Love Quotes

Quotes About Love From Million Quotes

 










Less is more unless it's love. - Ben Mittleman


If there is a day to act on the Love in your soul it is today, it is this moment. - Mike Dolan, @HawaiianLife


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


There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved. It is God's finger on man's shoulder. - Charles Morgan


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. - Erich Fromm


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. - Khalil Gibran


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. - Author Unknown


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. - Author Unknown


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





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


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 VI de la Rochefoucault


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)"
(Thanks, Krystel)


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, www.originals.net


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.
- Author Unknown


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. - Author unknown, 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 cures people—both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it. - Karl Menninger


If grass can grow through cement, love can find you at every time in your life. - Cher


Love is staying up all night with a sick child — or a healthy adult. - David Frost


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


While duty measures the regard it owes
With scrupulous precision and nice justice,
Love never reasons, but profusely gives,
Gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all,
And trembles then, lest it has done too little.
- Hannah More


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


Take love as a sober man takes wine; do not become a drunkard. If your mistress is sincere and faithful, love her for that; but if she is not, if she is merely young and beautiful, love her for that; if she is agreeable and spirituelle, love her for that; if she is none of these things but merely loves you, love her for that. Love does not come to us every day. - Alfred de Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century/La Confession d'un enfant du siècle, 1836, Desgenais to Octave, translated from French by Kendall Warren


It is the same in love as in war; a fortress that parleys is half taken. - Marguerite de Valois


Love.... Its eternal goal is life.... No one who has ever brought up a child can doubt for a moment that love is literally the life-giving fluid of human existence. - Smiley Blanton, quoted in Woman's Home Companion, 1956


A joyful heart is the inevitable result of a heart burning with love. - Mother Teresa


You don't have to go looking for love when it's where you come from. - Werner Erhard





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 is moonlight all about
And there's no moon above.
- E.Y. "Yip" Harburg & Fred Saidy
[I first wrote this down as a young teenager riding in my parents' car one night. It was on their oldies radio station, and I loved the line. For years I didn't know the attribution, but I am so grateful to Katherine who wrote to let me know that it's in the dialogue just before the song "Old Devil Moon" in the musical Finian's Rainbow. Thank you! —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]


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


I don't think you can keep someone you truly love at arm's length on purpose, they'll always end up in your arms. - Holly Nichole Miller


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. - Author Unknown


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





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 VI de la Rochefoucault


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


Be everything with so much love in your heart that you would never want to do it any other way. - Amrit Desai


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 in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky


[T]here is no hope for us in this painful, mysterious world save in giving ourselves to love. - Byron Caldwell Smith, letter to Kate Stephens


[Victor's] heart was on the sunny side of love... - Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Hesperus, or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography, translated from German by Charles T. Brooks, 1865





Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze. - Elinor Glyn


For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love. - Carl Sagan


True love, to whom my heart is prey,
How dost thou hold me in thy sway,
That in each day I find no fault
But daily wait for love's assault.
- Pernette du Guillet


Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. - Leo Tolstoy





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


Smiles escape from clouds above and angels ring a chorus of your love. - Daniel, @blindedpoet


You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. - Author Unknown


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.
- W.E. Henley





Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in love. I'd stepped in it a few times. - Rita Rudner


Fall not in love therefore; it will stick to your face. - Tony Hendra, "Deteriorata"


Love does not care to define and is never in a hurry to do so. - Charles du Bos


Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration. - D.H. Lawrence


What an infinity of bliss the possession of your love seemed to me — the future so full of passionate sweet life that my spirit shrank blinded from trying to explore it; I stopped content with the delicious sense of that moment alone. - Byron Caldwell Smith, letter to Kate Stephens


Love is an electric blanket with somebody else in control of the switch. - Cathy Carlyle


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  (Thanks, Bonnie)


The past is behind us, love is in front and all around us. - Terri Guillemets








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, 2009


She stole a piece of my heart but I couldn't ask for a better place I'd rather be imprisoned. - Craig D. Slovak


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


Voluptuous bloom and fragrance rare
The summer to its rose may bring;
Far sweeter to the wooing air
The hidden violet of spring.
Still, still that lovely ghost appears,
Too fair, too pure, to bid depart;
No riper love of later years
Can steal its beauty from the heart.
- Bayard Taylor, "Young Love"


