100 great quotes on Love, and consider that “Love is all you need” as Paul McCartney used to say.
If you are really interested in this topic and you want more quotes you can also download and read this book of Quotes and aphorisms on Love Edited by Carl William Brown
Love emotion has been explored in philosophy, religion, art, science and literature, often as either romantic love, the fraternal love of others, or the love of God, but this phenomenon still remains a great mystery. Marsilio Ficino commentary on Plato’s Symposium introduced the notion of platonic love. This concept of a special friendship based on love of God was seminal in the literature of the later Renaissance.
Seeing a parallel in the Platonic and Christian concept of love, he explained in his commentary on the Symposium that the highest form of human love and friendship is a communion based ultimately on the soul’s love for God. This theory of spiritual, or “Platonic,” love dominated European poetry and literature during the 16th century.
Ficino’s interpretation of Platonism greatly influenced subsequent European thought. His teaching that man naturally tends toward religion, distinguishing him from the lower animals, and that all religions have a measure of truth, appears to have inspired 17th-century deist thought as exemplified in Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury. Not only the 17th-century Cambridge Platonists but similar movements in France and Italy reflect Ficino’s original Platonist revival.
Anyway, first of all to love you must be stimulated and recent cognitive theories of motivation, however, portray humans seeking to optimize rather than minimize stimulation and are thus better able to account for exploratory behavior, the need for variety, aesthetic reactions, and curiosity. So we must conclude that love is really a very complicated matter.
Emotion, term frequently and familiarly used as synonymous with feeling. In psychology it signifies a reaction involving certain physiological changes, such as an accelerated or retarded pulse rate, the diminished or increased activities of certain glands, or a change in body temperature, which stimulate the individual, or some component part of his or her body, to further activity.
The three primary reactions of this type are anger, love, and fear, which occur either as an immediate response to external stimuli or are the result of an indirect subjective process, such as memory, association, or introspection. The American psychologist John Watson proved in a series of experiments that infants are capable of these three emotions; he also demonstrated that emotional reactions may be conditioned.
Anyway, here there are 100 best quotes and aphorisms on love that can explain almost everything, but of course they can’t solve the mystery, yet. There is also a very short poetical introduction by Francesco Petrarca, some lines of his Canzoniere about the enigma of love and a quote by William Shakespeare which should make us think a lot on this argument.
There are also some very nice pictures, and if you think of Plato who says that beauty is also a virtue and it means goodness, I can only add what Keats used to say, that is “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”, but this is only an artistic and poetic aphorism, and so the mystery still remains unsolved, even if you should read one billion quotes on love; therefore here at least you can save a bit of your time, so you can have more energy to devote to practical love.
Love found me all disarmed and found the way
was clear to reach my heart down through the eyes
which have become the halls and doors of tears.
It seems to me it did him little honour
to wound me with his arrow in my state
and to you, armed, not show his bow at all.
If it’s not love, then what is it I feel?
But if it’s love, by God, what is this thing?
If good, why then the bitter mortal sting?
If bad, then why is every torment sweet?
Francesco Petrarca Il Canzoniere
Time is very slow for those who wait; very fast for those who are scared; very long for those who lament; very short for those who celebrate; but for those who love, time is eternal.
William Shakespeare
Love is familiar. Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but Love.
William Shakespeare
Nobody is perfect, until you fall in love with.
Paulo Coelho
Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.
Hermann Hesse
Miserable is that love that needs words to express itself.
Carl William Brown
Love is often bitter.
Plauto
Love is like fish, bad if it’s not fresh.
Plauto
Love is not a selfless passion.
Marcel Proust
Wicked men obey from fear; good men, from love.
Aristotle
The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.
Mahatma Gandhi
Where both deliberate, the love is slight: Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?
Christopher Marlowe
Love is like the moon: if it doesn’t grow, it falls.
Proverbio Cinese
The woman is sexually involved in all affairs of life. Sometimes even in love.
Karl Kraus
Women are made to be loved, not to be understood.
Oscar Wilde
Monsieur Teste, after all, thinks that love consists in being idiots together.
Paul Valéry
A love night is one less book read.
Honoré de Balzac
Great quotes on love. I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Love is to the soul of him who loves, as what the soul is to the body that it animates.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.
D. H. Lawrence
What is love? It is the morning and the evening star.
Sinclair Lewis
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
H. L. Mencken
I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.
