Love

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The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. ~ eden ahbez

Quotes regarding Love (listed alphabetically by author):

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M - N - O - P -Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z - Anon - External links

A [edit]

Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt... ~ Augustine of Hippo
  • Mysterious love, uncertain treasure,
    Hast thou more of pain or pleasure!
    Endless torments dwell about thee:
    Yet who would live, and live without thee!
  • When love's well-timed 'tis not a fault to love;
    The strong, the brave, the virtuous, and the wise,
    Sink in the soft captivity together.
  • When love once pleads admission to our hearts,
    (In spite of all the virtue we can boast),
    The woman that deliberates is lost.
  • The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
  • Love is the answer, but while you're waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty interesting questions.
    • Woody Allen, reported in James Robert Parish, The Hollywood Book of Love, (2003), p. 35.
  • Who sings of all of Love's eternity
    Who shines so bright
    In all the songs of Love's unending spells?
    Holy lightning strikes all that's evil
    Teaching us to love for goodness sake.
    Hear the music of Love Eternal
    Teaching us to reach for goodness sake.
  • All our young lives we search for someone to love. Someone who makes us complete. We choose partners and change partners. We dance to a song of heartbreak and hope. All the while wondering if somewhere, somehow, there's someone perfect who might be searching for us.
  • Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
    • W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand, and other essays‎ (1962), p. 372.
  • It is love that asks, that seeks, that knocks, that finds, and that is faithful to what it finds.
    • Augustine of Hippo, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 392.
  • Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt: whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, through love cry out; whether thou correct, through love correct; whether thou spare, through love do thou spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.

B [edit]

The mightiest love was granted him
Love that does not expect to be loved. ~ Jorge Luis Borges
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways… Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  • The opposite of loneliness, it's not togetherness. It is intimacy.
    • Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A Lovestory (1989), p. 184
  • Ask not of me, love, what is love?
    Ask what is good of God above;
    Ask of the great sun what is light;
    Ask what is darkness of the night;
    Ask sin of what may be forgiven;
    Ask what is happiness of heaven;
    Ask what is folly of the crowd;
    Ask what is fashion of the shroud;
    Ask what is sweetness of thy kiss;
    Ask of thyself what beauty is.
  • Could I love less, I should be happier now.
  • I cannot love as I have loved,
    And yet I know not why;
    It is the one great woe of life
    To feel all feeling die.
  • Love spends his all, and still hath store.
  • The sweetest joy, the wildest woe is 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.
  • Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by the removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease, like caries and many other ailments, is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.
  • The mightiest love was granted him
    Love that does not expect to be loved.
  • We have common cause against the night... Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear the music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokecherry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain... We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul.
  • I love hiccups and I love sneezes and I love blinks and I love belches and I love gluttons. I love hair. I love bears. For me, the round. For me, the world.
  • There is musick, even in the beauty and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument.
  • If thou must love me, let it be for nought
    Except for love's sake only.     Do not say
    "I love her for her smile — her look — her way
    Of speaking gently, — for a trick of thought
    That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
    A sense of pleasant ease on such a day" —
    For these things in themselves, Beloved, may
    Be changed, or change for thee, — and love, so wrought,
    May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
    Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry, —
    A creature might forget to weep, who fbore
    Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
    But love me for love's sake, that evermore
    Thou may'st love on, through love's eternity    .
  • How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
    I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
    My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
    For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
    I love thee to the level of everyday's
    Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
    I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
    I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
    I love thee with the passion put to use
    In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
    I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
    With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
    Smiles, tears, of all my life! —and, if God choose,
    I shall but love thee better after death.
  • I would not be a rose upon the wall
    A queen might stop at, near the palace-door,
    To say to a courtier, "Pluck that rose for me,
    It's prettier than the rest." O Romney Leigh!
    I'd rather far be trodden by his foot,
    Than lie in a great queen's bosom.
  • But I love you, sir:
    And when a woman says she loves a man,
    The man must hear her, though he love her not.
  • And this is that Homer's golden chain, which reacheth down from heaven to earth, by which every creature is annexed, and depends on his Creator.
    • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III, Section 1. Memb. 1. Subsec. 7
  • No cord nor cable can so forcibly draw, or hold so fast, as love can do with a twined thread.
    • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III, Section 2. Memb. 1. Subsec. 2
  • The falling out of lovers is the renewing of love.
    • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III, Section 2. Terence—Andria, III. 23
  • To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk pain. To try is to risk failure, but risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
  • Love in your hearts as idly burns
    As fire in antique Roman urns.
  • Love is a boy by poets styl'd:
    Then spare the rod and spoil the child.
  • What mad lover ever dy'd,
    To gain a soft and gentle bride?
    Or for a lady tender-hearted,
    In purling streams or hemp departed?
  • Oh Love! young Love! bound in thy rosy band,
    Let sage or cynic prattle as he will,
    These hours, and only these, redeem Life's years of ill.
  • The cold in clime are cold in blood,
    Their love can scarce deserve the name.
  • Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven;
    A spark of that immortal fire
    With angels shared, by Allah given
    To lift from earth our low desire.
  • Why did she love him? Curious fool!—be still—
    Is human love the growth of human will?
    • Lord Byron, Lara, A Tale (1814), Canto II, Stanza 22
  • And to his eye
    There was but one beloved face on earth,
    And that was shining on him.
  • She knew she was by him beloved,—she knew
    For quickly comes such knowledge, that his heart
    Was darken'd with her shadow.
  • O! that the Desert were my dwelling place,
    With one fair Spirit for my minister,
    That I might all forget the human race,
    And, hating no one, love but only her!
  • Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,
    'Tis woman's whole existence: man may range
    The court, camp, church, the vessel, and the mart,
    Sword, gown, gain, glory, offer in exchange
    Pride, fame, ambition, to fill up his heart,
    And few there are whom these cannot estrange;
    Men have all these resources, we but one,
    To love again, and be again undone.
  • Alas! the love of women! it is known
    To be a lovely and a fearful thing.
  • In her first passion woman loves her lover;
    In all the others, all she loves is love.

C [edit]

The growth of one blesses all. I am commited to grow in love. All that I touch, I leave in love. I move through this world consciously and creatively. ~ Julia Cameron
A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. ~ Leonard Cohen
Be loving, and you will never want for love; be humble, and you will never want for guiding. - Dinah Craik
  • Isn't everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?
  • Love is the substance of all life. Everything is connected in love, absolutely everything.
    • Julia Cameron, in Blessings : Prayers and Declarations for a Heartful Life (1998).
  • When I listen to love, I am listening to my true nature. When I express love, I am expressing my true nature. All of us love. All of us do it more and more perfectly. The past has brought us both ashes and diamonds. In the present we find the flowers of what we've planted and the seeds of what we are becoming. I plant the seeds of love in my heart. I plant the seeds of love in the hearts of others.
    • Julia Cameron, in Blessings : Prayers and Declarations for a Heartful Life (1998).
  • The growth of one blesses all. I am commited to grow in love. All that I touch, I leave in love. I move through this world consciously and creatively.
    • Julia Cameron, in Blessings : Prayers and Declarations for a Heartful Life (1998).
  • Amor é um fogo que arde sem se ver,
    É ferida que dói, e não se sente;
    É um contentamento descontente,
    É dor que desatina sem doer.
    É um não querer mais que bem querer;
    É um andar solitário entre a gente;
    É nunca contentar-se de contente;
    É um cuidar que ganha em se perder.
    É querer estar preso por vontade;
    É servir a quem vence, o vencedor;
    É ter com quem nos mata, lealdade.
    Mas como causar pode seu favor
    Nos corações humanos amizade,
    Se tão contrário a si é o mesmo Amor?
    • Love is a fire that burns, but is never seen;
      a wound that hurts, but is never perceived;
      a pleasure that starts a pain that’s unrelieved;
      a pain that maddens without any pain; a serene
      desire for nothing, but wishing her only the best;
      a lonely passage through the crowd; the resentment
      of never being content with one’s contentment;
      a caring that gains only when losing; an obsessed
      desire to be bound, for love, in jail;
      a capitulation to the one you’ve conquered yourself;
      a devotion to your own assassin every single day.
      So how can Love conform, without fail,
      every captive human heart, if Love itself
      is so contradictory in every possible way?
    • Luís de Camões, Amor é fogo que arde sem se ver, translated by William Baer.
  • Nous nous trompons toujours deux fois sur ceux que nous aimons: d`abord à leur avantage, puis à leur désavantage.
    • We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
    • Albert Camus, quoted in Robertson, Connie (1998). ""Camus, Albert 1913–1960". The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations. Wordsworth Editions. pp. page 73. ISBN 185326489X. 
  • That's love too. It ain't sex, and maybe that's too bad, but you know, Cindy, when a man and a woman care for each other, that doesn't always mean they have to sleep together or live together.
  • I have often had occasion to observe, that a warm blundering man does more for the world than a frigid wise man.
    • Richard Cecil, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 394.
  • So mourn'd the dame of Ephesus her love.
    • Colley Cibber, Richard III (1700), Act II. Altered from Shakespeare.
  • What have I done? What horrid crime committed?
    To me the worst of crimes—outliv'd my liking.
    • Colley Cibber, Richard III (1700), Act III, scene 2. Altered from Shakespeare.
  • What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.
  • Our love is principle, and has its root
    In reason, is judicious, manly, free.
  • Be loving, and you will never want for love; be humble, and you will never want for guiding.
    • Dinah Craik, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 394.
  • 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.
  • Love's for a lifetime not for a moment.
    • The Corrs, in [[w:[[w:The Corrs||All The Love In The World (2001)

D [edit]

A song fluttered down in the form of a dove,
And it bore me a message, the one word—Love!

