Love Quotations
Albert Einstein:
Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
-->
Albert Einstein:
How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?
Alfred Adler:
We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a "getaway." We cannot love and be limited.
-->
Alfred Tennyson:
I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.
Allan K. Chalmers:
The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
Ambrose Bierce:
Love: a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.
Amy Bloom:
Love at first sight is easy to understand; it's when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.
Amy Tan:
I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.
Anais Nin:
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
Ann Landers:
If you have love in your life it can make up for a great many things you lack. If you don't have it, no matter what else there is, it's not enough.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh:
Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery:
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.
Barbara De Angelis:
Love is a choice you make from moment to moment.
Barbara De Angelis:
Love and kindness are never wasted. They always make a difference. They bless the one who receives them, and they bless you, the giver.
Bayard Rustin:
When I say I love Eastland, it sounds preposterous -- a man who brutalizes people. But you love him or you wouldn't be here. You're going to Mississippi to create social change -- and you love Eastland in your desire to create conditions which will redeem his children. Loving your enemy is manifest in putting your arms not around the man but around the social situation, to take power from those who misuse it -- at which point they can become human too.
Bayard Taylor:
I love thee, I love but theeWith a love that shall not dieTill the sun grows cold,And the stars grow old...
Bertrand Russell:
Three passions have governed my life: The longings for love, the search for knowledge, And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].
Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness. In the union of love I have seen In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of [people]. I have wished to know why the stars shine.
Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens, But always pity brought me back to earth; Cries of pain reverberated in my heart Of children in famine, of victims tortured And of old people left helpless. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, And I too suffer.
This has been my life; I found it worth living.
adapted
Bertrand Russell:
A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.
-->
Bible:
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 wrongs.Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth.It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.Love never fails.I Corinthians 13:4-8
Blaise Pascal:
The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.
C.S. Lewis:
Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.
Carl Jung:
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.
Carter Heyward:
Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn toward." Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies. This entry continued ...
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve:
Tell me who admires and loves you, And I will tell you who you are.
Chaucer:
For there is one thing I can safely say: that those bound by love must obey each other if they are to keep company long. Love will not be constrained by mastery; when mastery comes, the God of love at once beats his wings, and farewell -- he is gone. Love is a thing as free as any spirit; women naturally desire liberty, and not to be constrained like slaves; and so do men, if I shall tell the truth.This entry continued ...
-->
Dale Evans:
Every time we love, every time we give, it's Christmas.
Don Byas:
You call it madness, but I call it love.
-->
E.M. Forster:
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...
Ecclesiastes:
For everything there is a season,And a time for every matter under heaven:A time to be born, and a time to die;A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;A time to kill, and a time to heal;A time to break down, and a time to build up;A time to weep, and a time to laugh;A time to mourn, and a time to dance;A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;A time to seek, and a time to lose;A time to keep, and a time to throw away;A time to tear, and a time to sew;A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;A time to love, and a time to hate,A time for war, and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
Edna St. Vincent Millay:
Life is a quest and love a quarrel ...
-->
Edna St. Vincent Millay:
I love humanity but I hate people.
Elbert Hubbard:
The love we give away is the only love we keep.
Elie Wiesel:
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
(Oct. 1986)
Elie Wiesel:
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
Elizabeth Barret Browning:
Whoso loves, believes the impossible.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox:
All love that has not friendship for its base,Is like a mansion built upon the sand.
Emily Dickinson:
That Love is all there is,Is all we know of Love.
-->
Emily Dickinson:
Love—is anterior to Life—Posterior—to Death—Initial of Creation, andThe Exponent of Earth—
-->
Emily Dickinson:
Who has not found the heaven belowWill fail of it above.God's residence is next to min,His furniture is love.
-->
Emma Goldman:
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.
Erich Fromm:
Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved."Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love."Immature love says: "I love you because I need you."Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."
Ernest Becker:
When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.
Euripides:
He is not a lover who does not love forever.
-->
Felix Adler:
Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each include the other, each is enriched by the other.
Francis David:
We need not think alike to love alike.
Franklin P. Jones:
Love doesn't make the world go 'round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
Friedrich Nietzsche:
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Georg C. Lichtenberg:
Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.
George MacDonald:
To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.
George Sand:
There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.
George Santayana:
Love is only half the illusion; the lover, but not his love, is deceived.
The Life of Reason, 1905-1906
Goethe:
To be loved for what one is, is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him, their own selves, their version of him.
