Love
There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved. It is God's finger on man's shoulder. - Charles Morgan
Love has no desire but to fulfill itself. To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving. - Kahlil Gibran
The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread. - Mother Teresa
Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love. - Albert Einstein
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 Carroll, "Outside the Dog Museum"
Ah me! love can not be cured by herbs. - Ovid
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. - Eric Fromm
Infatuation is when you think he's as sexy as Robert Redford, as smart as Henry Kissinger, as noble as Ralph Nader, as funny as Woody Allen, and as athletic as Jimmy Conners. Love is when you realize that he's as sexy as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Connors, as funny as Ralph Nader, as athletic as Henry Kissinger and nothing like Robert Redford - but you'll take him anyway. - Judith Viorst, Redbook, 1975
Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species. - W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook, 1949
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from French by Lewis Galantière
When love is not madness, it is not love. - Pedro Calderon de la Barca
Let your love be like the misty rains, coming softly, but flooding the river. - Malagasy Proverb
Do I love you because you're beautiful,
Or are you beautiful because I love you?
- Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Cinderella
For you see, each day I love you more
Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.
- Rosemonde Gerard
Forget love - I'd rather fall in chocolate! - Sandra J. Dykes
Love is much like a wild rose, beautiful and calm, but willing to draw blood in its defense. - Mark Overby
Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end. - Anonymous
Love - a wildly misunderstood although highly desirable malfunction of the heart which weakens the brain, causes eyes to sparkle, cheeks to glow, blood pressure to rise and the lips to pucker. - Anonymous
Love is a sweet tyranny, because the lover endureth his torments willingly. - Proverb
The lover is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods. - Theodor Reik, Of Love and Lust, 1957
Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit. - Peter Ustinov
Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
- William Shakespeare, Mid-Summer Night's Dream, 1595
The art of love... is largely the art of persistence. - Albert Ellis
Love one another and you will be happy. It's as simple and as difficult as that. - Michael Leunig
Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law. - Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, A.D. 524
Who, being loved, is poor? - Oscar Wilde
Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame. - Henry David Thoreau
To find someone who will love you for no reason, and to shower that person with reasons, that is the ultimate happiness. - Robert Brault
Without love, what are we worth? Eighty-nine cents! Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely. - Laurence Marks, M*A*S*H, "Love Story," original air date 7 January 1973, spoken by the character Hawkeye
A baby is born with a need to be loved - and never outgrows it. - Frank A. Clark
Shall we compare our hearts to a garden -
with beautiful blooms, straggling weeds,
swooping birds and sunshine, rain -
and most importantly, seeds.
- Grey Livingston
Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. - Robert Heinlein
The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough. - George Moore
We loved with a love that was more than love. - Edgar Allan Poe
If I love you, what business is it of yours? - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire. - François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
My debt to you, Belovèd,
Is one I cannot pay
In any coin of any realm
On any reckoning day.
- Jessie B. Rittenhouse
We choose those we like; with those we love, we have no say in the matter. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands. - Quoted by Alexandra Penney in "Self"
Love is, above all, the gift of oneself. - Jean Anouilh
When a man is in love or in debt, someone else has the advantage. - Bill Balance
Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly. - Rose Franken
Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat. - Ben Hecht
A bell is no bell 'til you ring it,
A song is no song 'til you sing it,
And love in your heart
Wasn’t put there to stay -
Love isn’t love
'Til you give it away.
- Oscar Hammerstein, Sound of Music, "You Are Sixteen (Reprise)"
Love is like dew that falls on both nettles and lilies. - Swedish Proverb
Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity. - Henry Van Dyke
Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia. - Judith Viorst, Redbook, 1975
Passion makes the world go round. Love just makes it a safer place. - Ice T, The Ice Opinion, quoted in Reader's Digest, "Quotable Quotes," February 2002
Love is no respecter of age or practicality
Neither morality: unabashed
She enters where she will
Unheeding that her immortal fires
Burn up human hearts...