The Dove by Paul Laurence Dunbar
  • L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.
    • The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.
    • Dante Alighieri, Paradiso XXXIII, 145.
  • Amor, ch'al cor gentil ratto s'apprende.
    • Love, that all gentle hearts so quickly know.
    • Dante Alighieri, Inferno, V. 100.
  • Amor ch' a nullo amato amar perdona.
    • Love, which insists that love shall mutual be.
    • Dante Alighieri, Inferno, V. 103.
  • If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual.
    • Robertson Davies, "The Pleasures of Love," in Saturday Night (23 December 1961); reprinted in The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (1990).
  • Love is 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).
  • Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists. . . . When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.
  • We are all born for love.
    It is the principle of existence and its only end.
  • … What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
    • Dostoevsky, Fyodor M. (1999) [1880]. The Brothers Karamazov. Constance Garnett, translator. Signet Classic. pp. p. 312. ISBN 0451527348. 
    • Variant: Hell is the suffering of being unable to love.
  • A purple robe he wore, o'erwrought with gold
    With the device of a great snake, whose breath
    Was a fiery flame: which when I did behold
    I fell a-weeping and I cried, "Sweet youth,
    Tell me why, sad and sighing, thou dost rove
    These pleasant realms? I pray thee speak me sooth
    What is thy name?" He said, "My name is Love."
    Then straight the first did turn himself to me
    And cried, "He lieth, for his name is Shame,
    But I am Love, and I was wont to be
    Alone in this fair garden, till he came
    Unasked by night; I am true Love, I fill
    The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame."
    Then sighing said the other, "Have thy will,
    "I am the Love that dare not speak its name."
  • Love is a passion
    Which kindles honor into noble acts.
    • John Dryden, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 392.
  • Love taught him shame, and shame with love at strife
    Soon taught the sweet civilities of life.
  • "There are only four questions of value in life, Don Octavio: What is sacred? Of what is spirit made? What is worth living for? What is worth dying for? The answer to each is only love."

E [edit]

  • Love is so exquisitely elusive. It cannot be bought, cannot be badgered, cannot be hijacked. It is available only in one rare form: as the natural response of a healthy mind and healthy heart.
  • But is it what we love, or how we love,
    That makes true good?
  • 'Tis what I love determines how I love.
  • Women know no perfect love:
    Loving the strong, they can forsake the strong;
    Man clings because the being whom he loves
    Is weak and needs him.
  • Affection is the broadest basis of a good life.
    • George Eliot, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 393.

F [edit]

Love has no uttermost, as the stars have no number and the sea no rest. ~ Eleanor Farjeon
  • Love has no uttermost, as the stars have no number and the sea no rest.
  • For all the ill that is in us comes from fear, and all the good from love.
  • Just one step at a time
    And closer to destiny
    I knew at a glance
    There'd always be a chance for me
    With someone I could live for
    Nowhere I would rather be.
    Is your love strong enough
    Like a rock in the sea?
    Am I asking too much?
    Is your love strong enough?
  • I wish I could take what I'm feeling right now and put it in the water system so everybody could drink it and we would all love each other.
    • Jamie Foxx, at the Golden Globes ceremony (2005).
  • I love love
    I love being in love
    I don't care what it does to me
  • Masood, a young lady has fallen in love with me—at least so I judge from her letters. Awkward is it not—awkward and surprising. You would be flattered and twirl your moustache, but I am merely uncomfortable. I wish she would stop, as she is very nice, and I enjoyed being friends. What an ill constructed world this is! Love is always being given where it is not required.
    • E. M. Forster, Selected Letters: Letter 137, to Syed Ross Masood, 5 December 1914.
  • If you would be loved, love and be lovable.
  • Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness.
    • Erich Fromm, in Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (1947).
  • Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
    • Erich Fromm, in The Sane Society (1955), Ch. 3 : The Human Situation, Sect. C : Rootedness — Brotherliness vs. Incest
  • If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
  • I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.
  • Truth is cosmically total: synergetic. Verities are generalized principles stated in semimetaphorical terms. Verities are differentiable. But love is omniembracing, omnicoherent, and omni-inclusive, with no exceptions. Love, like synergetics, is nondifferentiable, i.e., is integral.
    • Buckminster Fuller, in Synergetics : Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975) 1005.54.
  • The highest of generalizations is the synergetic integration of truth and love.
    • Buckminster Fuller, in Synergetics : Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975) 1005.56.

G [edit]

  • Before my Soul taught me, Love was for me a delicate thread stretched between two adjacent pegs, but now it has been transformed into a halo; its first is its last, and its last is its first. It encompasses every being, slowly expanding to embrace all that ever will be.
    • Khalil Gibran, in The Vision : Reflections on the Way of the Soul (1994) edited by Robin H. Waterfield, translated by Juan R. I. Cole.
  • Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
    Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.
    • Emma Goldman, "Marriage and Love" in Anarchism and Other Essays (1911).
  • The bashful virgin's sidelong looks of love.
  • Love is like a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the snow weasels come.
  • Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.

H [edit]

Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another. ~ Victor Hugo
  • Love, whether newly-born or aroused from a death-like slumber, must always create a sunshine, filling the hearts so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.
  • The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved.
    • Matthew Henry in Commentary on the Whole Bible, Vol. 1, under Genesis 2:21. [1]
  • Love your neighbor, yet pull not down your hedge.
  • The love that gushes for all is the real elixir of life — the fountain of bodily longevity. It is the lack of this that always produces the feeling of age.
    • Josiah Gilbert Holland, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 393.
  • The most beautiful sight this earth affords is a man or woman so filled with love that duty is only a name, and its performance the natural outflow and expression of the love which has become the central principle of their life.
    • Josiah Gilbert Holland, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 394.
  • Love each other dearly always. There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.

I [edit]

  • Hold the person that you love closely if they're next to you, the one you love, not the person that'll simply have sex with you.
  • Love is the only bow on Life's dark cloud. It is the morning and the evening star. It shines upon the babe, and sheds its radiance on the quiet tomb. It is the mother of art, inspirer of poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart — builder of every home, kindler of every fire on every hearth. It was the first to dream of immortality. It fills the world with melody — for music is the voice of love. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to Joy, and makes royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods.

J [edit]

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. ~ John 15:13
  • Eja, Mater, fons amoris,
    me sentire vim doloris
      fac, ut tecum lugeam;
    Fac, ut ardeat cor meum
    in amando Christum Deum,
      ut sibi complaceam.
    • O Mother, fountain of love,
      make me feel the power of sorrow,
      that I may grieve with you
      Grant that my heart may burn
      in the love of Christ my Lord,
      that I may greatly please Him.
    • Stabat Mater, authorship unknown, variously attributed to Jacopone da Todi and to Pope Innocent III.
  • Better get ready gonna see the light
    Love, love is the answer and that's all right
    So don't you give up now so easy to find
    Just look to your soul and open your mind
  • Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.
    • William James, in The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 1 : The Scope of Psychology
  • Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
  • Because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.
  • I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
  • But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for He is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.
  • A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.
  • Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. ~ Carl Jung
  • At the evening of life, we shall be judged on our 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.
  • She's the goddess of all things sweaty and sticky.
    • Arthur M. Jolly Cupid (referring to Venus) in The Waiting Room of the Gods (2009)
  • Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. . . . It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more.
  • He that made all things for love, by the same love keepeth them, and shall keep them without end.
  • 'Love was without beginning, is, and shall be without ending.
  • We give our intent to love and meekness, by the working of mercy and grace we are made all fair and clean.
  • Truth seeth God, and Wisdom beholdeth God, and of these two cometh the third: that is, a holy marvellous delight in God; which is Love. Where Truth and Wisdom are verily, there is Love verily, coming of them both. And all of God’s making: for He is endless sovereign Truth, endless sovereign Wisdom, endless sovereign Love, unmade; and man’s Soul is a creature in God which hath the same properties made, and evermore it doeth that it was made for: it seeth God, it beholdeth God, and it loveth God. Whereof God enjoyeth in the creature; and the creature in God, endlessly marvelling.
    In which marvelling he seeth his God, his Lord, his Maker so high, so great, and so good, in comparison with him that is made, that scarcely the creature seemeth ought to the self. But the clarity and the clearness of Truth and Wisdom maketh him to see and to bear witness that he is made for Love, in which God endlessly keepeth him.
  • The ground of mercy is love, and the working of mercy is our keeping in love. And this was shewed in such manner that I could not have perceived of the part of mercy but as it were alone in love; that is to say, as to my sight.
  • Mercy is a sweet gracious working in love, mingled with plenteous pity: for mercy worketh in keeping us, and mercy worketh turning to us all things to good. Mercy, by love, suffereth us to fail in measure and in as much as we fail, in so much we fall; and in as much as we fall, in so much we die: for it needs must be that we die in so much as we fail of the sight and feeling of God that is our life. Our failing is dreadful, our falling is shameful, and our dying is sorrowful: but in all this the sweet eye of pity and love is lifted never off us, nor the working of mercy ceaseth.
    For I beheld the property of mercy, and I beheld the property of grace: which have two manners of working in one love.
  • Our life is all grounded and rooted in love, and without love we may not live.
  • Love and Dread are brethren, and they are rooted in us by the Goodness of our Maker, and they shall never be taken from us without end. We have of nature to love and we have of grace to love: and we have of nature to dread and we have of grace to dread.
  • All that is contrary to love and peace is of the Fiend and of his part.
  • If any such lover be in earth which is continually kept from falling, I know it not: for it was not shewed me. But this was shewed: that in falling and in rising we are ever preciously kept in one Love.
  • Charity keepeth us in Faith and Hope, and Hope leadeth us in Charity. And in the end all shall be Charity.
  • Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same. But thou shalt never know nor learn therein other thing without end. Thus was I learned that Love was our Lord’s meaning.
  • I saw full surely that ere God made us He loved us; which love was never slacked, nor ever shall be. And in this love He hath done all His works; and in this love He hath made all things profitable to us; and in this love our life is everlasting. In our making we had beginning; but the love wherein He made us was in Him from without beginning: in which love we have our beginning. And all this shall we see in God, without end.
  • Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
    • Carl Jung, in The Psychology of the Unconscious (1943)

K [edit]

When one has once fully entered the realm of Love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for Love. ~ Søren Kierkegaard
Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody. ~ Martin Luther King
Love is a uniquely portable magic. I don’t think it’s in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind and heart to heart. ~ Stephen King
  • The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched, but just felt in the heart.
  • Why only hate? Where does love remain? Or at least a little decency toward other people?
  • 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.
  • Love is a word, what matters is the connection that word implies.
  • The resolving of the ethical, is freedom; the negative resolution also has this, but the freedom, blank and bare, is as if tongue-tied, hard to express, and generally has something hard in its nature. Falling in love, however, promptly sets it to music, even if this composition contains a very difficult passage.
    • Soren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way, Hong p. 111
  • When one has once fully entered the realm of Love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for Love.
  • Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Love your enemy." This is the way to do it. When the opportunity presents itself when you can defeat your enemy, you must not do it.
  • It's love that holds it all together...it's love thats holding back the weather and the same will let it go.
  • The heart of a man to the heart of a maid—
    Light of my tents, be fleet—
    Morning awaits at the end of the world,
    And the world is all at our feet.
  • The white moth to the closing vine,
    The bee to the open clover,
    And the Gypsy blood to the Gypsy blood
    Ever the wide world over.
  • The wild hawk to the wind-swept sky
    The deer to the wholesome wold;
    And the heart of a man to the heart of a maid,
    As it was in the days of old.
  • Agape's object is always the concrete individual, not some abstraction called humanity. Love of humanity is easy because humanity does not surprise you with inconvenient demands. You never find humanity on your doorstep, stinking and begging.
    • Peter Kreeft, Fundamentals of the Faith: Essays in Christian Apologetics, II.A.30: "Love" [2]

L [edit]

  • 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.
  • TO LOVE is to find pleasure in the happiness of others.
  • We all been playing those mind games forever
    Some kinda druid dudes lifting the veil.
    Doing the mind guerrilla,
    Some call it magic — the search for the grail.