Love touches the soul and awakens a desire so powerful that even the most vigilant heart is lured by its radiance. - Jamie Lynn Morris


But I think it is hardly an argument against a man's general strength of character, that he should be apt to be mastered by love. A fine constitution doesn't insure one against small-pox or any other of those inevitable diseases. A man may be very firm in other matters, and yet be under a sort of witchery from a woman. - George Eliot, Adam Bede





Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. - Rumi


Love! Immortality! it speedily became so hot in my breast, that I thought the geographers had misplaced the equator, and that it now ran directly through my heart. And from my heart poured out the feeling of love;—it poured forth with wild longing into the broad night. The flowers in the garden beneath my window breathed a stronger perfume. Perfumes are the feelings of flowers, and as the human heart feels most powerful emotions in the night, when it believes itself to be alone and unperceived, so also do the flowers, soft-minded, yet ashamed, appear to await for concealing darkness, that they may give themselves wholly up to their feelings, and breathe them out in sweet odours. Pour forth, ye perfumes of my heart, and seek beyond yon blue mountain for the loved one of my dreams! - Heinrich Heine, "The Hartz Journey" (1824), Pictures of Travel, translated from German by Charles Godfrey Leland, 1855





Love is not a matter of what happens in life. It's a matter of what's happening in your heart. - Ken Keyes


Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. - Lao Tzu


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. - Author unknown, attributed to an 8-year-old named Jessica





The learned compute that seven hundred and seven millions of millions of vibrations have penetrated the eye before the eye can distinguish the tints of a violet. What philosophy can calculate the vibrations of the heart before it can distinguish the colours of love? - Pisistratus Caxton, What Will He Do With It?


[I]f you are truly a man, sure of yourself and confident of your strength, you may taste of life without fear and without reserve; you may be sad or joyous, deceived or respected; but be sure you are loved, for what matters the rest? - Alfred de Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century/La Confession d'un enfant du siècle, 1836, Desgenais to Octave, translated from French by Kendall Warren


So dear I love him, that with him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life. - John Milton


Feelings pass like clouds but love endures like the sky. - Peter Roberts (Omnipresent Love, @evolvewithlove)


In the midst of pain and urgent trouble we can not realize the supreme happiness of being loved — sweetest and deepest of all meditations.... - Byron Caldwell Smith, letter to Kate Stephens


Love is the second prevailing virtue, that adorns her character. Without it she is like a closed blossom which exhibits neither its beauty or its fragrance; love reveals her inward mystery. - Frederick A. Rauch, "Of Woman," Psychology; or, A View of the Human Soul: Including Anthropology, Being the Substance of a Course of Lectures, Delivered to the Junior Class Marshall College, Penn., 1840


Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold. - Zelda Fitzgerald





Love is the law of life. - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi


Are you a man, Octave? Do you see the leaves falling from the trees, the sun rising and setting? Do you hear the ticking of the clock of time with each pulsation of your heart? Is there, then, such a difference between the love of a year and the love of an hour? I challenge you to answer that, you fool, as you sit there looking out at the infinite through a window not larger than your hand. - Alfred de Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century/La Confession d'un enfant du siècle, 1836, Desgenais to Octave, translated from French by Kendall Warren


Candle light, moon light, star light,
The brightest glow is from love light.
- Terri Guillemets


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





To lovers! — the have-been's, the are-now's, and the may-be's. - Minna Thomas Antrim, A Book of Toasts, 1902


Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good too. - Author unknown, 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


I see that you believe in love such as the poets and romancers have represented... The poets represent love as the sculptors design beauty, as the musicians create melody; that is to say, endowed with an exquisite nervous organization, they gather up with discerning ardor the purest elements of life, the most beautiful lines of matter, and the most harmonious voices of nature.... To try to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute, is the same thing as to seek on the public squares such a woman as Venus or to expect nightingales to sing the symphonies of Beethoven. - Alfred de Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century/La Confession d'un enfant du siècle, 1836, Desgenais to Octave, translated from French by Kendall Warren


Love is a Mystery. You can't find it; it has to find you. - Author Unknown


Tumbling and playing, young and free
Moving targets we were
But Cupid's arrow
is heat-seeking, and found, and pierced.
- Terri Guillemets


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


So I'll sit and rock and be happy,
And meditate mostly on love!...
Love for my mother and dad...
And love for the friends I have had!
Love for the blessings God gives me,
Love for the sunshine and showers,
Love for the creatures God put here,
And love for the trees and the flowers...
- Gertrude Buckingham, "To Ruth Ann"


