love

You say that love is nonsense....I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.
- - - - Henry Brooks Adams

Love of country is like love of woman--he loves her best who seeks to bestow on her the highest good.
- - - - Felix Adler

In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities.
- - - - János Arany

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street.

I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
- - - - W. H. Auden "As I Walked Out One Evening"

What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
It's the only thing that there's just too little of.
- - - - Burt Bacharach / Hal David

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
- - - - James Baldwin

But, O Sarah! if the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; In the gladdest days and in the darkest nights . . . always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.
- - - - Major Sullivan Ballou, to his wife, a week before his death in 1861

The love you take is equal to the love you make.
- - - - The Beatles "The End"

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
- - - - Walter Benjamin "One-Way Street and Other Writings"

Love is very patient,
Love is very kind,
Love is never envious
Or vaunted up with pride.
- - - - Bible, 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If every wife was happy with a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can.
- - - - Anne Bradstreet "To My Dearest and Loving Husband," 1678

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breath and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
- - - - Elizabeth Barrett Browning "Sonnets from the Portuguese"

Love is the delightful interval between meeting a girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock.
- - - - John Barrymore

I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love.
- - - - Henry Ward Beecher

O lyric Love, half angel and half bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire.
- - - - Robert Browning "The Ring and the Book"

Unless you can love, as the angels may,
With the breadth of heaven betwixt you;
Unless you can dream that his faith is fast,
Through behoving and unbeloving;
Unless you can die when the dream is past--
Oh, never call it loving!
- - - - Robert Browning

Love is always either increasing or decreasing.
- - - - Andreas Capellanus

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
- - - - Albert Camus

Give me more love or more disdain;
The torrid or the frozen zone;
Bring equal ease unto my pain;
The temperate affords me none.
- - - - Thomas Carew

Of all the pain, the greatest pain,
Is to love, but to love in vain.
- - - - Abraham Cowley

Love is a power too strong to be overcome by anything but flight.
- - - - Miguel de Cervantes

Love is the enchanted dawn of every heart.
- - - - Alphonse Marie de Lamartine

There are people who would have never fallen in love if they never heard of love.
- - - - François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Love never dies of starvation, but often of indigestion.
- - - - Ninon de Lenclos

Love does not consist in gazing at each-other but in looking together in the same direction.
- - - - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I've ever known.
- - - - Walt Disney

Twice or thrice I loved thee
Before I knew thy face or name
So in a voice, so in shapeless flame,
Angels affect us oft, and worshipped be
- - - - John Donne "Air and Angels"

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
- - - - Edward Fitzgerald "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam"

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
- - - - Robert Frost

I believe that if I should die,
and you were to walk near my grave,
from the very depths of the earth
I would hear your footsteps.
- - - - Benito Perez Galdos

It is the special quality of love not to be able to remain stationary, to be obliged to increase under pain of diminishing.
- - - - Andre Gide

This is the true measure of love,
When we believe that we alone can love,
That no one could ever have loved so before us,
And that no one will ever love in the same way after us.
- - - - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine-gun.
- - - - Matt Groening

Love is the great miracle cure. Loving ourselves works miracles in our lives.
- - - - Louise Hay

Never judge someone by who he's in love with; judge him by his friends. People fall in love with the most appalling people.
- - - - Cynthia Heimel

Somewhere there was once a Flower, a Stone, a Crystal, a Queen, a King, a Palace, a Lover and his Beloved, and this was long ago, on an Island somewhere in the ocean 5,000 years ago.Such is Love, the Mystic Flower of the Soul. This is the Center, the Self.
- - - - Carl Jung

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
- - - - Martin Luther King, Jr.

There is nothing holier, in this life of ours, than the first consciousness of love --the first fluttering of its silken wings.
- - - - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Two souls with but a single thought,
Two hearts that beat as one.
- - - - Maria Lovell "Ingomar the Barbarian"

Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
- - - - Christopher Marlowe "Hero and Leander"

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
- - - - Paul McCartney

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
- - - - H. L. Mencken

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
- - - - H. L. Mencken

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
- - - - H. L. Mencken

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way you feel
As every fairy tale comes real
I've looked at love that way.
- - - - Joni Mitchell "Both Sides Now"

Alas! how light a cause may move
Dissension between hearts that love!
Hearts that the world in vain had tried,
And sorrow but more closely tied;
That stood the storm when waves were rough,
Yet in a sunny hour fall off.
- - - - Thomas Moore

I have loved many, the more and the few -
I have loved many that I might love you.
- - - - Grace Fallow Norton

In love there are two things: bodies and words.
- - - - Joyce Carol Oates

Love is much like a wild rose, beautiful and calm, but willing to draw blood in its defense.
- - - - Mark A. Overby

Love and dignity cannot share the same abode.
- - - - Ovid

Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away.
- - - - Dorothy Parker

Love is a reciprocal torture.
- - - - Marcel Proust

Love rules the court, the camp, the grove,
And men below, and saints above:
For love is heaven, and heaven is love.
- - - - Walter Scott

Love is like the moon; when it does not increase it decreases.
- - - - Segur

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

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
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 proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
- - - - William Shakespeare "Sonnet CXVI"

Men have died from time to time, and the worms have eaten 'em, but not for love.
- - - - William Shakespeare "As You Like It"

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.
- - - - George Bernard Shaw "John Bull's Other Island"

If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is Love.
- - - - Percy Bysshe Shelley "Essay on Love"

All is fair in love and war.
- - - - Francis Edward Smedley

If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf,
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather.
- - - - Algernon Charles Swinburne "A Match"

Shower the people you love with love
Show them the way that you feel
Things are gonna work out fine if you only will.
- - - - James Taylor "Shower the People"

The joy of late love is like green firewood when set aflame, for the longer the wait in lighting, the greater heat it yields and the longer its force lasts.
- - - - Chrétien de Troyes "The Knight with Lion"

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

Here are fruits, flowers, leaves and branches,
And here is my heart which beats only for you.
- - - - Paul Verlaine "Romances sans Paroles"

Love begets love, love knows no rules, this is the same for all.
- - - - Virgil

It has ever been since time began,
And ever will be, till time lose breath,
That love is a mood - no more - to man,
And love to a woman is life or death.
- - - - Ella Wheeler Wilcox "Blind"

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
- - - - Oscar Wilde