H. L. Mencken:
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia -- to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
Prejudices, 1919
HH the Dalai Lama:
Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually. Peace, for example, starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us.This entry continued ...
HH the Dalai Lama:
When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.
Han Suyin [Elizabeth Comber]:
...love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.
b. 1917 Chinese writer and physician
Hazrat Inayat Khan:
The sage said, "The best thing is not to hate anyone, only to love. That is the only way out of it. As soon as you have forgiven those whom you hate, you have gotten rid of them. Then you have no reason to hate them; you just forget.
Spiritual Dimensions of Psychology
Helen Keller:
Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding line, and no way of knowing how near the harbor was. "Light! Give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.
Henri Nouwen:
Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.
-->
Henry David Thoreau:
Love must be as much a light as it is a flame.
Henry David Thoreau:
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
If I am not worth the wooing, I am surely not worth the winning.
Herman Hesse:
If I know what love is, it is because of you.
Hermann Hesse:
You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.
Hobbes (of Calvin and ...):
I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each others dreams, we can be together all the time.
Houssaye:
Tell me whom you love and I will tell you who you are.
Ingrid Bergman:
A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.
Isha McKenzie-Mavinga:
On reflection, one of the things I needed to learn was to allow myself to be loved.
James Baldwin:
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
Another Country, 1962
James D. Bryden:
Love does not die easily. It is a living thing. It thrives in the face of all of life's hazards, save one -- neglect.
James Thurber and E.B. White:
Love is the strange bewilderment which overtakes one person on account of another person.
Jane Austen:
Friendship is the finest balm for the pangs of despised love.
Jane Austen:
One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it unless it has all been suffering, nothing but suffering.
Jean Baptiste Henry Lacordaire:
We are the leaves of one branch, the drops of one sea, the flowers of one garden.
Jeanne Moreau:
Age does not protect you from love, but love to some extent protects you from age.
Jessamyn West:
A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.
The Quaker Reader, 1962
Jimi Hendrix:
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
Joan Vinge:
Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.
The Snow Queen
John Lennon:
Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.
-->
Jonathan Swift:
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Karl Menninger:
Love cures people -- both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
W.H. Murray
Katharine Hepburn:
Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.
Lily Tomlin:
If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?
Lisa Hoffman:
Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important.
-->
M. Scott Peck:
Although the act of nurturing another's spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one's own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved.
Madeleine de Scudery:
Love makes mutes of those who habitually speak most fluently.
Marcel Proust:
In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual, delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted, atrocious.
Margaret Anderson:
In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person.
Margaret Guenther:
[W]e all need friends with whom we can speak of our deepest concerns, and who do not fear to speak the truth in love to us.
Mark Twain:
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
Mark Twain:
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
Mark Twain:
After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
Adam, in Adam's Diary
Martin Luther King, Jr.:
Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.
-->
Martin Luther King, jr.:
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
-->
Mary Oliver:
To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. Blackwater Woods
Mary Parrish:
Love vanquishes time. To lovers, a moment can be eternity, eternity can be the tick of a clock.
Mary S. Calderone:
I truly feel that there are as many ways of loving as there are people in the world and as there are days in the life of those people.
-->
Matthew Arnold:
Is it so small a thing To have enjoy'd the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done...
-->
Mitsugi Saotome:
If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth.
Mohandas K. Gandhi:
Hatred ever kills, love never dies. Such is the vast difference between the two. What is obtained by love is retained for all time. What is obtained by hatred proves a burden in reality for it increases hatred.
Mohandas K. Gandhi:
Where there is love there is life.
Molly Haskell:
But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat.
Mother Teresa:
The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.
Mother Teresa:
Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go.
Nathaniel Hawthorne:
It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.
from The Scarlet Letter
Norman Lindsay:
The best love affairs are those we never had.
Oscar Hammerstein, II:
Do you love me because I'm beautiful, or am I am beautiful because you love me?
Oscar Wilde:
Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
-->
Paul Tillich:
The first duty of love is to listen.
-->
Pearl Bailey:
What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork.
Pearl S. Buck:
A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.
-->
Pearl S. Buck:
The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
Pearl S. Buck:
I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.
Rainer Maria Rilke:
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.
Reinhold Niebuhr:
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,Therefore, we are saved by hope.Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;Therefore, we are saved by faith.Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.Therefore, we are saved by love.No virtuous act is quite a 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.
Robert Frost:
Earth's the right place for love. I don't know where it's likely to go better.
Birches
-->
Robert Fulghum:
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.