Your fortune is misfortune if it is not Love. - Silent Lotus





My heart was glass, daily shattered
Your love the glue, repairing the tattered.
- Jaesse Tyler


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. - Author Unknown


Love is what makes two people sit in the middle of a bench when there is plenty of room at both ends. - Author Unknown





You see, I'd never stopped to wonder why it was that millions of boys all over creation weren't seeing her and instantly falling in love with her, worshipping her body and mind and soul and spirit as I did. It never occurred to me until this precise moment that maybe lots of boys wouldn't have thought she was gorgeous. Maybe she only seemed so gorgeous to me because — and this is the shocker — her face came alive when I walked in front of it. - Author Unknown  [Hey, y'all. I got this from Sassy magazine years ago — 1987, I believe — but then I lost it; does anyone know the attribution?—tεᖇᖇ¡·g]


I'm so in love, every time I look at you my soul gets dizzy. - Jaesse Tyler


Before you love, learn to run through the snow leaving no footprint. - Turkish Proverb


Friendship, as some sage poet sings,
Is chasten'd Love, depriv'd of wings,
Without all wish or power to wander;
Less volatile, but not less tender:
Yet says the proverb—"Sly and slow
"Love creeps, even where he cannot go;"
To clip his pinions then is vain,
His old propensities remain;
And she, who years beyond fifteen,
Has counted twenty, may have seen
How rarely unplum'd Love will stay;
He flies not—but he coolly walks away.
- Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806), "On the Aphorism, 'L'Amitié est l' Amour sans ailes.'"


What the world really needs is more love and less paper work. - Pearl Bailey


Love is how you earn your wings. - Karen Goldman


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


To find love some day—there was a fit ambition for every human heart! But how often it was pushed aside by greed, by cynicism, by selfishness, by fear—by any number of cold and worldly things! - Burton E. Stevenson, The Kingmakers, "Chapter XIX: Selden Takes an Inventory," 1922





It is really one moment of looking love dead in the eye that takes us everywhere in a flash. - Swami Chetanananda


Christianity claims to be pre-eminently the religion of love, in the widest sense of that term.... it cannot be denied that much good would have resulted if more emphasis had been placed by the Apostles on certain phases of the domestic relations. That Romantic Love is not alluded to in the New Testament need not cause any surprise, for that sentiment cannot have existed in those days when Courtship and Individual Choice were unknown. But there are passages in St. Paul's writings which were probably the seeds from which grew the mediæval contempt for marriage and women. And although marriage is now zealously guarded by the Church, Love of the romantic sort is no doubt looked upon even to‑day by many an austere clergyman as a harmless youthful epidemic—a sort of emotional measles—rather than as a new æsthetico-moral sentiment destined to become the strongest of all agencies working for the improvement of the personal appearance, social condition, and happiness of mankind. - Henry T. Finck, "Christianity and Love," Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their Development, Causal Relations, Historic and National Peculiarities, 1887





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'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


I saw them kissing in the shade
and knew the sum of all my lore:
God gave them Youth, God gave them Love,
and even God can give no more.
- Frederic Ridgely Torrence, The House of a Hundred Lights: A Psalm of Experience After Reading a Couplet of Bidpai, 1899





Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination. - Voltaire


In a deep moment of love, thinking stops. The moment is so intriguing, the moment is so tremendously powerful, the moment is so intensely alive, that thinking stops. You are simply in awe, a great wonder surrounds you. - Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh


Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs. - William Shakespeare


There's no denying that the only real unhappiness in life is losing a man.... Death isn't nature's greatest mistake — falling in love is. If we didn't do that, all the misery in life would be cut right out of it. Oh my goodness, so would all the fun. So, what are you gonna do about it. - When Ladies Meet, 1941 movie written by Rachel Crothers, John Meehan, Leon Gordon, S.K. Lauren, and Anita Loos, spoken by the character Bridgie Drake  [I got this directly from the later movie, but I'm not sure if the same quote is also in the 1933 movie or the 1932 play — does anyone out there know? —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]


While God waits for His temple to be built of love, men bring stones. - Rabindranath Tagore


