Love

We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.  

To be happy with a man you must understand him a lot and love him a little. To be happy with a woman you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all

Helen Rowland (1875–1950), U.S. journalist. A Guide to Men, “Fourth Interlude” (1922).

There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

Where there is no exaggeration there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding

Where there is no extravagance there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding

So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Anglo-Irish playwright, author. Lord Darlington, in Lady Windermere’s Fan,

Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–74), Anglo-Irish author, poet, playwright. Mr. Honeywood, in The Good Natur’d Man, act 1

Friendship is Love without his wings!

Lord Byron (1788–1824), English poet. L’Amitié est L’Amour Sans Ailes.

Love is only chatter,
Friends are all that matter.

The greatest sweetener of human life is Friendship. To raise this to the highest pitch of enjoyment, is a secret which but few discover.

Joseph Addison (1672–1719), English essayist. Interesting Anecdotes, Memoirs, Allegories, Essays, and Poetical Fragments, “Of Friendship” (1794).

When all is said and done, friendship is the only trustworthy fabric of the affections. So-called love is a delirious inhuman state of mind: when hot it substitutes indulgence for fair play; when cold it is cruel, but friendship is warmth in cold, firm ground in a bog.

Miles Franklin (1879–1954), Australian authoress. My Career Goes Bung, ch. 19 (written 1900; published 1946).

Had we never lov’d sae kindly,
Had we never lov’d sae blindly,
Never met— or never parted—
We had ne’er been broken-hearted.

Robert Burns (1759–96), Scottish poet. Ae Fond Kiss.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Anglo-Irish playwright, critic. Ellie, in Heartbreak House, act 2.

Infatuation

I understand by this passion the union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, which is inflamed by a single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which seeks her possession as the supreme or the sole happiness of our being.

Edward Gibbon (1737–94), English historian. Memoirs of my Life (1796; published in Routledge, Autobiography, 1971, pp. 54–55), of Gibbon’s youthful attachment to Mademoiselle Susan Curchod, who he claimed was the only woman in his life, and whom he later rejected. See Gibbon on Duty.

Infatuation

It is best to love wisely, no doubt: but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63), English author. Pendennis, ch. 6 (1848–50).

Infatuation

One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love— any love— reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.

Cesare Pavese (1908–50), Italian poet, novelist, translator. The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935–1950 (1952; tr. 1961), entry for 25 March 1950. See Pavese on Suicide.

Infidelity

Men and women are not born inconstant: they are made so by their early amorous experiences.

André Maurois (1885–1967), French author, critic. The Art of Living, “The Art of Loving” (1940).

Infidelity

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Anglo-Irish playwright, author. Lord Henry, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 1 (1891).

Loneliness

When Christ said: “I was hungry and you fed me,” he didn’t mean only the hunger for bread and for food; he also meant the hunger to be loved. Jesus himself experienced this loneliness. He came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept on hurting him. The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that’s real hunger.

Mother Teresa (b. 1910), Albanian-born Roman Catholic missionary. A Gift for God, “Imitation of Christ” (1975).

Love, Ended

After all, my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished,
Need we say it was not love,
Just because it perished?

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), U.S. poet. Passer Mortuus Est.

Love, Ended

And I shall find some girl perhaps,
And a better one than you,
With eyes as wise, but kindlier,
And lips as soft, but true,
And I daresay she will do.

Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), British poet. The Chilterns.

Love, Ended

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

George Eliot (1819–80), English novelist, editor. Middlemarch, bk. 3, ch. 27 (1871), of Rosamund and Lydgate.

Love, Ended

I leave before being left. I decide.

Brigitte Bardot (b. 1933), French screen actor. Quoted in: Newsweek (New York, 5 March 1973).

Love, Ended

I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken— and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.

Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949), U.S. novelist. Rhett Butler’s farewell to Scarlett O’Hara, in Gone with the Wind, vol. 2, pt. 5, ch. 63 (1936). The last words of his speech are: “I wish I could care what you do or where you go, but I can’t. My dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Love, Ended

When once estrangement has arisen between those who truly love each other, everything seems to widen the breach.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1837–1915), English writer. Run to Earth, ch. 8 (1868).