Robert G. Ingersoll:
Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud.It is the Morning and the Evening Star.It shines upon the cradle of the babe,and sheds its radiance upon 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 right royal kings and queens of common clay.It is the perfume of the wondrous flower -- the heart and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon,we are less than beasts;but with it, earth is heavenand we are gods.
Robert Heinlein:
Love is a condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Roger de Bussy-Rabutin:
Absence is to love as wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small and kindles the great.
Rose Walker:
Have you even been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...This entry continued ...
Roy Croft:
I love youNot only for what you areBut for what I am When I am with you
Love (first stanza)
Rumi:
Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded. Someone sober will worry about events going badly.Let the lover be.
Rumi:
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:
Come out of the circle of timeAnd into the circle of love.
Saint Francis de Sales:
You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves.
-->
Samuel Butler:
Perhaps; but is it not Tennyson who has said: "'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have lost at all"? in The Way of All Flesh
Simone Weil:
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?"
Sir Arthur Pinero:
Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
Song of Solomon:
This is my beloved and this is my friend.
Spanish proverb:
Where there is love, there is pain.
St. Augustine:
Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.
Søren Kierkegaard:
Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.
Thomas Merton:
It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them…. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.
Tom Robbins:
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 vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
Still Life With Woodpecker
Truman Capote:
The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.
Other Voices, Other Rooms, 1948
Unknown:
Love is blind, but friendship closes its eyes.
Ursula K. LeGuin:
Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
Ursula LeGuin:
Love doesn't sit there like a stone. It has to made like bread; remade all the time, made new.
-->
Victor Frankl:
A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."
Victor Hugo:
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
W.H. Murray:
...the more the soul knows, the more she loves, and loving much, she tastes much.
from the journal of his Himalayan expedition
-->
Washington Irving:
Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.
-->
Willa Cather:
Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
Willa Cather:
Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.
William E. Gladstone :
We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.
William Shakespeare:
Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.
William Shakespeare:
Love all, trust a few.
William Shakespeare:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,My love as deep; the more I give to thee,The more I have, for both are infinite.
"Romeo and Juliet"
-->
William Sloane Coffin:
The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
William Wordsworth:
The little unremembered acts of kindness and love are the best parts of a person's life.
Zora Neale Hurston:
Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.
Albert Einstein:
Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
-->
Albert Einstein:
How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?
Alfred Adler:
We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a "getaway." We cannot love and be limited.
-->
Alfred Tennyson:
I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.
Allan K. Chalmers:
The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
Ambrose Bierce:
Love: a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.
Amy Bloom:
Love at first sight is easy to understand; it's when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.
Amy Tan:
I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.
Anais Nin:
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
Ann Landers:
If you have love in your life it can make up for a great many things you lack. If you don't have it, no matter what else there is, it's not enough.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh:
Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery:
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.
Barbara De Angelis:
Love is a choice you make from moment to moment.
Barbara De Angelis:
Love and kindness are never wasted. They always make a difference. They bless the one who receives them, and they bless you, the giver.
Bayard Rustin:
When I say I love Eastland, it sounds preposterous -- a man who brutalizes people. But you love him or you wouldn't be here. You're going to Mississippi to create social change -- and you love Eastland in your desire to create conditions which will redeem his children. Loving your enemy is manifest in putting your arms not around the man but around the social situation, to take power from those who misuse it -- at which point they can become human too.
Bayard Taylor:
I love thee, I love but theeWith a love that shall not dieTill the sun grows cold,And the stars grow old...
Bertrand Russell:
Three passions have governed my life: The longings for love, the search for knowledge, And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].
Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness. In the union of love I have seen In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of [people]. I have wished to know why the stars shine.
Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens, But always pity brought me back to earth; Cries of pain reverberated in my heart Of children in famine, of victims tortured And of old people left helpless. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, And I too suffer.
This has been my life; I found it worth living.
adapted
Bertrand Russell:
A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.
-->
Bible:
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 wrongs.Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth.It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.Love never fails.I Corinthians 13:4-8
Blaise Pascal:
The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.
C.S. Lewis:
Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.
Carl Jung:
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.
Carter Heyward:
Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn toward." Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies. This entry continued ...
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve:
Tell me who admires and loves you, And I will tell you who you are.
Chaucer:
For there is one thing I can safely say: that those bound by love must obey each other if they are to keep company long. Love will not be constrained by mastery; when mastery comes, the God of love at once beats his wings, and farewell -- he is gone. Love is a thing as free as any spirit; women naturally desire liberty, and not to be constrained like slaves; and so do men, if I shall tell the truth.This entry continued ...