Life can be hard but if you've got somebody to love — yay! - Terri Guillemets


Love is why I came here in the first place. - John Denver





Your love has gone all through my body
like honey in water,
as a drug is mixed into spices,
as water is mingled with wine....
- Author Unknown


Oh! my friend, when you feel bursting on your lips the vow of eternal love, do not be afraid to yield, but do not confound wine with intoxication; do not think the cup divine because the draft is of celestial flavor; do not be astonished to find it broken and empty in the evening. - Alfred de Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century/La Confession d'un enfant du siècle, 1836, Desgenais to Octave, translated from French by Kendall Warren


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. - Author Unknown


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. - Author Unknown


Everyone has that one thing that's totally illogical, which if you really want to love that person, you've just got to accept. - Terri Guillemets


If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular? - Author Unknown


Anyone can catch your eye, but it takes someone special to catch your heart. - Author Unknown


No maths can entail love,
lovers belong to infinity.
- Terri Guillemets





I tell again the oldest and the newest story of all the world, — the story of Invincible Love! This tale divine — ancient as the beginning of things, fresh and young as the passing hour — has forms and names various as humanity. - Amelia E. Huddleston Barr, A Rose of a Hundred Leaves: A Love Story, 1891


Love is missing someone whenever you're apart, but somehow feeling warm inside because you're close in heart. - Kay Knudsen


For without love we will lose the will to live. Our mental and physical vitality is impaired, our resistance is lowered, and we succumb to illnesses that often prove fatal. We may escape actual death, but what remains is a meager and barren existence, emotionally so impoverished that we can only be called half alive. - Smiley Blanton, Love or Perish


Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another. - Henry Louis Mencken


Love knows no answer for it does not question. - Silent Lotus


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. - Author Unknown


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. - Author Unknown


True love is when you put someone on a pedestal, and they fall — but you are there to catch them. - Author Unknown


She thinks your lady-love will rule you as the moon rules the tides. - George Eliot, Adam Bede


You know when you have found your prince because you not only have a smile on your face but in your heart as well. - Author Unknown


Love puts the fun in together, the sad in apart, and the joy in a heart. - Author Unknown


Love is giving someone the ability to destroy you — but trusting them not to. - Author unknown





Trip over love, you can get up. Fall in love and you fall forever. - Author Unknown


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


And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything as you like it, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose, and it's always daisy-time. - D.H. Lawrence





To the world you might be one person, but to one person you might be the world. - Author Unknown


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








I am so tired — so tired.
I see too many people,
Read too many books.
Do too many things.
I hate the theaters,
I hate my work,
I want you, — only you....
Come to me between the cool sheets
And let me burrow my head in your shoulder....
- Pauline Cohn, "Rest"


It's so easy to fall in love but hard to find someone who will catch you. - Author Unknown


I'm far from perfect, but I'll be perfect for that imperfect person that's perfect for me. - Amanda Bynes


Passion spins around love and I am dizzy around you always. - Terri Guillemets


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


And he could glance at her continually as she bent over the fruit, while the level evening sunbeams stole through the thick apple-tree boughs and rested on her round cheek and neck as if they too were in love with her. - George Eliot, Adam Bede


Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two. - Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin


Love is the silent saying and saying of a single name. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Outlawed, but not alone, for Love
Is outlawed, too.
You cannot banish us, proud world:
We banish you.
- Alfred Noyes, "The Outlaw," The Century Magazine, January 1912


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


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


Lust never apologizes
Love never needs to.
- Terri Guillemets


I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art. - Thomas Moore





Love isn't blind, it's retarded. - Don Foster and Susan Beavers, Two and a Half Men


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


I offer you the remedy of Free Love as an antidote for enforced lust, and the world will have to take it before the disease can be cured. - Victoria Claflin Woodhull Martin, Tried As By Fire; or, The True and the False, Socially.


Everyone wants to be the sun that lifts up your life, but I'd rather be your moon, so I may shine on you during your darkest hour when the sun isn't around and the ghost white moonbeams will allow you to find comfort in my arms. - Craig D. Slovak


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


May love touch every brutal soldier and every uncherished heart. - Terri Guillemets


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  (Thanks, David)


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. - Author Unknown


A heart that loves is always young. - Greek Proverb





It's hard to defeat a woman in love. - Terri Guillemets


Falling in love is so hard on the knees. - Aerosmith


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


My heart quotes your love for me, not in words but in heartbeats. - Terri Guillemets


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