- Phillip Pulfrey, from Beyond Me
Love is an ocean of emotions entirely surrounded by expenses. - Lord Dewar
When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks. - Natalie Clifford Barney
Only in love are unity and duality not in conflict. - Rabindranath Tagore
It is astonishing how little one feels alone when one loves. - John Bulwer
'Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark our coming, and look brighter when we come. - Lord Byron
A hundred hearts would be too few
To carry all my love for you.
- Anonymous
Love is the thing that enables a woman to sing while she mops up the floor after her husband has walked across it in his barn boots. - Anonymous, as printed in The Hoosier Farmer
Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke. - Lynda Barry
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love's tragedies. - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
Love doesn't sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all of the time, made new. - Ursula K. Le Guin
Love is not singular except in syllable. - Marvin Taylor
Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old. - John Ciardi
People who are sensible about love are incapable of it. - Douglas Yates
Love never reasons but profusely gives; gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all, and trembles lest it has done too little. - Hannah More
The past is behind us, love is in front and all around us. - Terri Guillemets
Ah me! why may not love and life be one? - Henry Timrod
Take away love and our earth is a tomb. - Robert Browning
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. - William Shakespeare, "Sonnet CXVI"
He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began. - Leo Tolstoy
It is the same in love as in war; a fortress that parleys is half taken. - Marguerite de Valois
You don't have to go looking for love when it's where you come from. - Werner Erhard
Sometimes the shortest distance between two points is a winding path walked arm in arm. - Robert Brault
No one can understand love who has not experienced infatuation. And no one can understand infatuation, no matter how many times he has experienced it. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Love me and the world is mine. - David Reed
It would be impossible to "love" anyone or anything one knew completely. Love is directed towards what lies hidden in its object. - Paul Valéry, Tel quel, 1943
The love game is never called off on account of darkness. - Tom Masson
They who meet on an April night are forever lost in love, if there's moonlight all about and there's no moon above. - E.Y. "Yip" Harburg and Fred Saidy, dialogue just before the song "Old Devil Moon" in the musical Finian's Rainbow
Sometimes it's a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence. - David Byrne
Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. - Robert Frost
You know you're in love when you don't want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams. - Dr. Seuss
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place. - Zora Neale Hurston
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. - Emily Brontë
The excesses of love soon pass, but its insufficiencies torment us forever. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
An old man in love is like a flower in winter. - Portuguese Proverb
Will you love me in December as you do in May,
Will you love me in the good old fashioned way?
When my hair has all turned gray,
Will you kiss me then and say,
That you love me in December as you do in May?
- James J. Walker
Love unlocks doors and opens windows that weren't even there before. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane. - Honoré de Balzac
Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its votaries live in confidence, equality and unreserve. - Percy Bysshe Shelley
Love is the poetry of the senses. - Honoré de Balzac
Love is a game that two can play and both win. - Eva Gabor
Without love, the rich and poor live in the same house. - Anonymous
The heart is a small thing, but desireth great matters. It is not sufficient for a kite's dinner, yet the whole world is not sufficient for it. - Francis Quarles, Emblems
Love is like those second-rate hotels where all the luxury is in the lobby. - Paul-Jean Toulet
We don't believe in rheumatism and true love until after the first attack. - Marie Ebner Von Eschenbach, Aphorism
We picture love as heart-shaped because we do not know the shape of the soul. - Robert Brault
All love is probationary, a fact which frightens women and exhilarates men. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen. - François, duc de La Rochefoucauld
Some women love only what they can hold in their arms; others, only what they can't. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
Love, and a cough, cannot be hid. - George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 1651
Desire creates havoc when it is the only thing between two people, or when it is what's missing. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Poetry spills from the cracks of a broken heart, but flows from one which is loved. - Christopher Paul Rubero
A man is not where he lives, but where he loves. - Latin Proverb
The arms of love encompass you with your present, your past, your future, the arms of love gather you together. - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail, 1929, translated from French by Curtis Cate
I need the starshine of your heavenly eyes,
After the day's great sun.