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

  • O, there is nothing holier, in this life of ours, than the first consciousness of love,—the first fluttering of its silken wings.
  • Ah, how skillful grows the hand
    That obeyeth Love's command!
    It is the heart, and not the brain,
    That to the highest doth attain,
    And he who followeth Love's behest
    Far excelleth all the rest!
    • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Building of the Ship" in Voices of the Night: The Seaside and the Fireside; and Other Poems (1846), p. 34.
  • That was the first sound in the song of love!
    Scarce more than silence is, and yet a sound.
    Hands of invisible spirits touch the strings
    Of that mysterious instrument, the soul,
    And play the prelude of our fate. We hear
    The voice prophetic, and are not alone.
  • Love keeps the cold out better than a cloak.
    It serves for food and raiment.
  • How can I tell the signals and the signs
    By which one heart another heart divines?
    How can I tell the many thousand ways
    By which it keeps the secret it betrays?

M [edit]

To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that Love is the reason for my existence, for God is love.
Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name. ~ Thomas Merton
  • I will make love my greatest weapon and none on whom I call can defend against its force.
    My reasoning they may counter; my speech they may distrust; my apparel they may disapprove; my face they may reject; and even my bargains may cause them suspicion; yet my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest clay.
    I will greet this day with love in my heart.
  • Henceforth I will look upon all things with love and I will be born again. I will love the sun for it warms my bones; yet I will love the rain for it cleanses my spirit. I will love the light for it shows me the way; yet I will love the darkness for it shows me the stars. I will welcome happiness because it enlarges my heart; yet I will endure sadness because it opens my soul. I will acknowledge rewards because they are my due; yet I will welcome obstacles because they are my challenge.
    I will greet this day with love in my heart.
    • Og Mandino, in The Greatest Salesman in the World (1968), Ch. 9 : The Scroll Marked II, p. 58.
  • Contrary to Pascal's saying, we don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
  • To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.
  • Learning to love yourself, it is the greatest love of all.
  • To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that Love is the reason for my existence, for God is love.
    Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.
  • Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action.
  • Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
    Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
    Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
    And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
    Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
    Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
    Yet many a man is making friends with death
    Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
  • So dear I love him, that with him all deaths
    I could endure, without him live no life.
  • It is not virtue, wisdom, valour, wit,
    Strength, comeliness of shape, or amplest merit,
    That woman's love can win, or long inherit;
    But what it is, hard is to say,
    Harder to hit.
  • Love would master self; and having made the mastery stretch onward and upward toward infinitude.
    • Donald G. Mitchell, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 394.
  • Love on through all ills, and love on till they die!
    • Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh (1817), The Light of the Harem, line 653.
  • Bessie: I've been lucky to have so much love in my life.
    Lee: Yes, Marvin and Ruth love you so much.
    Bessie: No, I’ve been lucky to be able to love them so much.

N [edit]

  • If only we could all escape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other, if only I could save you all from yourselves.
  • Love reduces the complexity of living.
    • Anaïs Nin, in June 1932 entry in her journal; published in Henry and June : from a journal of love : the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1990), p. 178.
  • You cannot save people, you can only love them.
    • Anaïs Nin, in The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939).
  • Someday I'll be locked up for love insanity. "She loved too much."
    • Anaïs Nin, in The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939).
  • Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst.
    • Anaïs Nin (30 May 1934), in The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939).
  • No one but a woman in love ever sees the maximum of men's greatness .
    • Anaïs Nin (18 June 1934), in The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939).
  • Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance — that is all!
    • Anaïs Nin (21 October 1934), in The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939).
  • You are like a person who consumes herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are born of this.
    • Anaïs Nin, in A Spy in the House of Love (1954).
  • The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.
    • Anaïs Nin, in A Spy in the House of Love (1954).
  • I think that natural truths will cease to be spat at us like insults, that aesthetics will once more be linked with ethics, and that people will become aware that in casting out aesthetics that they also cast out a respect for human life, a respect for creation, a respect for spiritual values. Aesthetics was an expression of man's need to be in love with his world. The cult of ugliness is a regression. It destroys our appetite, our love for our world.
  • Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
    • Anaïs Nin, as quoted in French Writers of the Past (2000) by Carol A. Dingle, p. 126.
  • Love works magic.
    It is the final purpose
    Of the world story,
    The Amen of the universe.
    • Novalis, in Blüthenstaub-Fragmente (1798).

O [edit]

If you want to be loved, be lovable.
  • Militat omnis amans.
    Every lover is a soldier. (Love is a warfare).
    • Ovid, Amorum (16 BC), I. 9. 1.
  • Qui non vult fieri desidiosus, amet.
    Let the man who does not wish to be idle, fall in love.
    • Ovid, Amorum (16 BC), I. 9. 46.
  • Sic ego nec sine te nec tecum vivere possum
    Et videor voti nescius esse mei.
    Thus I am not able to exist either with you or without you; and I seem not to know my own wishes.
    • Ovid, Amorum (16 BC), Book III. 10. 39.
  • Qui finem quaeris amoris/Cedit amor rebus; res age, tutus eris.
    Love yields to business. If you seek a way out of love, be busy; you'll be safe then.
    • Ovid, Remedia Amoris, 143.
  • If you want to be loved, be lovable.
    Variant: To be loved, be lovable.
  • Intret amicitiae nomine tectus amor.
    Let love steal in disguised as friendship.
    • Variant: Love will enter cloaked in friendship's name.
    • Context: Cool off; don't let her think you too importunate. Do not betray the hope of too swift a victory; let Love steal in disguised as Friendship. I've often seen a woman thus disarmed, and friendship ripen into love.
    • Ovid, The Art of Love, Book 1, line 720, translated by J. Lewis May in The Love Books of Ovid, 1930.

P [edit]

Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away. ~ Paul of Tarsus
The three most important things to have are faith, hope and love. But the greatest of them is love. ~ Paul of Tarsus


  • Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.
    Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
    Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.
    When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.
    And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
    • Paul of Tarsus, in I Corinthians Ch. 13 (NKJV)
    • Variant translation: Love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud, it is not rude, it is not self seeking. It is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrong. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perservers. Love never fails.
      • 1 Corinthians 13:4-8.
  • The three most important things to have are faith, hope and love. But the greatest of them is love.
    • Paul of Tarsus, in 1 Corinthians 13:13 (New. International Readers Version).
  • Love is the cheapest of religions.
  • Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.
    • Petrarch, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 392.
  • Of all affliction taught a lover yet,
    'Tis true the hardest science to forget.
  • One thought of thee puts all the pomp to flight;
    Priests, tapers, temples, swim before my sight.
  • When the heart stops for one beat it is desire, when it stops for one life time it is love
    • Lucy Powell, The Heart Yearns But Once (2004).
  • In all of nature, a male belongs to a female that he fancies and who fancies him. And so among the animals there are no idiots. But with us!... I'm a Jew, so I musn't love a Christian woman... He's a merchant, so he's got no right to a countess... And you who've got no money, you've no rights to any woman at all...

Q [edit]

R [edit]

  • We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.
  • Love is the ark appointed for the righteous,
    Which annuls the danger and provides a way of escape.
    Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
    Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition.
    • Rumi, The Masnavi, Book IV, Story II, as translated in Masnavi I Ma'navi : The Spiritual Couplets of Maulána Jalálu-'d-Dín Muhammad Rúmí (1898) by Edward Henry Whinfield
    • Variant: Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
      Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition.

S [edit]

  • Love means never having to say you're sorry.
  • Love is seeing God in the person next to us, and meditation is seeing God within us.
  • Yet all love is sweet
    Given or returned. Common as light is love,
    And its familiar voice wearies not ever
    * * * * *
    They who inspire it most are fortunate,
    As I am now: but those who feel it most
    Are happier still after long sufferings
    As I shall soon become.
  • The night has a thousand eyes, and the day but one; Yet the light of the world dies with the dying sun. The mind has a thousand eyes, and the heart but one; yet the light of a whole life dies when love is done.
  • The feeling of love - is a fervent desire of goodness to a man.
  • When I saw you, I was afraid of meeting you.
    When I met you, I was afraid of kissing you.
    When I kissed you, I was afraid to love you.
    Now that I love you, I'm afraid of losing you.
    • Silard Somorjay, in "The Voice Of Love" on The Streets of Beijing movie soundtrack, Video Art Beijing
  • But love, I've come to understand, is more than three words mumbled before bedtime. Love is sustained by action, a pattern of devotion in the things we do for each other every day.
  • In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.
  • Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.
    • Stendhal in The Pink and the Green (Le Rose et le Vert, 1837), Ch. 9, translated by Richard Howard. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988, p. 89
  • At the heart of its strength is a weakness: a lone candle can hold it back. Love is more than a candle, love can ignite the stars.
  • Love's a different sort of thing, hot enough to make you flow into something, interflow, cool and anneal and be a weld stronger than what you started with.

