Romantic Love

We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.

For a man to become a poet he must be in love, or miserable.

Observe that open loves are held to be more honorable than secret ones, and that the love of the noblest and highest, even if their persons are less beautiful than others, is especially honorable.

Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.

If a man can be properly said to love something, it must be clear that he feels affection for it as a whole, and does not love part of it to the exclusion of the rest.

He whom love touches not walks in darkness

As wolves love lambs so lovers love their loves.

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Love is music, and sex is only the instrument.

The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

Love is a reality which is born in the fairy region of romance.

My attachment has neither the blindness of the beginning— nor the microscopic accuracy of the close of such liaisons.

A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss.

When men and women pick one another up for just a bit of fun, they find they’ve picked up more than they bargained for, because men and women have a top story as well as a ground floor, and you can’t have the one without the other.

The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.

Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes.

If we judge of love by its usual effects, it resembles hatred more than friendship.

Love that is ignorant and hatred have almost the same ends.

Hatred is blind, as well as love.

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.

All love that has not friendship for its base, Is like a mansion built upon the sand.

Love . . . dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source, it dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illnesses and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never a natural death. Every lover should be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love.

Love must be as much a light as a flame.