To be loved for what one is, is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him, their own selves, their version of him.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Do you love me because I’m beautiful, or am I am beautiful because you love me?
– Oscar Hammerstein, II
Love: a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.
– Ambrose Bierce
After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
– Mark Twain
But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat.
– Molly Haskell
In real love you want the other person’s good. In romantic love you want the other person.
– Margaret Anderson
Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.
– St. Augustine
We must be our own before we can be another’s.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
– Albert Einstein
It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.
– Nathaniel Hawthorne
I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that’s where you renew your springs that never dry up.
– Pearl S. Buck
A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.
– Jessamyn West
One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it unless it has all been suffering, nothing but suffering.
– Jane Austen
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.
– James Baldwin
A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.
– Ingrid Bergman