T [edit]

I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love. ~ Leo Tolstoy
Let my love open the door To your heart. ~ Pete Townshend
  • How come we don't always know when love begins, but we always know when it ends?
  • There has fallen a splendid tear
    From the passion-flower at the gate.
    She is coming, my dove, my dear;
    She is coming, my life, my fate;
    The red rose cries, "She is near, she is near;"
    And the white rose weeps, "She is late;"
    The larkspur listens, "I hear; I hear;"
    And the lily whispers, "I wait."
  • She is coming, my own, my sweet;
    Were it ever so airy a tread,
    My heart would hear her and beat,
    Were it earth in an earthly bed;
    My dust would hear her and beat,
    Had I lain for a century dead;
    Would start and tremble under her feet,
    And blossom in purple and red.
  • Love lieth deep; Love dwells not in lip-depths.
  • Where love could walk with banish'd Hope no more.
  • Love's arms were wreathed about the neck of Hope,
    And Hope kiss'd Love, and Love drew in her breath
    In that close kiss and drank her whisper'd tales.
    They said that Love would die when Hope was gone.
    And Love mourn'd long, and sorrow'd after Hope;
    At last she sought out Memory, and they trod
    The same old paths where Love had walked with Hope,
    And Memory fed the soul of Love with tears.
  • They say it is to know the union with love that the soul takes union with the body.
  • The throb of life is love. Without it, humans are bodies of bones clad with skin.
  • Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.
  • 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.
  • To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.
  • I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.
  • What are wanted ...are not Constitutions and Revolutions, nor all sorts of Conferences and Congresses, nor the many ingenious devices for submarine navigation and aerial navigation, nor powerful explosives, nor all sorts of conveniences to add to the enjoyment of the rich, ruling classes... but one thing only is needful: the knowledge of the simple and clear truth ...that for our life one law is valid — the law of love, which brings the highest happiness to every individual as well as to all mankind.
  • As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love natural to their hearts and now revealed to them, which excludes all resistance by violence, and therefore hold aloof from all participation in violence — as soon as this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to enslave a single individual.
  • The more God's manifestation in man (life) unites with the manifestations (lives) of other beings, the more man exists. This union with the lives of other beings is accomplished through love.
    God is not love, but the more there is of love, the more man manifests God, and the more he truly exists...
  • When people keep repeating
    That you'll never fall in love
    When everybody keeps retreating
    But you can't seem to get enough
    Let my love open the door
    Let my love open the door
    Let my love open the door
    To your heart.
  • God, from a beautiful necessity, is Love in all he doeth,
    Love, a brilliant fire, to gladden or consume    :
    The wicked work their woe by looking upon love, and hating it:
    The righteous find their joys in yearning on its loveliness for ever.

U [edit]

V [edit]

Omnia vincit amor ~ Virgil
A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
  • Omnia vincit amor et nos cedamus amori .
    • Love conquers all; let us all yield to love!
  • Qui que tu sois, voici ton maître;
    Il l'est—le fut—ou le doit être.
    Whoe'er thou art, thy master see;
    He was—or is—or is to be.
    • Voltaire, Works, II, p. 765 (Ed. 1837). Used as an inscription for a statue of Cupid.
  • 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".
  • Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.
  • I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, "Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency."

W [edit]

Love is the fulfilling of the law, the end of the commandment. ~ John Wesley
There's a reason for the sunshinin' sky
And there's a reason why I'm feelin' so high
Must be the season when that
Love light shines all around us. ~ Larry E. Williams, in Let Your Love Flow
  • Could we forbear dispute, and practise love,
    We should agree as angels do above.
  • Love is a minefield. You take a step and get blown to pieces, put yourself back together again and stupidly take another step. I guess that's human nature. It hurts so much to be alone that we'd all rather blow up than be single.
  • I observed, "Love is the fulfilling of the law, the end of the commandment." It is not only "the first and great" command, but all the commandments in one. "Whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise," they are all comprised in this one word, love.
    • John Wesley quoting his own earlier sermon on "The Circumsicion of the Heart" (1 January 1733) in the work A Plain Account Of Christian Perfection (Edition of 1777).
  • An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.
    • John Wesley, The Works of the Rev. John Wesley (1830), p. 393.
  • "Stop talking about love. Every asshole in the world says he loves somebody. It means nothing."
    "But it's true-"
    "Still doesn't mean anything. What you feel only matters to you. It is what you do to the people you love; that's what matters. That's the only thing that counts."
  • Just let your love flow like a mountain stream
    And let your love grow with the smallest of dreams
    And let your love show and you'll know what I mean
    It's the season
    Let your love fly like a bird on a wing
    And let your love bind you to all livin' things
    And let your love shine and you'll know what I mean
    That's the reason.
  • A hundred wise men have said in various ways that love transcends the power of death, and millions of fools have supposed that they meant nothing by it. At this late hour in my life I have learned what they meant. They meant that love transcends death. They are correct.
    • Gene Wolfe, "Bed and Breakfast", in Dante's Disciples (1995), ed. Edward E. Kramer. Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Strange Travelers (2000).
  • Living might mean taking chances, but they're worth taking.
    Loving might be a mistake, but it's worth making.
  • Love is the true antithesis of fear. It expands where fear constricts. It embraces where fear repels.
    • Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness, p. 45 (1997).

X [edit]

Y [edit]

I know a lot about love. I've seen it, seen centuries and centuries of it, and it was the only thing that made watching your world bearable. ~ "Yvaine" in Stardust (2007 film)
  • A pity beyond all telling
    Is hid in the heart of love.
  • Love is in the air
    Everywhere I look around
    Love is in the air
    Every sight and every sound
    And I don't know if I'm being foolish
    Don't know if I'm being wise
    But it's something that I must believe in
    And it's there when I look in your eyes.
  • Love is in the air
    In the whisper of the trees
    Love is in the air
    In the thunder of the sea
    And I don't know if I'm just dreaming
    Don't know if I feel sane
    But it's something that I must believe in
    And it's there when you call out my name.
  • You know when I said I knew little about love? That wasn't true. I know a lot about love. I've seen it, seen centuries and centuries of it, and it was the only thing that made watching your world bearable. All those wars. Pain, lies, hate... Made me want to turn away and never look down again. But to see the way that mankind loves... I mean, you could search to the furthest reaches of the universe and never find anything more beautiful. So, yes, I know that love is unconditional. But I also know it can be unpredictable, unexpected, uncontrollable, unbearable and strangely easy to mistake for loathing, and... What I'm trying to say, Tristan, is... I think I love you. My heart... It feels like my chest can barely contain it. Like it doesn't belong to me any more. It belongs to you. And if you wanted it, I'd wish for nothing in exchange — no gifts, no goods, no demonstrations of devotion. Nothing but knowing you loved me, too. Just your heart, in exchange for mine.

Z [edit]

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations [edit]