Love, First

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Anglo-Irish playwright, critic. Broadbent, in John Bull’s Other Island, act 4.

Love, First

In her first passion woman loves her lover,
In all the others all she loves is love.

Lord Byron (1788–1824), English poet. Don Juan, cto. 3, st. 3. The words are from La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, no. 471 (1678).

Love, First

We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.

Cyril Connolly (1903–74), British critic. The Unquiet Grave, pt. 1 (1944; rev. 1951).

Love

A man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her ears.

Woodrow Wyatt (b. 1918), British journalist. To the Point, “The Ears Have It” (1981). Wyatt’s reasoning, apropos of women, was that “what is said to them and what they believe about a man’s status is usually more important than the superficiality of good looks.”

Love

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

John Updike (b. 1932), U.S. author, critic. Couples, ch. 2 (1968).

Love

At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That’s a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), U.S. author. John to Kismine, in The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, ch. 11 (1922).

Love

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. . . . It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. Hans, in How to Save Your Own Life, “Intuition, extuition . . .” (1977).

Love

Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common-sense.

Helen Rowland (1875–1950), U.S. journalist. A Guide to Men, “Variations” (1922).

Love

Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.

Andy Warhol (1928–87), U.S. pop artist. From A to B and Back Again, ch. 3 (1975).

Love

For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that in the depth of love there is a depth of eternal despair, out of which springs hope and consolation.

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), Spanish philosophical writer. The Tragic Sense of Life, ch. 7 (1913).

Love

For love . . . has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you cannot separate them.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), British novelist. Orlando, ch. 2 (1928).

Love

Great passions, my dear, don’t exist: they’re liars’ fantasies. What do exist are little loves that may last for a short or a longer while.

Anna Magnani (1918–73), Egyptian-born Italian actor. Quoted in: Oriana Fallaci, The Egotists, “Anna Magnani” (1963).

Love

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. “The Method of Nature,” oration, 11 Aug. 1841, delivered to the Society of the Adelphi, Waterville College, Me. (published in The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1889).

Love

I don’t want to live— I want to love first, and live incidentally.

Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–1948), U.S. writer. Letter, March 1919, to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Quoted in: Nancy Milford, Zelda, pt. 1, ch. 4 (1970).

Love

I regard as a mortal sin not only the lying of the senses in matters of love, but also the illusion which the senses seek to create where love is only partial. I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one’s being, or else live, come what may, a life of complete chastity.

George Sand (1804–76), French novelist. The Story of My Life, vol. 4, pt. 5, ch. 7 (1856). Men could never adhere to this principle, Sand added, but women, “helped by shame and public opinion,” can easily accept the doctrine once convinced of its worth.

Love

I shall always be a priest of love.

D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), British author. Letter, 25 Dec. 1912 (published in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 1, ed. by James T. Boulton, 1979).

Love

If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.

André Breton (1896–1966), French surrealist. Taped discussions, 3 March 1928 (published in Recherches sur la Sexualité, Jan. 1928–Aug. 1932, “Sixth Session,” ed. by José Pierre, 1990).

Love

If love . . . means that one person absorbs the other, then no real relationship exists any more. Love evaporates; there is nothing left to love. The integrity of self is gone.

Ann Oakley (b. 1944), British sociologist, author. Taking It Like a Woman, “Love: Irresolution” (1984).

Love

If only the strength of the love that people feel when it is reciprocated could be as intense and obsessive as the love we feel when it is not; then marriages would be truly made in heaven.

Ben Elton (b. 1959), British author, performer. Stark, “Private Investigations” (1989).

Love

If somebody says, “I love you,” to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? “I love you, too.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922), U.S. novelist. Wampeters, Foma and Granfallons, “Address at Dedication of Wheaton College Library, 1973” (1974).

Love

If there’s delight in love, ‘tis when I see
That heart, which others bleed for, bleed for me.

William Congreve (1670–1729), English dramatist. Song sung by Mrs. Hodgson, in The Way of the World, act 3, sc. 12.

Love

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say,
I love her for her smile . . . her look . . . her way
Of speaking gently . . . for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and, certes, brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day—
For these things in themselves, Beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee— and love so
  wrought,
May be unwrought so.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61), English poet. Sonnets from the Portuguese, Sonnet 14.