-->
Dale Evans:
Every time we love, every time we give, it's Christmas.
Don Byas:
You call it madness, but I call it love.
-->
E.M. Forster:
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...
Ecclesiastes:
For everything there is a season,And a time for every matter under heaven:A time to be born, and a time to die;A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;A time to kill, and a time to heal;A time to break down, and a time to build up;A time to weep, and a time to laugh;A time to mourn, and a time to dance;A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;A time to seek, and a time to lose;A time to keep, and a time to throw away;A time to tear, and a time to sew;A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;A time to love, and a time to hate,A time for war, and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
Edna St. Vincent Millay:
Life is a quest and love a quarrel ...
-->
Edna St. Vincent Millay:
I love humanity but I hate people.
Elbert Hubbard:
The love we give away is the only love we keep.
Elie Wiesel:
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
(Oct. 1986)
Elie Wiesel:
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
Elizabeth Barret Browning:
Whoso loves, believes the impossible.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox:
All love that has not friendship for its base,Is like a mansion built upon the sand.
Emily Dickinson:
That Love is all there is,Is all we know of Love.
-->
Emily Dickinson:
Love—is anterior to Life—Posterior—to Death—Initial of Creation, andThe Exponent of Earth—
-->
Emily Dickinson:
Who has not found the heaven belowWill fail of it above.God's residence is next to min,His furniture is love.
-->
Emma Goldman:
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.
Erich Fromm:
Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved."Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love."Immature love says: "I love you because I need you."Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."
Ernest Becker:
When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.
Euripides:
He is not a lover who does not love forever.
-->
Felix Adler:
Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each include the other, each is enriched by the other.
Francis David:
We need not think alike to love alike.
Franklin P. Jones:
Love doesn't make the world go 'round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
Friedrich Nietzsche:
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Georg C. Lichtenberg:
Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.
George MacDonald:
To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.
George Sand:
There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.
George Santayana:
Love is only half the illusion; the lover, but not his love, is deceived.
The Life of Reason, 1905-1906
Goethe:
To be loved for what one is, is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him, their own selves, their version of him.
H. L. Mencken:
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia -- to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
Prejudices, 1919
HH the Dalai Lama:
Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually. Peace, for example, starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us.This entry continued ...
HH the Dalai Lama:
When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.
Han Suyin [Elizabeth Comber]:
...love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.
b. 1917 Chinese writer and physician
Hazrat Inayat Khan:
The sage said, "The best thing is not to hate anyone, only to love. That is the only way out of it. As soon as you have forgiven those whom you hate, you have gotten rid of them. Then you have no reason to hate them; you just forget.
Spiritual Dimensions of Psychology
Helen Keller:
Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding line, and no way of knowing how near the harbor was. "Light! Give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.
Henri Nouwen:
Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.
-->
Henry David Thoreau:
Love must be as much a light as it is a flame.
Henry David Thoreau:
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
If I am not worth the wooing, I am surely not worth the winning.
Herman Hesse:
If I know what love is, it is because of you.
Hermann Hesse:
You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.
Hobbes (of Calvin and ...):
I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each others dreams, we can be together all the time.
Houssaye:
Tell me whom you love and I will tell you who you are.
Ingrid Bergman:
A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.
Isha McKenzie-Mavinga:
On reflection, one of the things I needed to learn was to allow myself to be loved.
James Baldwin:
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
Another Country, 1962
James D. Bryden:
Love does not die easily. It is a living thing. It thrives in the face of all of life's hazards, save one -- neglect.
James Thurber and E.B. White:
Love is the strange bewilderment which overtakes one person on account of another person.
Jane Austen:
Friendship is the finest balm for the pangs of despised love.
Jane Austen:
One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it unless it has all been suffering, nothing but suffering.
Jean Baptiste Henry Lacordaire:
We are the leaves of one branch, the drops of one sea, the flowers of one garden.
Jeanne Moreau:
Age does not protect you from love, but love to some extent protects you from age.
Jessamyn West:
A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.
The Quaker Reader, 1962
Jimi Hendrix:
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
Joan Vinge:
Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.
The Snow Queen
John Lennon:
Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.
-->
Jonathan Swift:
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Karl Menninger:
Love cures people -- both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
W.H. Murray
Katharine Hepburn:
Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.
Lily Tomlin:
If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?
Lisa Hoffman:
Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important.