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 464-84.
  • Che amar chi t'odia, ell'è impossibil cosa.
    For 'tis impossible
    Hate to return with love.
  • Somewhere there waiteth in this world of ours
    For one lone soul another lonely soul,
    Each choosing each through all the weary hours,
    And meeting strangely at one sudden goal,
    Then blend they, like green leaves with golden flowers,
    Into one beautiful and perfect whole;
    And life's long night is ended, and the way
    Lies open onward to eternal day.
  • Ma vie a son secret, mon âme a son mystére:
    Un amour éternel en un moment concu.
    La mal est sans remède, aussi j'ai dû le taire,
    Et elle qui l'a fait n'en a jamais rien su.
    One sweet, sad secret holds my heart in thrall;
    A mighty love within my breast has grown,
    Unseen, unspoken, and of no one known;
    And of my sweet, who gave it, least of all.
    • Félix Arvers, Sonnet. Translation by Joseph Knight. In The Athenæum, Jan. 13, 1906. Arvers in Mes Heures Perdues, says that the sonnet was "mite de l'italien".
  • How many times do I love, again?
    Tell me how many beads there are
    In a silver chain
    Of evening rain
    Unravelled from the trembling main
    And threading the eye of a yellow star:—
    So many times do I love again.
  • Mein Herz ich will dich fragen,
    Was ist denn Liebe, sag?
    "Zwei Seelen und ein Gedanke,
    Zwei Herzen und ein Schlag."
    • My heart I fain would ask thee
      What then is Love? say on.
      "Two souls and one thought only
      Two hearts that throb as one."
    • Von Münch Bellinghausen (Friedrich Halm)—Der Sohn der Wildniss, Act II. Translation by W. H. Charlton. (Commended by author). Popular translation. of the play is by Marie Lovell—Ingomar the Barbarian. Two souls with but a single thought, / Two hearts that beat as one.
  • To Chloe's breast young Cupid slily stole,
    But he crept in at Myra's pocket-hole.
  • Love in a shower safe shelter took,
    In a rosy bower beside a brook,
    And winked and nodded with conscious pride
    To his votaries drenched on the other side.
    Come hither, sweet maids, there's a bridge below,
    The toll-keeper, Hymen, will let you through.
    Come over the stream to me.
  • Love is like fire.
    Wounds of fire are hard to bear; harder still are those of love.
  • Le premier soupir de l'amour
    Est le dernier de la sagesse.
    The first sigh of love is the last of wisdom.
  • Much ado there was, God wot;
    He woold love, and she woold not,
    She sayd, "Never man was trewe;"
    He sayes, "None was false to you."
  • In your arms was still delight,
    Quiet as a street at night;
    And thoughts of you, I do remember,
    Were green leaves in a darkened chamber,
    Were dark clouds in a moonless sky.
  • For none can express thee, though all should approve thee.
    I love thee so, Dear, that I only can love thee.
  • Who can fear
    Too many stars, though each in heaven shall roll—
    Too many flowers, though each shall crown the year?
    Say thou dost love me, love me, love me—toll
    The silver iterance!—only minding, Dear,
    To love me also in silence, with thy soul.
  • Unless you can feel when the song is done
    No other is sweet in its rhythm;
    Unless you can feel when left by one
    That all men else go with him.
  • I think, am sure, a brother's love exceeds
    All the world's loves in its unworldliness.
  • Never the time and the place
    And the loved one all together.
  • God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures
    Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
    One to show a woman when he loves her.
  • Love has no thought of self!
    Love buys not with the ruthless usurer's gold
    The loathsome prostitution of a hand
    Without a heart! Love sacrifices all things
    To bless the thing it loves!
  • Love thou, and if thy love be deep as mine,
    Thou wilt not laugh at poets.
  • No matter what you do, if your heart is ever true,
    And his heart was true to Poll.
  • To see her is to love her,
    And love but her forever;
    For nature made her what she is,
    And never made anither!
  • The wisest man the warl' e'er saw,
    He dearly loved the lasses, O.
  • The golden hours on angel wings
    Flew o'er me and my dearie,
    For dear to me as light and life
    Was my sweet Highland Mary.
  • Oh my luve's like a red, red rose,
    That's newly sprung in June;
    Oh my luve's like the melodie
    That's sweetly played in tune.
  • What is life, when wanting love?
    Night without a morning;
    Love's the cloudless summer sun,
    Nature gay adorning.
  • When things were as fine as could possibly be
    I thought 'twas the spring; but alas it was she.
  • I'll bid the hyacinth to blow,
    I'll teach my grotto green to be;
    And sing my true love, all below
    The holly bower and myrtle tree.
  • He that loves a rosy cheek,
    Or a coral lip admires,
    Or from star-like eyes doth seek
    Fuel to maintain his fires,
    As Old Time makes these decay,
    So his flames must waste away.
  • Then fly betimes, for only they
    Conquer love, that run away.
  • Of all the girls that are so smart
    There's none like pretty Sally;
    She is the darling of my heart,
    And lives in our alley.
  • Let Time and Chance combine, combine!
    Let Time and Chance combine!
    The fairest love from heaven above,
    That love of yours was mine,
    My Dear!
    That love of yours was mine.
  • Vivamus, mea Lesbia atque amemus.
    My Lesbia, let us live and love.
  • Mulier cupido quod dicit amanti,
    In vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua.
    What woman says to fond lover should be written on air or the swift water.
  • Difficile est longum subito deponere amorem.
    It is difficult at once to relinquish a long-cherished love.
  • Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
    Nescio: sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.
    I hate and I love. Why do I do so you perhaps ask.
    I cannot say; but I feel it to be so, and I am tormented accordingly.
  • It's love, it's love that makes the world go round.
    • Popular French song in Chansons Nationales et Populaires de France, Volume II, p. 180 (c. 1821).
  • I tell thee Love is Nature's second sun,
    Causing a spring of virtues where he shines.
  • None ever loved, but at first sight they loved.
  • Banish that fear; my flame can never waste,
    For love sincere refines upon the taste.
  • Vivunt in venerem frondes omnisque vicissim
    Felix arbor amat; mutant ad mutua palmæ
    Fœdera.
    The leaves live but to love, and in all the lofty grove the happy trees love each his neighbor.
  • Her very frowns are fairer far
    Than smiles of other maidens are.
  • Alas! they had been friends in youth;
    But whispering tongues can poison truth,
    And constancy lives in realms above;
    And life is thorny, and youth is vain;
    And to be wroth with one we love
    Doth work like madness in the brain.
  • All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
    Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
    All are but ministers of Love,
    And feed his sacred flame.
  • I have heard of reasons manifold
    Why love must needs be blind,
    But this is the best of all I hold—
    His eyes are in his mind.
  • Say what you will, 'tis better to be left
    Than never to have loved.
  • If there's delight in love, 'tis when I see
    The heart, which others bleed for, bleed for me.
  • I know not when the day shall be,
    I know not when our eyes may meet;
    What welcome you may give to me,
    Or will your words be sad or sweet,
    It may not be 'till years have passed,
    'Till eyes are dim and tresses gray;
    The world is wide, but, love, at last,
    Our hands, our hearts, must meet some day.
  • How wise are they that are but fools in love!
    • How a man may choose a Good Wife, Act I. 1. Attributed to Joshua Cooke in Dictioanry of National Biography.
  • A mighty pain to love it is,
    And 'tis a pain that pain to miss;
    But, of all pains, the greatest pain
    Is to love, but love in vain.
    • Abraham Cowley, Translation of Anacreontic Odes, VII. Gold. (Anacreon's authorship doubted).
  • Better to love amiss than nothing to have loved.
  • Mighty Love's artillery.
  • And I, what is my crime I cannot tell,
    Vnless it be a crime to haue lou'd too well.
  • Poor love is lost in men's capacious minds,
    In ours, it fills up all the room it finds.
  • He who, being bold
    For life to come, is false to the past sweet
    Of mortal life, hath killed the world above.
    For why to live again if not to meet?
    And why to meet if not to meet in love?
    And why in love if not in that dear love of old?
  • Give, you gods,
    Give to your boy, your Cæsar,
    The rattle of a globe to play withal,
    This gewgaw world, and put him cheaply off;
    I'll not be pleased with less than Cleopatra.
  • How happy the lover,
    How easy his chain,
    How pleasing his pain,
    How sweet to discover
    He sighs not in vain.
  • Fool, not to know that love endures no tie,
    And Jove but laughs at lovers' perjury.
    • John Dryden, Palamon and Arcite, Book II, line 75. Amphitron, Act I, scene 2.
  • Pains of love be sweeter far
    Than all other pleasures are.
  • I'm sitting on the stile. Mary,
    Where we sat side by side.
  • Oh, tell me whence Love cometh!
    Love comes uncall'd, unsent.
    Oh, tell me where Love goeth!
    That was not Love that went.
    • Burden of a Woman. Found in J. W. Ebsworth's Roxburghe Ballads.
  • The solid, solid universe
    Is pervious to Love;
    With bandaged eyes he never errs,
    Around, below, above.
    His blinding light
    He flingeth white
    On God's and Satan's brood,
    And reconciles
    By mystic wiles
    The evil and the good.
  • A ruddy drop of manly blood
    The surging sea outweighs;
    The world uncertain comes and goes,
    The lover rooted stays.
  • Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.
  • Venus, when her son was lost,
    Cried him up and down the coast,
    In hamlets, palaces, and parks,
    And told the truant by his marks,—
    Golden curls, and quiver, and bow.
  • Mais on revient toujours
    A ses premières amours.
    But one always returns to one's first loves.
    • Quoted by Étienne in Joconde, Act III. 1. Same idea in Pliny the Elder, Natural History, X, 63.
  • Venus, thy eternal sway
    All the race of men obey.
  • He is not a lover who does not love for ever.
  • Love is the tyrant of the heart; it darkens
    Reason, confounds discretion; deaf to Counsel
    It runs a headlong course to desperate madness.
    • John Ford, The Lover's Melancholy (licensed 24 November 1628; printed 1629), Act III, scene 3, line 105.
  • Love, then, hath every bliss in store;
    'Tis friendship, and 'tis something more.
    Each other every wish they give;
    Not to know love is not to live.
    • John Gay, Plutus, Cupid and Time, line 135.
  • I love her doubling and anguish;
    I love the love she withholds,
    I love my love that loveth her,
    And anew her being moulds.
  • Love, Love, my Love.
    The best things are the truest!
    When the earth lies shadowy dark below
    Oh, then the heavens are bluest!
  • Not from the whole wide world I chose thee,
    Sweetheart, light of the land and the sea!
    The wide, wide world could not inclose thee,
    For thou art the whole wide world to me.
  • I seek for one as fair and gay,
    But find none to remind me,
    How blest the hours pass'd away
    With the girl I left behind me.
    • The Girl I Left Behind Me (1759).
  • Es ist eine der grössten Himmelsgaben,
    So ein lieb' Ding im Arm zu haben.
    It is one of Heaven's best gifts to hold such a dear creature in one's arms.
  • Und Lust und Liebe sind die Fittige zu grossen Thaten.
    Love and desire are the spirit's wings to great deeds.
  • In einem Augenblick gewährt die Liebe
    Was Mühe kaum in langer Zeit erreicht.
    Love grants in a moment
    What toil can hardly achieve in an age.
  • Man liebt an dem Mädchen was es ist,
    Und an dem Jüngling was er ankündigt.
    Girls we love for what they are;
    Young men for what they promise to be.
  • Wenn ich dich lieb habe, was geht's dich an?
    If I love you, what business is that of yours?
  • Thus let me hold thee to my heart,
    And every care resign:
    And we shall never, never part,
    My life—my all that's mine!
  • As for murmurs, mother, we grumble a little now and then, to be sure; but there's no love lost between us.