Love

If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.

Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. Cool Memories, ch. 4 (1987; tr. 1990).

Love

Immature love says: “I love you because I need you.” Mature love says: “I need you because I love you.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980), U.S. psychologist. The Art of Loving, ch. 2 (1956).

Love

In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek.

French Proverb. George Bernard Shaw adapted this proverb in Heartbreak House, act 2: “One turns the cheek: the other kisses it. One provides the cash: the other spends it.”

Love

It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. . . . Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardour and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.

Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), French poet. “The Painter of Modern Life,” sct. 9 (published in L’Art Romantique, 1869; repr. in Selected Writings on Art and Artists, ed. by P. E. Charvet, 1972).

Love

It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.

Marguerite Duras (1914–96), French author, filmmaker. Practicalities, “The Chimneys of India Song” (1987; tr. 1990).

Love

It’s unthinkable not to love— you’d have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you’d have to be Philip Larkin.

Lawrence Durrell (1912–90), British author. Interview in Observer (London, 11 Nov. 1990).

Love

I’ve only been in love with a beer bottle and a mirror.

Sid Vicious (1957–79), British punk rocker. Sounds (London, 9 Oct. 1976).

Love

Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another’s soul.

James Joyce (1882–1941), Irish author. Notes to the play Exiles (written 1914–15; published 1952).

Love

Love and war are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as in the other.

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616), Spanish writer. Don Quixote, in Don Quixote, pt. 2, bk. 5, ch. 21 (1615; tr. by P. Motteux).

Love

Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944), French aviator, author. Wind, Sand, and Stars, ch. 8 (1939).

Love

Love feels no burden, regards not labors, strives toward more than it attains, argues not of impossibility, since it believes that it may and can do all things. Therefore it avails for all things, and fulfils and accomplishes much where one not a lover falls and lies helpless.

Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471), German monk, mystic. The Imitation of Christ, pt. 3, ch. 6 (1471).

Love

Love is a great beautifier.

Louisa May Alcott (1832–88), U.S. author. Little Women, pt. 2, ch. 1 (1869).

Love

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs,
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes,
Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears.
What is it else? A madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616), English dramatist, poet. Romeo, in Romeo and Juliet, act 1, sc. 1.

Love

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.

Peter Ustinov (b. 1921), British actor, writer, director. Christian Science Monitor (Boston, 9 Dec. 1958).

Love

Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), English poet. Even Love Is Sold, a note from Queen Mab (1813)


Love

Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Russian novelist, philosopher. Prince Andrew, in War and Peace, bk. 12, ch. 4 (1868–69) 

Love

Love is made by two people, in different kinds of solitude. It can be in a crowd, but in an oblivious crowd.

Louis Aragon (1897–1982), French poet. Taped discussion in La Révolution Surréaliste, no. 11, Paris, 15 March 1928; repr. in Recherches sur la Sexualité, Jan. 1928– Aug. 1932, “Second Session, ed. by José Pierre (1990).

Love

Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone— but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.

Bette Davis (1908–89), U.S. screen actor. The Lonely Life, ch. 19 (1962).

Love

Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.

Erich Fromm (1900–1980), U.S. psychologist. The Sane Society, ch. 5, “Alienation” (1955).

Love

Love is the direct opposite of hate. By definition it’s something you can’t feel for more than a few minutes at a time, so what’s all this bullshit about loving somebody for the rest of your life?

Judith Rossner (b. 1935), U.S. author. Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid, pt. 2 (1969).

Love

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

Samuel Johnson (1709–84), English author, lexicographer. Quoted in: William Cooke, Life of Samuel Foote, vol. 2 (repr. in Johnsonian Miscellanies, vol. 2, ed. by George Birkbeck Hill, 1897).

Love

Love is too young to know what conscience is.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616), English dramatist, poet. Sonnet 151.

Love

Love, the quest; marriage, the conquest; divorce, the inquest.

Helen Rowland (1875–1950), U.S. journalist. A Guide to Men, “Syncopations” (1922).

Love

Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable, and praised when they are not praiseworthy.

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), British philosopher, mathematician. The Conquest of Happiness, ch. 9 (1930).