-->
M. Scott Peck:
Although the act of nurturing another's spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one's own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved.
Madeleine de Scudery:
Love makes mutes of those who habitually speak most fluently.
Marcel Proust:
In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual, delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted, atrocious.
Margaret Anderson:
In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person.
Margaret Guenther:
[W]e all need friends with whom we can speak of our deepest concerns, and who do not fear to speak the truth in love to us.
Mark Twain:
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
Mark Twain:
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
Mark Twain:
After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
Adam, in Adam's Diary
Martin Luther King, Jr.:
Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.
-->
Martin Luther King, jr.:
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
-->
Mary Oliver:
To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. Blackwater Woods
Mary Parrish:
Love vanquishes time. To lovers, a moment can be eternity, eternity can be the tick of a clock.
Mary S. Calderone:
I truly feel that there are as many ways of loving as there are people in the world and as there are days in the life of those people.
-->
Matthew Arnold:
Is it so small a thing To have enjoy'd the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done...
-->
Mitsugi Saotome:
If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth.
Mohandas K. Gandhi:
Hatred ever kills, love never dies. Such is the vast difference between the two. What is obtained by love is retained for all time. What is obtained by hatred proves a burden in reality for it increases hatred.
Mohandas K. Gandhi:
Where there is love there is life.
Molly Haskell:
But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat.
Mother Teresa:
The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.
Mother Teresa:
Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go.
Nathaniel Hawthorne:
It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.
from The Scarlet Letter
Norman Lindsay:
The best love affairs are those we never had.
Oscar Hammerstein, II:
Do you love me because I'm beautiful, or am I am beautiful because you love me?
Oscar Wilde:
Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
-->
Paul Tillich:
The first duty of love is to listen.
-->
Pearl Bailey:
What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork.
Pearl S. Buck:
A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.
-->
Pearl S. Buck:
The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
Pearl S. Buck:
I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.
Rainer Maria Rilke:
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.
Reinhold Niebuhr:
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,Therefore, we are saved by hope.Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;Therefore, we are saved by faith.Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.Therefore, we are saved by love.No virtuous act is quite a 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.
Robert Frost:
Earth's the right place for love. I don't know where it's likely to go better.
Birches
-->
Robert Fulghum:
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.
Robert G. Ingersoll:
Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud.It is the Morning and the Evening Star.It shines upon the cradle of the babe,and sheds its radiance upon 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 right royal kings and queens of common clay.It is the perfume of the wondrous flower -- the heart and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon,we are less than beasts;but with it, earth is heavenand we are gods.
Robert Heinlein:
Love is a condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Roger de Bussy-Rabutin:
Absence is to love as wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small and kindles the great.
Rose Walker:
Have you even been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...This entry continued ...
Roy Croft:
I love youNot only for what you areBut for what I am When I am with you
Love (first stanza)
Rumi:
Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded. Someone sober will worry about events going badly.Let the lover be.
Rumi:
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:
Come out of the circle of timeAnd into the circle of love.
Saint Francis de Sales:
You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves.
-->
Samuel Butler:
Perhaps; but is it not Tennyson who has said: "'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have lost at all"? in The Way of All Flesh
Simone Weil:
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?"
Sir Arthur Pinero:
Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
Song of Solomon:
This is my beloved and this is my friend.
Spanish proverb:
Where there is love, there is pain.
St. Augustine:
Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.
Søren Kierkegaard:
Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.
Thomas Merton:
It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them…. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.
Tom Robbins:
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 vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
Still Life With Woodpecker
Truman Capote:
The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.
Other Voices, Other Rooms, 1948
Unknown:
Love is blind, but friendship closes its eyes.
Ursula K. LeGuin:
Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
Ursula LeGuin:
Love doesn't sit there like a stone. It has to made like bread; remade all the time, made new.
-->
Victor Frankl:
A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."
Victor Hugo:
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
W.H. Murray:
...the more the soul knows, the more she loves, and loving much, she tastes much.
from the journal of his Himalayan expedition
-->
Washington Irving:
Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.
-->
Willa Cather:
Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
Willa Cather:
Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.
William E. Gladstone :
We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.
William Shakespeare:
Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.
William Shakespeare:
Love all, trust a few.
William Shakespeare:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,My love as deep; the more I give to thee,The more I have, for both are infinite.
"Romeo and Juliet"
-->
William Sloane Coffin:
The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
William Wordsworth:
The little unremembered acts of kindness and love are the best parts of a person's life.
Zora Neale Hurston:
Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.