  • Whoe'er thou art, thy Lord and master see,
    Thou wast my Slave, thou art, or thou shalt be.
    • George Granville (Lord Lansdowne), Inscription for a Figure representing the God of Love. See Genuine Works. (1732) I. 129. Version of a Greek couplet from the Greek Anthology.
  • Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes,
    Dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart.
  • O'er her warm cheek, and rising bosom, move
    The bloom of young Desire and purple light of love.
  • Love is a lock that linketh noble minds,
    Faith is the key that shuts the spring of love.
    • Robert Greene, Alcida. Verses Written under a Carving of Cupid Blowing Bladders in the Air.
  • Greensleeves was all my joy,
    Greensleeves was my delight,
    Greensleeves was my heart of gold,
    And who but Lady Greensleeves?
    • A new Courtly Sonnet of the Lady Greensleeves, to the new tune of "Greensleeves", from "A Handful of Pleasant Deities" (1584).
  • The chemist of love
    Will this perishing mould,
    Were it made out of mire,
    Transmute into gold.
  • What a sweet reverence is that when a young man deems his mistress a little more than mortal and almost chides himself for longing to bring her close to his heart.
  • Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.
    • Hebrews, XII. 6.
  • Du bist wie eine Blume, so hold, so schön und rein;
    Ich shau' dich an und Wehmut schleicht mir ins Herz hinein.
    Oh fair, oh sweet and holy as dew at morning tide,
    I gaze on thee, and yearnings, sad in my bosom hide.
  • Es ist eine alte Geschichte,
    Doch bleibt sie immer neu.
    It is an ancient story
    Yet is it ever new.
  • And once again we plighted our troth,
    And titter'd, caress'd, kiss'd so dearly.
  • Alas! for love, if thou art all,
    And nought beyond, O earth.
  • No, not Jove
    Himselfe, at one time, can be wise and love.
  • You say to me-wards your affection's strong;
    Pray love me little, so you love me long.
  • There is a lady sweet and kind,
    Was never face so pleased my mind;
    I did but see her passing by,
    And yet I love her till I die.
    • Ascribed to Robert Herrick in the Scottish Student's Song-Book. Found on back of leaf 53 of Popish Kingdome or reigne of Antichrist, in Latin verse by Thomas Naogeorgus, and Englished by Barnabe Googe. Printed 1570. See Notes and Queries. S. IX. X. 427. Lines from Elizabethan Song-books. Bullen, p. 31. Reprinted from Thomas Ford's Music of Sundry Kinds. (1607).
  • Bid me to live, and I will live
    Thy Protestant to be:
    Or bid me love, and I will give
    A loving heart to thee,
    A heart as soft, a heart as kind,
    A heart as sound and free
    As in the whole world thou canst find,
    That heart I'll give to thee.
  • Let never man be bold enough to say,
    Thus, and no farther shall my passion stray:
    The first crime, past, compels us into more,
    And guilt grows fate, that was but choice, before.
  • To love is to know the sacrifices which eternity exacts from life.
  • O, love, love, love!
    Love is like a dizziness;
    It winna let a poor body
    Gang about his biziness!
    • Hogg, Love is like a Dizziness, line 9.
  • Soft is the breath of a maiden's Yes:
    Not the light gossamer stirs with less;
    But never a cable that holds so fast
    Through all the battles of wave and blast.
  • Who love too much, hate in the like extreme.
    • Homer, The Odyssey, Book XV, line 79. Pope's translation.
  • For love deceives the best of woman kind.
    • Homer, The Odyssey, Book XV, line 463. Pope's translation.
  • Si sine amore, jocisque
    Nil est jucundum, vivas in amore jocisque.
    If nothing is delightful without love and jokes, then live in love and jokes.
  • What's our baggage? Only vows,
    Happiness, and all our care,
    And the flower that sweetly shows
    Nestling lightly in your hair.
  • If you become a Nun, dear,
    The bishop Love will be;
    The Cupids every one, dear!
    Will chant—'We trust in thee!'
  • From henceforth thou shalt learn that there is love
    To long for, pureness to desire, a mount
    Of consecration it were good to scale.
    • Jean Ingelow, A Parson's Letter to a Young Poet, Part II, line 55.
  • But great loves, to the last, have pulses red;
    All great loves that have ever died dropped dead.
  • When love is at its best, one loves
    So much that he cannot forget.
  • Love's like the flies, and, drawing-room or garret, goes all over a house.
  • Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
    • John, XV. 13.
  • Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
    Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust.
  • I wish you could invent some means to make me at all happy without you. Every hour I am more and more concentrated in you; everything else tastes like chaff in my mouth.
  • When late I attempted your pity to move,
    Why seemed you so deaf to my prayers?
    Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love
    But—why did you kick me downstairs?
    • J. P. Kemble, Panel, Act I, scene 1. Quoted from Asylum for Fugitive Pieces, Volume I, p. 15. (1785) where it appeared anonymously. Kemble is credited with its authorship. The Panel is adapted from Bickerstaff's 'Tis Well 'Tis No Worse, but these lines are not therein. It may also be found in Annual Register. Appendix. (1783) P. 201.
  • What's this dull town to me?
    Robin's not near—
    He whom I wished to see,
    Wished for to hear;
    Where's all the joy and mirth
    Made life a heaven on earth?
    O! they're all fled with thee,
    Robin Adair.
  • The hawk unto the open sky,
    The red deer to the wold;
    The Romany lass for the Romany lad,
    As in the days of old.
    • Given in the N. Y. Times Review of Books as a previously written poem by F. C. Weatherby. Not found.
  • Sing, for faith and hope are high—
    None so true as you and I—
    Sing the Lovers' Litany:
    "Love like ours can never die!"
  • By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,
    There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
    For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
    "Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"
  • If Love were jester at the court of Death,
    And Death the king of all, still would I pray,
    "For me the motley and the bauble, yea,
    Though all be vanity, as the Preacher saith,
    The mirth of love be mine for one brief breath!"
  • Love begins with love.
  • Le commencement et le déclin de l'amour se font sentir par l'embarras où l'on est de se trouver seuls.
    The beginning and the end of love are both marked by embarrassment when the two find themselves alone.
  • Amour! Amour! quand tu nous tiens
    On peut bien dire, Adieu, prudence.
    O tyrant love, when held by you,
    We may to prudence bid adieu.
  • Ce qui fait que amants et les maitresses ne s'ennuient point d'être ensemble; c'est qu'ils parlent toujours d'eux mêmes.
    The reason why lovers and their mistresses never tire of being together is that they are always talking of themselves.
  • Do you know you have asked for the costliest thing
    Ever made by the Hand above—
    A woman's heart, and a woman's life,
    And a woman's wonderful love?
    • Mary T. Lathrop, A Woman's Answer to a Man's Question. Erroneously credited to Mrs. Browning.
  • I love a lassie, a bonnie, bonnie lassie,
    She's as pure as the lily in the dell.
    She's as sweet as the heather,
    The bonnie, bloomin' heather,
    Mary, ma Scotch Blue-bell.
    • Harry Lauder and Gerald Grafton. I Love a Lassie.
  • Et c'est dans la première flamme
    Qu'est tout le nectar du baiser.
    And in that first flame
    Is all the nectar of the kiss.
    • Lebrun, Mes Souvenirs, ou les Deux Rives de la Seine.
  • Love leads to present rapture,—then to pain;
    But all through Love in time is healed again.
  • A warrior so bold, and a virgin so bright,
    Conversed as they sat on the green.
    They gazed on each other with tender delight,
    Alonzo the Brave was the name of the knight—
    The maiden's the Fair Imogene.
    • M. G. Lewis—Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene. First appeared in his novel Ambrosio the Monk. Found in his Tales of Wonder, Volume III, p. 63. Lewis's copy of his poem is in the British Museum.
  • Love contending with friendship, and self with each generous impulse.
    To and fro in his breast his thoughts were heaving and dashing,
    As in a foundering ship.
  • Like Dian's kiss, unask'd, unsought,
    Love gives itself, but is not bought.
  • Does not all the blood within me
    Leap to meet thee, leap to meet thee,
    As the springs to meet the sunshine.
  • It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.
  • I do not love thee less for what is done,
    And cannot be undone. Thy very weakness
    Hath brought thee nearer to me, and henceforth
    My love will have a sense of pity in it,
    Making it less a worship than before.
  • So they grew, and they grew, to the church steeple tops
    And they couldn't grow up any higher;
    So they twin'd themselves into a true lover's knot,
    For all lovers true to admire.
    • Lord Lovel. Old Ballad. History found in Professor Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, II. 204. Also in The New Comic Minstrel. Pub. by John Cameron, Glasgow. The original version seems to be as given there.
  • Under floods that are deepest,
    Which Neptune obey,
    Over rocks that are steepest,
    Love will find out the way.
  • Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,
    That from the nunnery
    Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
    To war and arms I fly.
    . . . . . .
    Yet this inconstancy is such
    As you too shall adore:—
    I could not love thee, dear, so much,
    Loved I not honour more.
    • Richard Lovelace, To Lucasta, on going to the Wars. Given erroneously to Montrose by Scott.
  • True love is but a humble, low born thing,
    And hath its food served up in earthenware;
    It is a thing to walk with, hand in hand,
    Through the every-dayness of this workday world.
  • Not as all other women are
    Is she that to my soul is dear;
    Her glorious fancies come from far,
    Beneath the silver evening star,
    And yet her heart is ever near.
  • Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib, und Gesang,
    Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang.
    • He who loves not wine, woman, and song,
      Remains a fool his whole life long.
    • Attributed to Luther by Uhland in Die Geisterkelter. Found in Luther's Tischreden. Proverbs at end. Credited to J. H. Voss by Redlich, Die poetischen Beiträge zum Waudsbecker Bothen, Hamburg, 1871, p. 67.
  • As love knoweth no lawes, so it regardeth no conditions.
  • Cupid and my Campaspe play'd
    At cards for kisses; Cupid paid;
    He stakes his quiver, bow and arrows,
    His mother's doves, and team of sparrows;
    Loses them too; then down he throws
    The coral of his lip,—the rose
    Growing on 's cheek (but none knows how)
    With these, the crystal on his brow,
    And then the dimple of his chin;
    All these did my Campaspe win.
    At last he set her both his eyes,
    She won, and Cupid blind did rise.
    O Love! hath she done this to thee?
    What shall, alas! become of me?
    • John Lyly, Alexander and Campaspe, Act III, scene VI. Song.
  • It is better to poyson hir with the sweet bait of love.
  • Nothing is more hateful than love.
  • But thou, through good and evil, praise and blame,
    Wilt not thou love me for myself alone?
    Yes, thou wilt love me with exceeding love,
    And I will tenfold all that love repay;
    Still smiling, though the tender may reprove,
    Still faithful, though the trusted may betray.
  • This lass so neat, with smile so sweet,
    Has won my right good will,
    I'd crowns resign to call her mine,
    Sweet lass of Richmond Hill.
    • Ascribed to Leonard McNally, who married Miss I'Anson, one of the claimants for the "Lass," by Sir Joseph Barrington in Sketches of His Own Times, Volume II, p. 47. Also credited to William Upton. It appeared in Public Advertiser, Aug. 3, 1789. "Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill" erroneously said to have been a sweetheart of King George III.
  • When Madelon comes out to serve us drinks,
    We always know she's coming by her song.
    And every man he tells his little tale,
    And Madelon, she listens all day long.
    Our Madelon is never too severe—
    A kiss or two is nothing much to her—
    She laughs us up to love and life and God—
    Madelon, Madelon, Madelon.
