish' or 'I do not wish.' You can't say 'Yes' without saying 'I." There's no affirmation without the one who affirms. In this sense, everything to which you grant your love is yours.
  [...]
  "Howard, that 'Yes'--once granted, can it be withdrawn?"
  "Never."
  • Howard Roark and Gail Wynand in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1943), Part IV.

• • Gail Wynand, in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1943), Part IV
• Some day, the world will discover that, without thought, there can be no love.
  • Ayn Rand, Apollo and Dionysus (1969).

• [The hippies] were told that love - indiscriminate love for one's fellow man - is the highest virtue, and they obeyed. They were told that the merging of one's self with a herd, tribe, or community is the noblest way for a man to live, and they obeyed. There isn't a philosophical idea of today's establishment which they have not accepted, which they do not share. When they discovered this philosophy did not work, because in fact it cannot work, the hippies had neither the wit nor the courage to challenge it. They found, instead, an outlet for their impotent frustration by accusing their elders of hypocrisy, as if hypocrisy were the only obstacle to the realization of their dreams. And, left blindly, helplessly lobotomized in the face of an inexplicable reality that is not amenable to their feelings, they have no recourse but the shouting of obscenities at anything that frustrates their whims; at man, or at the rainy sky, indiscriminately, with no concept of the difference. It is typical of today's culture that the proponents of seething, raging hostility are taken as advocates of love.
  • Ayn Rand, Apollo and Dionysus (1969).

• Liebe, Arbeit und Wissen sind die Quellen unseres Lebens. Sie sollen es auch regieren.
  • Love, work and knowledge are the well-springs of our life. They should also govern it.
    • Wilhelm Reich's personal motto, the English translation used at least as early as The Function of the Orgasm (1948), a translation of Die Funktion des Orgasmus (1927).

• Psychic health depends on orgastic potency, i.e., upon the degree to which one can surrender to and experience the climax of excitation in the natural sexual act. It is founded upon the healthy character attitude of the individual's capacity for love. Psychic illnesses are the result of a disturbance of the natural capacity for love.
  • Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm (1927), General Survey.

• Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.
  • Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm (1927), Ch. V : The Development of the Character-Analytic Technique.

• You beg for happiness in life, but security is more important to you, even if it costs you your spine or your life. Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; love more than money; your freedom more than party line or public opinion; when your thinking will be in harmony with your feelings; when the teachers of your children will be better paid than the politicians; when you will have more respect for the love between man and woman than for a marriage license.
  • Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man! (1948).

• Follow the voice of your heart, even if it leads you off the path of timid souls. Do not become hard and embittered, even if life tortures you at times. There is only one thing that counts: to live one's life well and happily...
  • Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man! (1948).

• In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.
  • Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo (1966).

• Love is the garment of knowledge.'
  • Kenneth Rexroth, Eckhart, Brethren of the Free Spiritfrom Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (1974), ch. 4.

• The holiness of the real
  Is always there, accessible
  In total immanence. The nodes
  Of transcendence coagulate
  In you, the experiencer,
  And in the other, the lover.
  • Kenneth Rexroth, In Defense of the Earth (1956).

• Now I know surely and forever,
  However much I have blotted our
  Waking love, its memory is still
  there. And I know the web, the net,
  The blind and crippled bird. For then, for
  One brief instant it was not blind, nor
  Trapped, not crippled. For one heart beat the
  Heart was free and moved itself. O love,
  I who am lost and damned with words,
  Whose words are a business and an art,
  I have no words. These words, this poem, this
  Is all confusion and ignorance.
  But I know that coached by your sweet heart,
  My heart beat one free beat and sent
  Through all my flesh the blood of truth.
  • Kenneth Rexroth, She Is Away.

• Each of us is a specific individual, that one and no other, out of billions. I think each of us knows his own mystery with a knowing that precedes the origins of all knowledge. None of us ever gives it away. No one can. We envelop it with talk and hide it with deeds.
  Yet we always hope that somehow the others will know it is there, that a mystery in the other we cannot know will respond to a mystery in the self we cannot understand. The only full satisfaction life offers us is this sense of communion. We seek it constantly. Sometimes we find it. As we grow older we learn that it is never complete and sometimes it is entirely illusory.
  • Kenneth Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel (1991), Introduction. Originally published in 1966, with an additional chapter included in 1978 and further recollections published as Excerpts from a Life in 1981. A posthumous edition, incorporating all of this material, was then printed by New Directions in 1991.

• The free, creative, loving people who shine so brightly in my memory of studios and coffee shops have become models for a huge section of the population. If they in turn can just stay alive in the face of power and terror, they may become the decisive section.
  • "Introduction"
  • Kenneth Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel (1991), Introduction. Originally published in 1966, with an additional chapter included in 1978 and further recollections published as Excerpts from a Life in 1981. A posthumous edition, incorporating all of this material, was then printed by New Directions in 1991.

• I don't know how to love him.
  • Judas, and Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar, lyrics by Tim Rice

If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, acting lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that's perfectly valid — but don't go out trying to sell your beliefs to the system. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself.

• • Tim Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976)

• I’m not quite twenty, but, thanks to you, I’ve learned something that many women these days never learn: Prince Charming really is a toad. And the Beautiful Princess has halitosis. The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn’t that be the way to make love stay?
  • Tim Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker (1980), Leigh-Cheri to Bernard, in Phase III, Ch. 46.

• Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words “make” and “stay” become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.
  • Tim Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker (1980), Bernard to Leigh-Cheri, in Phase III, Ch. 46.

• No matter how much others might love you, you can’t love yourself unless you’re in charge of your own actions, and you’ll never take charge as long as you can get away with blaming your shortcomings and misfortunes on your family or society or your race or gender or Satan or whatever…
  • Tim Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994).

• You cannot love someone you do not know -- not unless you water down the definition of love so much that it becomes meaningless.
  • Jane Roberts, The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, p. 105.

• * One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved.
  • Romain Rolland, as quoted in On Relationships: A Book for Teenagers (1999) by Kimberly Kirberger.

• A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all-knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.'
  • Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living (1960), p. 63.

• It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death. (1 April 1939)
  • Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day (1935 - 1962), Her daily newspaper column (1 April 1939).