Quotes to inspire and reflect

Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.

When a love relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves.

There is desire / in those who love to hear about their loved ones’ pains.

The lover is made happier by his love than the object of his affection.

Lovers are commonly industrious to make themselves uneasy.

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

Hatred which is entirely conquered by love passes into love, and love on that account is greater than if it had not been preceded by hatred.

Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourself are dying.

It is the missed opportunity that counts, and in a love that vainly yearns from behind prison bars you have perchance the love supreme.

After all, my erstwhile dear, / My no longer cherished, / Need we say it was no love, / Just because it perished?

Women’s hearts are like old china, none the worse for a break or two.

It is obviously quite difficult to be no longer loved when we are still in love, but it is incomparably more painful to be loved when we ourselves no longer love.

We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.

You must love him, ere to you / He will seem worthy of your love.

[L]ove was an appalling bore once you had ceased loving. All that time wasted.

Love is / unworldly / and nothing / comes of it but love.

We must try to love one another.... The terrible and beautiful sentence, the last, the final wisdom that the earth can give, is remembered at the end, is spoken too late, wearily. It stands there, awful and untraduced, above the dusty racket of our lives. No forgetting, no forgiving, no denying, no explaining, no hating.

Love has various lodgings; the same word does not always signify the same thing.

There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well.

Love has features which pierce all hearts, he wears a bandage which conceals the faults of those beloved. Fie has wings, he comes quickly and flies away the same.

Love, like a sense of humor, is now claimed by everyone even though Love, like a sense of humor, is rather more rare than not, and to most of us poor muddlers unbearable at full strength.

Love’s gift cannot be given, / it waits to be accepted.

Love is an endless mystery, / for it has nothing else to explain it.

Let the dead have the immortality of fame, but the living the immortality of love.

Love remains a secret even when spoken, / for only a lover truly "knows that he is loved.

To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.

Romance is a means to the end of selfcompletion, but love is an end in itself.

All love is sweet, / Given or returned. Common as light is love, / And its familiar voice wearies not ever.

A woman holds dreadful power over a man who is in love with her but she should realize that the quality and force of his love is the index of his potential contempt and hatred.

Base men being in love have then a nobility in their natures more than is native to them.

Love’s best habit is a soothing tongue.

Love rules the court, the camp, the grove, / And men below, and saints above; / For love is heaven, and heaven is love.

True love’s the gift which God has given / To man alone beneath the heaven.

Not to believe in love is a great sign of dulness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection must rest on circumstantial evidence.

When we love animals and children too much, we love them at the expense of men.

There is a warning love sends and the cost of it is never written till long afterward.

Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.

To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.

We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry.

There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires.

Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.

We never, then, love a person, but only qualities.

[Love is] the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the gods; desired by those who have no part in him, and precious to those who have the better part in him.

We conceal it from ourselves in vain—we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it. v

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

To love, that’s the point—what matters whom? / What does the bottle matter provided we can be drunk?

When a man is in love he endures more than at other times; he submits to everything.