Mother Teresa
In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love
Mother Teresa
Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as the are not.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
George Orwell
No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.
Cesare Pavese
When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.
Blaise Pascal
At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.
Plato
Love is a serious mental disease.
Plato
Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods.
Plato
If you find someone you love in your life, then hang on to that love.
Princess Diana
Every love reveals us our will to live and create, but since ours is a destiny of death, even the noblest sentiment is nothing but a stupid illusion.
Carl William Brown
The man who has never made a fool of himself in love will never be wise in love.
Theodor Reik
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
Rainer Maria Rilke
True love means simply taking care of our humanity
Carl William Brown
But love is blind, and lovers cannot see What petty follies they themselves commit
William Shakespeare
We have preached good and love for millennia and look at how we are reduced, maybe if we start preaching evil, things will improve.
Carl William Brown
Love bears it out even to the edge of doom.
William Shakespeare
Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
William Shakespeare
To say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days.
William Shakespeare
The hottest love has the coldest end.
Socrates
Love is the beauty of the soul.
St. Augustine
Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.
Anne Germain De Stael
‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Love conquers all; let us surrender to Love.
Virgil
One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
Oscar Wilde
Eros and Thanatos, two inseparable themes, deeply romantic and fascinating. Love of common sense and hatred of vanity; life instinct towards equity and death drive towards stupidity.
Carl William Brown
Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.
Woody Allen
Love is a great beautifier.
Louisa May Alcott
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.
Andre Gide
Wicked men obey from fear; good men, from love.
Aristotle
We must love one another or die.
W. H. Auden
Love makes labor light. Love alone gives value to all things.
St. Teresa of Avila
Real love stories never have endings.
Richard Bach
Love is a precious commodity, and like all precious goods, you buy it at a high price, but if you want to resell it, as usual, you no longer take a penny.
Carl William Brown
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
Honore De Balzac
What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.
Charles Baudelaire
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
Jorge Luis Borges
If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
Andre Breton
Who so loves believes the impossible.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
Robert Browning
Love the whole world as a mother loves her only child.
Buddha
The desire for possession, the love of power, rivalry and vanity; here are the four basic components of stupidity.
Carl William Brown
Love acquires meaning only as it’s shared.
Leo Buscaglia
Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life.
Lord Byron
In her first passion, a woman loves her lover, in all the others all she loves is love.
Lord Byron
Love and war are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as in the other.
Miguel De Cervantes
The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.
Albert Camus
Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.
Thomas Carlyle
What a woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and running water.
Galius Valerius Catullus
Love is blind.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Love, friendship, and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.
Anton Chekhov
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Can there be a love which does not make demands on its object?
Confucius
Love of kindness without a love of learning will be obscured by foolishness.
Confucius
Love of persistence without a love of learning will be obscured by stubbornness.
Confucius
Love of wisdom without a love of learning will be obscured by excessive speculation.
Confucius
To love a thing means wanting it to live.
Confucius
A loving heart is the truest wisdom.
Charles Dickens
I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.
Emily Dickinson
The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can never end.
Benjamin Disraeli
Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
John Donne
Love was as subtly caught as a disease; But being got it is a treasure sweet, which to defend is harder than to get: And ought not be profaned on either part, for though ‘Tis got by chance, ‘Tis kept by art.
John Donne
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
John Donne
Love is love’s reward.
John Dryden
Love is not in our choice but in our fate.
John Dryden
It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.
Marguerite Duras
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love
Albert Einstein
Love is a better teacher than duty.
Albert Einstein
Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter.
T. S. Eliot
He is not a lover who does not love forever.
Euripides
Love is all we have, the only way that each can help the other.
Euripides
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
Sigmund Freud
One is very crazy when in love.
Sigmund Freud
Immature love says: “I love you because I need you.” Mature love says: “I need you because I love you.”
Erich Fromm
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Erich Fromm
Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
Robert Frost
Where there is love there is life.
Mahatma Gandhi
Life without love is like a tree without blossom and fruit.
Kahlil Gibran
The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves. We cannot force love.
William Hazlitt
Love is the reduction of the universe to a single being.
Victor Hugo
Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.
Samuel Johnson
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
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Find out what Shakespeare thought on love
reading our Dictionary of Shakespeare quotes
But if you are really interested in this topic and you want more quotes you can also download and read this book of Quotes and aphorisms on Love Edited by Carl William Brown