- Charles Hanson Towne
A lover is a man who tries to be more amiable than it is possible for him to be. - Nicholas de Chamfort
Love is not consolation. It is light. - Friedrich Nietzsche
True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked. - Erich Segal
Love is the greatest touch-up artist of all. - Robert Brault
Loving is never a waste of time. - Astrid Alauda
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. - Fyodor Dostoevski
True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self. - William Butler Yeats
Mumps, measles, and puppy love are terrible after twenty. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. - Anonymous
Love is what you've been through with somebody. - James Thurber, quoted in Life magazine, 1960
Love is being stupid together. - Paul Valery
In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love. - Charles Baudelaire
Open your heart and take us in,
Love - love and me.
-
On a cloudy night, when nothing seems above, still, there is love. Always love. For something, from someone. It's never done. Never. - Jeb Dickerson
Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in love. I'd stepped in it a few times. - Rita Rudner
Love does not care to define and is never in a hurry to do so. - Charles du Bos
I love you like crazy, baby
'Cuz I'd go crazy without you.
- Pixie Foudre
What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another. - William Carlos Williams
I learned the real meaning of love. Love is absolute loyalty. People fade, looks fade, but loyalty never fades. You can depend so much on certain people, you can set your watch by them. And that's love, even if it doesn't seem very exciting. - Sylvester Stallone
Ah, lady, when I gave my heart to thee,
It passed into thy lifelong regency.
- Gilbert Parker
The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of. - Blaise Pascal, "Pensées," 1670
At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet. - Plato
As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words. - William Shakespeare
Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable. - Bruce Lee
Life only starts when love comes. - From the movie "Bill of Divorcement," 1932
Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain,
Unravelled from the tumbling main,
And threading the eye of a yellow star: -
So many times do I love again.
- Thomas Lovell Beddoes
A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy. - George Jean Nathan
Love makes time pass; time makes love pass. - French Proverb
True love stories never have endings. - Richard Bach
It is not that love is blind. It is that love sees with a painter's eye, finding the essence that renders all else background. - Robert Brault
I love you as you are, but do not tell me how that is. - Antonio Porchia, "Voces," 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
When you're attracted to someone it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously, so what we know as fate is two neuroses knowing that they're a perfect match. - Jeff Arch, Nora Ephron, and David S. Ward, Sleepless in Seattle
Platonic love is love from the neck up. - Thyra Smater Winsolow
The music may have stopped but my heart beats to another tune, this rhythm called love. - A.C. Van Cherub
We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love. - Tom Robbins
The eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love. - Margaret Atwood
You really shouldn't say "I love you" unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget. - Anonymous, attributed to an 8-year-old named Jessica
Some say that true love is a mirage; seek it anyway, for all else is surely desert. - Robert Brault
So dear I love him, that with him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life. - John Milton
Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold. - Zelda Fitzgerald
Men love because they are afraid of themselves, afraid of the loneliness that lives in them, and need someone in whom they can lose themselves as smoke loses itself in the sky. - V.F. Calverton
Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good too. - Anonymous, sometimes attributed to an 8-year-old named Greg
Lust fades, so you'd better be with someone who can stand you. - Alan Zweibel and Jessie Nelson, "The Story of Us"
Ah! a blessing beyond all fate
My sole mate 'tis my soul mate.