    • La Madelon, song of the French Soldiers in the Great War.
  • Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight?
    • Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander. First Sestiad, line 176. Quoted as a "dead shepherd's saw." Found in As You Like It.
  • Love me little, love me long.
  • Come live with me, and be my love,
    And we will all the pleasures prove,
    That valleys, groves, or hills, or fields,
    Or woods and steepy mountains, yield.
  • Quand on n'a pas ce que l'on aime, il faut aimer ce que l'on a.
    If one does not possess what one loves, one should love what one has.
  • Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare;
    Hoc tantum posse dicere: non amo te.
    I do not love thee, Sabidius, nor can I say why; I can only say this, "I do not love thee."
    • Martial, Epigrams (c. 80-104 AD), I. 33. 1. (Name sometimes given "Savidi.").
  • I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.
    But why I cannot tell;
    But this I know full well,
    I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.
    • Paraphrase of Martial by Tom Brown, as given in his Works, ed. by Drake. (1760). Answer to Dean John Fell, of Oxford, IV. 100.
  • Je ne vous aime pas, Hylas;
    Je n'en saurois dire la cause;
    Je sais seulement une chose.
    C'est que je ne vous aime pas.
    • Paraphrase of Martial by Robert Rabutin (De Bussy)—Epigram 32, Book I.
  • I love thee not, Nell
    But why I can't tell.
    • Paraphrase of Martial in Thomas Forde's Virtus Rediviva.
  • I love him not, but show no reason wherefore, but this, I do not love the man.
    • Paraphrase of Martial by Rowland Watkyns, Antipathy.
  • Love is a flame to burn out human wills,
    Love is a flame to set the will on fire,
    Love is a flame to cheat men into mire.
  • Great men,
    Till they have gained their ends, are giants in
    Their promises, but, those obtained, weak pigmies
    In their performance. And it is a maxim
    Allowed among them, so they may deceive,
    They may swear anything; for the queen of love,
    As they hold constantly, does never punish,
    But smile, at lovers' perjuries.
  • 'Tis well to be merry and wise,
    'Tis well to be honest and true;
    'Tis well to be off with the old love,
    Before you are on with the new.
    • As used by Charles Maturin, for the motto to "Bertram," produced at Drury Lane, 1816.
  • It is good to be merry and wise,
    It is good to be honest and true,
    It is best to be off with the old love,
    Before you are on with the new.
    • Published in "Songs of England and Scotland." London, 1835, Volume II, p. 73.
  • I loved you ere I knew you; know you now,
    And having known you, love you better still.
  • Love is all in fire, and yet is ever freezing;
    Love is much in winning, yet is more in leesing:
    Love is ever sick, and yet is never dying;
    Love is ever true, and yet is ever lying;
    Love does doat in liking, and is mad in loathing;
    Love indeed is anything, yet indeed is nothing.
  • I never heard
    Of any true affection but 'twas nipped.
  • He who for love hath undergone
    The worst that can befall,
    Is happier thousandfold than one
    Who never loved at all.
  • Such sober certainty of waking bliss.
  • La fleur nominée héliotrope tourne sans cesse vers cet astre du jour, aussi mon cœur dorénavant tournera-t-il toujours vers les astres resplendissants de vos yeux adorables, ainsi que son pôle unique.
    The flower called heliotrope turns without ceasing to that star of the day, so also my heart henceforth will turn itself always towards the resplendent stars of your adorable eyes, as towards its only pole.
    • Molière, Le Malade Imaginaire, Act II, scene 6.
  • L'amour est souvent un fruit de mariage.
    Love is often a fruit of marriage.
  • If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed than by making answer, Because it was he; because it was I. There is beyond all that I am able to say, I know not what inexplicable and fated power that brought on this union.
  • Celuy ayme peu qui ayme à la mesure.
    He loves little who loves by rule.
  • Yes, loving is a painful thrill,
    And not to love more painful still;
    But oh, it is the worst of pain,
    To love and not be lov'd again.
  • No, the heart that has truly loved never forgets,
    But as truly loves on to the close,
    As the sunflower turns on her god, when he sets,
    The same look which she turn'd when he rose.
    • Thomas Moore, Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms, Stanza 2.
  • I know not, I ask not, if guilt's in that heart,
    I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art.
  • A boat at midnight sent alone
    To drift upon the moonless sea,
    A lute, whose leading chord is gone,
    A wounded bird, that hath but one
    Imperfect wing to soar upon,
    Are like what I am, without thee.
  • But there's nothing half so sweet in life
    As love's young dream.
  • "Tell me, what's Love;" said Youth, one day,
    To drooping Age, who crost his way.—
    "It is a sunny hour of play;
    For which repentance dear doth pay;
    Repentance! Repentance!
    And this is Love, as wise men say."
  • I've wandered east, I've wandered west,
    I've bourne a weary lot;
    But in my wanderings far or near
    Ye never were forgot.
    The fount that first burst frae this heart
    Still travels on its way
    And channels deeper as it rins
    The luve o' life's young day.
  • Duty's a slave that keeps the keys,
    But Love, the master goes in and out
    Of his goodly chambers with song and shout,
    Just as he please—just as he please.
  • Ah, dearer than my soul…
    Dearer than light, or life, or fame.
  • Jupiter ex alto perjuria ridet amantum.
    Jupiter from on high laughs at the perjuries of lovers.
    • Ovid, Ars Amatoria, Book I. 633.
  • Res est soliciti plena timoris amor.
    Love is a thing full of anxious fears.
    • Ovid, Heroides, I. 12.
  • Quicquid Amor jussit non est contemnere tutum.
    Regnat, et in dominos jus habet ille deos.
    It is not safe to despise what Love commands. He reigns supreme, and rules the mighty gods.
    • Ovid, Heroides, IV. 11.
  • Hei mihi! quod nullis amor est medicabilis herbis.
    Ah me! love can not be cured by herbs.
    • Ovid, Metamorphoses, I. 523.
  • Non bene conveniunt, nec in una sede morantur,
    Majestas et amor.
    Majesty and love do not well agree, nor do they live together.
    • Ovid, Metamorphoses, II. 846.
  • Credula res amor est.
    Love is a credulous thing.
    • Ovid, Metamorphoses, VII. 826. Heroides, VI. 21.
  • Otia si tollas, periere cupidinis arcus.
    If you give up your quiet life, the bow of Cupid will lose its power.
    • Ovid, Remedia Amoris, CXXXIX.
  • Qui finem quæris amoris,
    (Cedit amor rebus) res age; tutus eris.
    If thou wishest to put an end to love, attend to business (love yields to employment); then thou wilt be safe.
    • Ovid, Remedia Amoris, CXLIII.
  • Let those love now who never lov'd before,
    Let those who always loved now love the more.
    • Thomas Parnell—Translation of the Pervigilium Veneris. Ancient poem. Author unknown. Ascribed to Catullus. See also Burton—Anatomy of Melancholy, Part III, Section II. Memb. 5. 5.
  • The moods of love are like the wind,
    And none knows whence or why they rise.
  • My merry, merry, merry roundelay
    Concludes with Cupid's curse,
    They that do change old love for new,
    Pray gods, they change for worse!
    • George Peele, Cupid's Curse; From the Arraignment of Paris.
  • What thing is love?—for (well I wot) love is a thing.
    It is a prick, it is a sting.
    It is a pretty, pretty thing;
    It is a fire, it is a coal,
    Whose flame creeps in at every hole!
  • Love will make men dare to die for their beloved—love alone; and women as well as men.
  • Qui amat, tamen hercle si esurit, nullum esurit.
    He that is in love, faith, if he be hungry, is not hungry at all.
  • Amor et melle et felle est fœcundissimus:
    Gustu dat dulce, amarum ad satietatem usque aggerit.
    Love has both its gall and honey in abundance: it has sweetness to the taste, but it presents bitterness also to satiety.
  • Auro contra cedo modestum amatorem.
    Find me a reasonable lover against his weight in gold.
  • Qui in amore præcipitavit pejus perit, quam si saxo saliat.
    He who falls in love meets a worse fate than he who leaps from a rock.
  • A lover's soul lives in the body of his mistress.
  • Ah! what avails it me the flocks to keep,
    Who lost my heart while I preserv'd my sheep.
  • Is it, in Heav'n, a crime to love too well?
    To bear too tender or too firm a heart,
    To act a lover's or a Roman's part?
    Is there no bright reversion in the sky
    For those who greatly think, or bravely die?
  • Love, free as air, at sight of human ties,
    Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies.
  • Ye gods, annihilate but space and time,
    And make two lovers happy.
    • Alexander Pope, Martinus Scriblerus on the Art of Sinking in Poetry, Chapter XI.
  • O Love! for Sylvia let me gain the prize,
    And make my tongue victorious as her eyes.
  • Scilicent insano nemo in amore videt.
    Everybody in love is blind.
  • Divine is Love and scorneth worldly pelf,
    And can be bought with nothing but with self.
  • If all the world and love were young,
    And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
    These pretty pleasures might me move
    To live with thee, and be thy love.
  • Ach die Zeiten der Liebe rollen nicht zurück, sondern ewig weiter hinab.
    Ah! The seasons of love roll not backward but onward, downward forever.
  • Die Liebe vermindert die weibliche
    Feinheit und verstärkt die männliche.
    Love lessens woman's delicacy and increases man's.
  • Ein liebendes Mädchen wird unbewust kühner.
    A loving maiden grows unconsciously more bold.
  • As one who cons at evening o'er an album all alone,
    And muses on the faces of the friends that he has known,
    So I turn the leaves of Fancy, till in shadowy design
    I find the smiling features of an old sweetheart of mine.
  • The hours I spent with thee, dear heart,
    Are as a string of pearls to me;
    I count them over, every one apart,
    My rosary, my rosary.
  • Oh! she was good as she was fair.
    None—none on earth above her!
    As pure in thought as angels are,
    To know her was to love her.
  • Love is the fulfilling of the law.
    • Romans, XIII. 10.
  • Trust thou thy Love: if she be proud, is she not sweet?
    Trust thou thy love: if she be mute, is she not pure?
    Lay thou thy soul full in her hands, low at her feet—
    Fail, Sun and Breath!—yet, for thy peace, she shall endure.
  • Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.
    • Ruth. I. 16.
  • Et l'on revient toujours à ses premiers amours.
    One always returns to his first love.
    • St. Just.
  • L'amour est un égoïsme à deux.
    Love is an egotism of two.
    • Antoine de Salle.
  • Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.
    • II Samuel. I. 26.
  • Raum ist in der kleinsten Hütte
    Für ein glücklich liebend Paar.
    In the smallest cot there is room enough for a loving pair.
  • Arm in Arm mit dir,
    So fordr' ich mein Jahrhundert in die Schranken.
    Thus Arm in Arm with thee I dare defy my century into the lists.
  • Ah, to that far distant strand
    Bridge there was not to convey,
    Not a bark was near at hand,
    Yet true love soon found the way.
  • O dass sie ewig grünen bliebe,
    Die schöne Zeit der jungen Liebe.
    O that it might remain eternally green,
    The beautiful time of youthful love.
  • Ich habe genossen das irdische Glück,
    Ich habe gelebt und geliebt.
    I have enjoyed earthly happiness,
    I have lived and loved.
  • Mortals, while through the world you go,
    Hope may succor and faith befriend,
    Yet happy your hearts if you can but know,
    Love awaits at the journey's end!
  • And love is loveliest when embalm'd in tears.
    • Walter Scott, Lady of the Lake (1810), Canto IV, Stanza 1.
  • In peace, Love tunes the shepherd's reed;
    In war, he mounts the warrior's steed;
    In halls, in gay attire is seen;
    In hamlets, dances on the green.
    Love rules the court, the camp, the grove,
    And men below, and saints above;
    For love is heaven, and heaven is love.
    • Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Canto III, Stanza 2.
  • Her blue eyes sought the west afar,
    For lovers love the western star.
    • Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Canto III, Stanza 24.
  • True love's the gift which God has given
