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Love Quotes

This is one of the biggest pages on the site, and most of what is on it is not the kind of line you would put on a mug. Wikiquote’s editors drew these from poems, novels, letters and essays, so a lot of them only make full sense next to the sentences around them. That is useful if you want a real source and annoying if you want a caption.

Two of the best-known love quotes are flagged here as misattributed. “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life” is credited to Confucius. The oldest English version anyone has found is from a 1982 alumni magazine, where the man quoted was himself passing it along from an unnamed source. “God made beer because he loves us and wants us to be happy” is credited to Benjamin Franklin. It looks like a garbled version of what he wrote about wine in 1779, in a letter to André Morellet.

If a quote you want is marked disputed or attributed, that is Wikiquote’s judgement, not ours. The notes on the quote’s page show what the editors found.

Random quote on Love

Most quoted on love:

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.

Jesus

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.

Erica Jong

Love is treacherous to those who fear, since fear and hate can never be apart. No one who hates but is afraid of love, and therefore must he be afraid of God. Certain it is he knows not what love means. He fears to love and loves to hate, and so he thinks that love is fearful; hate is love.

Helen Schucman A Course in Miracles (1976)

If we conceive that anyone loves, desires, or hates anything which we ourselves love, desire, or hate, we shall thereupon regard the thing in question with more steadfast love, etc. On the contrary, if we think that anyone shrinks from something that we love, we shall undergo vacillation of the soul.

Baruch Spinoza

Some people have been trying for centuries to love their neighbor as themselves. But they have been finding it difficult because loving your neighbor as yourself really means, first of all, you need to be in touch with yourself, the self that you are beyond the form. And then you can love your neighbor as yourself because you recognize your oneness with your neighbor.

Eckhart Tolle

it's love by whom (my beautiful friend) the gift to live is without until:
...love was and shall be this only truth (a dream of a deed, born not to die)

E. E. Cummings

the axis of the universe
—love

E. E. Cummings

I am going to sit here with you by the river. If you go home to sleep, I will sleep in front of your house. And if you go away, I will follow you — until you tell me to go away. Then I'll leave. But I have to love you for the rest of my life.

Paulo Coelho By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994)

By in love she meant the acuteness of the heart at the sudden sight of a particular person or the way over a couple of years of interested friendship one is suddenly stunned by the lungs' longing for more and more breath in the presence of that friend

Grace Paley Midrash on happiness (1990)

Love and fraternity, once part of an ideal, have become crucial to our survival. Jesus enjoined his followers to love one another. Teilhard added, "or you perish." Without human affection, we become sick, frightened, hostile. Lovelessness is a broken circuit, loss of order.

Marilyn Ferguson The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980)

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.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Spanish Student (1843)

Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state — admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological — in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that "I" and "you" are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.

Sigmund Freud Civilization and Its Discontents (1929)

Love has a particular trait: it has a task or purpose to fulfill - to abide. By its nature, love is enduring. The Holy Spirit offers our world love that dispels uncertainty; love that overcomes the fear of betrayal; love that carries eternity within; the true love that draws us into a unity that abides!

Pope Benedict XVI Youth Day Vigil (2008)

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? ...
Quit, quit, for shame, this will not move:
This cannot take her.
If of herself she cannot love,
Nothing can make her:
The devil take her!

John Suckling Aglaura (1638)

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.

Martin Luther King Jr.

“No one can learn to love by following a manual, and no one can learn to write by following a course. I’m not telling you to seek out other writers but to find people with different skills from yourself, because writing is no different from any other activity done with joy and enthusiasm”.

Paulo Coelho Aleph (2011)

I have been thinking about our conversation and about your book, and I am afraid that I expressed myself badly yesterday. When I said that one may love and be loved at any age I ought to have added that sometimes this love comes too late. It comes when one no longer has the right to prove to the loved one how much she is loved, except by love's sacrifice.

Paul Bourget

I'm searching a heart
inside me--
a heart
that's ebullient by swallowing
the entire pain of the creation,
a heart jubilant by accepting
the entire tears of the world,
a heart aglow by merging
the entire dark within itself
a heart that's smooth, effervescent and clean.

Suman Pokhrel

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.

Thomas Carlyle

Have you listened to your heart? Does it beat in rhythm with the Perfect Heart which embraces all of you? Thus, I shall finish with the words about the heart. Let woman affirm this great symbol, which can transfigure the whole of life. Let her strive to transmute the spiritual life of mankind.

Helena Roerich Letters of Helena Roerich Volume I: 1929-1935 (1940)

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