- Pixie Foudre
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. - Victor Hugo
Love is the greatest refreshment in life. - Pablo Picasso
I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. - J.D. Salinger, "The Catcher in the Rye," 1945
Love means nothing in tennis, but it's everything in life. - Anonymous
What the world really needs is more love and less paper work. - Pearl Bailey, singer
Love is when you can be your true self with someone, and you only want to be your true self because of them. - Terri Guillemets
Once a man has won a woman's love, the love is his forever. He can only lose the woman. - Robert Brault
Love, love, love - all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures. - Germaine Greer
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
We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love. - Anonymous
Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination. - Voltaire
Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs. - William Shakespeare
While God waits for His temple to be built of love, men bring stones. - Rabindranath Tagore
Love is metaphysical gravity. - R. Buckminster Fuller
Love is my religion - I could die for it. - John Keats
Love is the self-delusion we manufacture to justify the trouble we take to have sex. - Dan Greenburg
Love would never be a promise of a rose garden unless it is showered with light of faith, water of sincerity and air of passion. - Anonymous
Just because somebody doesn't love you the way you want them to, doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have. - Anonymous
If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular? - Anonymous
Anyone can catch your eye, but it takes someone special to catch your heart. - Anonymous
Love is missing someone whenever you're apart, but somehow feeling warm inside because you're close in heart. - Kay Knudsen
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another. - Henry Louis Mencken
You learn to like someone when you find out what makes them laugh, but you can never truly love someone until you find out what makes them cry. - Anonymous
Sometimes we make love with our eyes. Sometimes we make love with our hands. Sometimes we make love with our bodies. Always we make love with our hearts. - Anonymous
True love is when you put someone on a pedestal, and they fall - but you are there to catch them. - Anonymous
You know when you have found your prince because you not only have a smile on your face but in your heart as well. - Anonymous
Love puts the fun in together, the sad in apart, and the joy in a heart. - Anonymous
Trip over love, you can get up. Fall in love and you fall forever. - Anonymous
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. - Thomas Merton
Love is not blind - it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less. - Julins Gordon
To the world you might be one person, but to one person you might be the world. - Anonymous
No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness. - Oliver Wendell Holmes
Today's Multiple Choice Thought
There is no place where a loving touch so completely compensates for an unskilled hand as in:
a. the bedroom
b. the nursery
c. the garden
d. all of the above.
I guess, when you get down to it, a loving touch compensates for an unskilled hand about everywhere except in an airplane cockpit. - Robert Brault
It's so easy to fall in love but hard to find someone who will catch you. - Anonymous
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance. - Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray"
Candle light, moon light, star light,
The brightest glow is from love light.
- Grey Livingston
Love is the silent saying and saying of a single name. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Come live in my heart and pay no rent. - Samuel Lover
Romance is dead - it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, and sold off piece by piece. - Lisa Simpson, "The Simpsons" cartoon show
If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus. - Emma Goldman, "The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation"
I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art. - St. Thomas Moore
Love isn't blind, it's retarded. - Don Foster and Susan Beavers, "Two and a Half Men" comedy TV show
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. - Emma Goldman, "Marriage and Love"
Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion. - Miguel de Unamuno
If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I. - Michel de Montaigne
I don't wish to be everything to everyone, but I would like to be something to someone. - Javan
Like I've always said, love wouldn't be blind if the braille weren't so damned much fun. - Armistead Maupin, "Maybe the Moon"
Part of the reason that men seem so much less loving than women is that men's behavior is measured with a feminine ruler. - Francesca M. Cancian
What I need to live has been given to me by the earth. Why I need to live has been given to me by you. - Anonymous
If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden. - Claudia Ghandi
Falling in love is so hard on the knees. - Aerosmith, rock music group
In true love the smallest distance is too great, and the greatest distance can be bridged. - Hans Nouwens
Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages. - Marcel Proust, "Remembrance of Things Past: Cities of the Plain," 1922
In springtime, love is carried on the breeze. Watch out for flying passion or kisses whizzing by your head. - Terri Guillemets
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost. - G.K. Chesterton
I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each other's dreams, we can play together all night. - Bill Watterson, "Calvin & Hobbes" cartoon strip
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else. - George Bernard Shaw
The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence. - Edward Thomas
When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. - Nora Ephron, "When Harry Met Sally" movie