Love

Men and women are not free to love decently until they have analysed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex; and this means the acquisition of a profound philosophical theory based on wide reading of anthropology and enlightened practice.

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), British occultist. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, ch. 44 (1929; rev. 1970).

Love

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616), English dramatist, poet. Rosalind, in As You Like It, act 4, sc. 1.

Love

O lyric Love, half angel and half bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire.

Robert Browning (1812–89), English poet. The Ring and the Book, bk. 1.

Love

Whoso loves
Believes the impossible.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61), English poet. Aurora Leigh, bk. 5 (1857).

Love

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Anglo-Irish playwright, author. Lord Henry, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 4 (1891). The same words reappeared spoken by Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance, act 3.

Love

When first we met we did not guess
That Love would prove so hard a master.

Robert Bridges (1844–1930), British poet. Triolet.

Love

We’ve got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can’t just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.

John Lennon (1940–80), British rock musician. Man of the Decade, broadcast, 30 Dec. 1969, ATV.

Love

Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can’t even think straight.

Marilyn French (b. 1929), U.S. author, critic. Valerie, in The Women’s Room, ch. 4, sct. 10 (1977).

Love

We loved, sir— used to meet:
How sad and bad and mad it was—
But then, how it was sweet!

Robert Browning (1812–89), English poet. Confessions, st. 9.

Love

We love in another’s soul
whatever of ourselves
we can deposit in it;
the greater the deposit,
the greater the love.

Irving Layton (b. 1912), Canadian poet. The Whole Bloody Bird, “Aphs” (1969).

Love

True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about but few have seen.

François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–80), French writer, moralist. Sentences et Maximes Morales, no. 76 (1678).

Love

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive . . . and impoverished.

Roland Barthes (1915–80), French semiologist. A Lover’s Discourse, “Inexpressible Love” (1977; tr. 1979).

Love

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.

Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. Fatal Strategies, “Ironic Strategies” (1983; tr. 1990).

Love

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.

Bible: New Testament. 1 John 4:18.

Love

The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one’s wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great— quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it.

D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), British author. Letter, 2 June 1912 (published in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 1, ed. by James T. Boulton, 1979). Lawrence wrote the letter after eloping to Germany with Frieda von Richthofen, wife of his old university professor, whom he later married.

Love

The fate of love is that it always seems too little or too much.

Amelia Barr (1831–1919), Anglo-American novelist. The Belle of Bolling Green, ch. 5 (1904)

Love

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus.

Marcel Proust (1871–1922), French novelist. Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 2, “Swann’s Way: Swann in Love” (1913; tr. by Scott Monkrieff, 1922).

Youth

Enjoy the Spring of Love and Youth,
To some good angel leave the rest;
For Time will teach thee soon the truth,
There are no birds in last year’s nest!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82), U.S. poet. It Is Not Always May.

Romanticism

Romanticism is not just a mode; it literally eats into every life. Women will never get rid of just waiting for the right man.

Anita Brookner (b. 1938), British novelist, art historian. Interview in Women Writers Talk (ed. by Olga Kenyon, 1989).

Romance

Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Anglo-Irish playwright, author. Mrs. Cheveley, in An Ideal Husband, act 3.

Romance

Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humour in the woman.

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Anglo-Irish playwright, author. Lord Illingworth, in A Woman of No Importance, act 1.

Romance

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 (1885–1930), British author. Studies in Classic American Literature, ch. 7 (1924).

Relationships

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), German critic and philosopher. One-Way Street, “Arc Lamp” (1928; repr. in One-Way Street and Other Writings, 1978).

Relationships

One can find women who have never had one love affair, but it is rare indeed to find any who have had only one.

François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–80), French writer, moralist. Sentences et Maximes Morales, no. 73 (1678).

Relationships

Nowadays love is a matter of chance, matrimony a matter of money and divorce a matter of course.

Helen Rowland (1875–1950), U.S. journalist. Reflections of a Bachelor Girl (1903). The epigram reappeared in Rowland, A Guide to Men, “Cymbals and Kettle-Drums” (1922).

Relationships

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

Angela Carter (1940–92), British author. The Sadeian Woman, “Polemical Preface” (1979).


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