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

— James Joyce Notes (1913)

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Love

More quotes by James Joyce

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.

There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Ulysses (1922)

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

James Clarence Mangan (1902)

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Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind.

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595)

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Bertrand Russell Marriage and Morals (1929)

Not for the body, but for the heart; companion and company are needed.

Sanu Sharma

Love seldom haunts the breast where learning lies,
And Venus sets ere Mercury can rise.

Alexander Pope

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: James Joyce (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.