    To man alone beneath the heaven.
    It is the secret sympathy,
    The silver link, the silken tie,
    Which heart to heart, and mind to mind,
    In body and in soul can bind.
    • Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Canto V, Stanza 13.
  • Where shall the lover rest,
    Whom the fates sever
    From his true maiden's breast,
    Parted for ever?
    Where, through groves deep and high,
    Sounds the far billow,
    Where early violets die,
    Under the willow.
  • Magis gauderes quod habueras, quam moereres quod amiseras.
    Better to have loved and lost, than not to have loved at all. (Free translation).
  • Odit verus amor nec patitur moras.
    True love hates and will not bear delay.
    • Seneca, Hercules Furens, 588.
  • Qui blandiendo dulce nutrivit malum,
    Sero recusat ferre, quod subiit, jugum.
    He who has fostered the sweet poison of love by fondling it, finds it too late to refuse the yoke which he has of his own accord assumed.
  • Si vis amari, ama.
    If you wish to be loved, love.
    • Seneca, Epistolæ Ad Lucilium, IX. Ausonius—Epigrams. XCI. 6. Martial, Epigrams, VI. 11. Ovid, Ars Amatoria, II. 107. Attributed to Plato by Burton.
  • Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
    Within his bending sickle's compass come;
    Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
    But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
    If this be error and upon me prov'd,
    I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
  • When you loved me I gave you the whole sun and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in a single moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of your arms, the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your soul. A moment only; but was it not enough? Were you not paid then for all the rest of your struggle on earth?… When I opened the gates of paradise, were you blind? Was it nothing to you? When all the stars sang in your ears and all the winds swept you the heart of heaven, were you deaf? were you dull? was I no more to you than a bone to a dog? Was it not enough? We spent eternity together; and you ask me for a little lifetime more. We possessed all the universe together; and you ask me to give you my scanty wages as well. I have given you the greatest of all things; and you ask me to give you little things. I gave you your own soul: you ask me for my body as a plaything. Was it not enough? Was it not enough?
  • The fickleness of the woman I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
  • My true-love hath my heart, and I have his,
    By just exchange, one for the other given;
    I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss,
    There never was a better bargain driven.
  • They love indeed who quake to say they love.
  • Priests, altars, victims, swam before my sight.
  • Thy fatal shafts unerring move;
    I bow before thine altar, Love!
  • Love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave.
    • Song of Solomon, VIII. 6.
  • Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.
    • Song of Solomon, VIII. 7.
  • And when my own Mark Antony
    Against young Cæsar strove,
    And Rome's whole world was set in arms,
    The cause was,—all for love.
  • Cupid "the little greatest god."
  • They sin who tell us Love can die:
    With life all other passions fly,
    All others are but vanity,
    In Heaven Ambition cannot dwell,
    Nor Avarice in the vaults of Hell.
  • Together linkt with adamantine chains.
    • Edmund Spenser, Hymn in Honour of Love. Phrase used by Drummond, Flowers of Sion. Belvoir, in Harleian Miscellany, IV. 559. Phineas Fletcher—Purple Island, Chapter XII. 64. (1633). Manilius, Book I. 921. Marini—Sospetto d'Herode. Sts. 14 and 18, Crashaw's translation. Shelley, Revolt of Islam, III. 19.
  • To be wise and eke to love,
    Is granted scarce to gods above.
  • Love is the emblem of eternity: it confounds all notion of time: effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.
  • Where we really love, we often dread more than we desire the solemn moment that exchanges hope for certainty.
  • L'amour est l'histoire de la vie des femmes; c'est un épisode dans celle des hommes.
    Love is the history of a woman's life; it is an episode in man's.
  • Sweetheart, when you walk my way,
    Be it dark or be it day;
    Dreary winter, fairy May,
    I shall know and greet you.
    For each day of grief or grace
    Brings you nearer my embrace;
    Love hath fashioned your dear face,
    I shall know you when I meet you.
  • To love her was a liberal education.
    • Steele, of Lady Elizabeth Hastings, in The Tatler, No. 49. Augustine Birrell in Obiter Dicta calls this "the most magnificent compliment ever paid by man to a woman".
  • I who all the Winter through,
    Cherished other loves than you
    And kept hands with hoary policy in marriage-bed and pew;
    Now I know the false and true,
    For the earnest sun looks through,
    And my old love comes to meet me in the dawning and the dew.
  • And my heart springs up anew,
    Bright and confident and true,
    And the old love comes to meet me, in the dawning and the dew.
  • Just like Love is yonder rose,
    Heavenly fragrance round it throws,
    Yet tears its dewy leaves disclose,
    And in the midst of briars it blows
    Just like Love.
  • Why so pale and wan, fond lover,
    Prithee, why so pale?
    Will, when looking well can't move her,
    Looking ill prevail?
    Prithee, why so pale?
  • Love in its essence is spiritual fire.
  • In all I wish, how happy should I be,
    Thou grand Deluder, were it not for thee?
    So weak thou art that fools thy power despise;
    And yet so strong, thou triumph'st o'er the wise.
  • Love, as is told by the seers of old,
    Comes as a butterfly tipped with gold,
    Flutters and flies in sunlit skies,
    Weaving round hearts that were one time cold.
  • If love were what the rose is,
    And I were like the leaf,
    Our lives would grow together
    In sad or singing weather.
  • O Love, O great god Love, what have I done,
    That thou shouldst hunger so after my death?
    My heart is harmless as my life's first day:
    Seek out some false fair woman, and plague her
    Till her tears even as my tears fill her bed.
  • Love laid his sleepless head
    On a thorny rose bed:
    And his eyes with tears were red,
    And pale his lips as the dead.
  • I that have love and no more
    Give you but love of you, sweet;
    He that hath more, let him give;
    He that hath wings, let him soar;
    Mine is the heart at your feet
    Here, that must love you to live.
  • Cogas amantem irasci, amare si velis.
    You must make a lover angry if you wish him to love.
  • Tum, ut adsolet in amore et ira, jurgia, preces, exprobrutio, satisfactio.
    Then there is the usual scene when lovers are excited with each other, quarrels, entreaties, reproaches, and then fondling reconcilement.
    • Tacitus, Annales (AD 117), XIII. 44.
  • When gloaming treads the heels of day
    And birds sit cowering on the spray,
    Along the flowery hedge I stray,
    To meet mine ain dear somebody.
  • I love thee, I love but thee,
    With a love that shall not die
    Till the sun grows cold,
    And the stars are old,
    And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!
  • Love better is than Fame.
  • Love's history, as Life's, is ended not
    By marriage.
  • For love's humility is Love's true pride.
  • And on her lover's arm she leant,
    And round her waist she felt it fold,
    And far across the hills they went
    In that new world which is the old.
  • I loved you, and my love had no return,
    And therefore my true love has been my death.
  • Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a moulder'd string?
    I am shamed through all my nature to have lov'd so slight a thing.
  • Love is hurt with jar and fret;
    Love is made a vague regret.
  • It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.
  • Werther had a love for Charlotte,
    Such as words could never utter;
    Would you know how first he met her?
    She was cutting bread and butter.
  • Like to a wind-blown sapling grow I from
    The cliff, Sweet, of your skyward-jetting soul,—
    Shook by all gusts that sweep it, overcome
    By all its clouds incumbent; O be true
    To your soul, dearest, as my life to you!
    For if that soil grow sterile, then the whole
    Of me must shrivel, from the topmost shoot
    Of climbing poesy, and my life, killed through,
    Dry down and perish to the foodless root.
  • Why should we kill the best of passions, love?
    It aids the hero, bids ambition rise
    To nobler heights, inspires immortal deeds,
    Even softens brutes, and adds a grace to virtue.
  • O, what are you waiting for here? young man!
    What are you looking for over the bridge?—
    A little straw hat with the streaming blue ribbons
    Is soon to come dancing over the bridge.
  • Nec jurare time; Veneris perjuria venti
    Irrita per terras et freta summa ferunt,
    Gratia magna Jovi; vetuit pater ipse valere,
    Jurasset cupide quicquid ineptus amor.
    Fear not to swear; the winds carry the perjuries of lovers without effect over land and sea, thanks to Jupiter. The father of the gods himself has denied effect to what foolish lovers in their eagerness have sworn.
  • Perjuria ridet amantium Jupiter et ventos irrita ferre jubet.
    At lovers' perjuries Jove laughs and throws them idly to the winds.
  • Die Liebe wintert nicht;
    Nein, nein! Ist und bleibt Frühlings-Schein.
    Love knows no winter; no, no! It is, and remains the sign of spring.
  • At first, she loved nought else but flowers,
    And then—she only loved the rose;
    And then—herself alone; and then—
    She knew not what, but now—she knows.
  • For Truth makes holy Love's illusive dreams,
    And their best promise constantly redeems.
  • The warrior for the True, the Right,
    Fights in Love's name;
    The love that lures thee from that fight
    Lures thee to shame:
    That love which lifts the heart, yet leaves
    The spirit free,—
    That love, or none, is fit for one
    Man-shaped like thee.
  • Quis fallere possit amantem?
    Who can deceive a lover?
  • For all true love is grounded on esteem.
    • Villiers (Duke of Buckingham).
  • To love is to believe, to hope, to know;
    'Tis an essay, a taste of Heaven below!
  • Could we forbear dispute, and practise love,
    We should agree as angels do above.
  • And the King with his golden sceptre,
    The Pope with Saint Peter's key,
    Can never unlock the one little heart
    That is opened only to me.
    For I am the Lord of a Realm,
    And I am Pope of a See;
    Indeed I'm supreme in the kingdom
    That is sitting, just now, on my knee.
  • O, rank is good, and gold is fair,
    And high and low mate ill;
    But love has never known a law
    Beyond its own sweet will!
  • "I'm sorry that I spell'd the word;
    I hate to go above you,
    Because"—the brown eyes lower fell,—
    "Because, you see, I love you!"
  • Your love in a cottage is hungry,
    Your vine is a nest for flies—
    Your milkmaid shocks the Graces,
    And simplicity talks of pies!
    You lie down to your shady slumber
    And wake with a bug in your ear,
    And your damsel that walks in the morning
    Is shod like a mountaineer.
  • He loves not well whose love is bold!
    I would not have thee come too nigh.
    The sun's gold would not seem pure gold
    Unless the sun were in the sky:
    To take him thence and chain him near
    Would make his beauty disappear.
  • The unconquerable pang of despised love.
  • For mightier far
    Than strength of nerve or sinew, or the sway
    Of magic potent over sun and star,
    Is love, though oft to agony distrest,
    And though his favourite be feeble woman's breast.
  • O dearer far than light and life are dear.
  • While all the future, for thy purer soul,
    With "sober certainties" of love is blest.
  • Farewell, Love, and all thy laws for ever.
    • Sir Thomas Wyatt, Songs and Sonnets, A Renouncing of Love.

Anonymous [edit]

Love rules without rules.
This section is for widely quoted statements by authors unknown or Anonymous
  • Love rules without rules.
    • Translation of Italian saying: Amor regge senza legge; as quoted in Dictionary of Foreign Terms Found in English and American Writings of Yesterday and Today, 2nd Edition (1934) edited by Christopher Orlando Sylvester Mawson
    • Variant translations:
    • Love reigns without rules.
    • Love holds no law.

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