130 Quotes on Love
From shortest to longest
Love is always having to say I'm sorry.
- Bob Irwin
A spoiled child never loves its mother.
- Sir Henry Taylor
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is the most fatal.
The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
What we love we shall grow to resemble.
- Bernard of Clairvaux
Get a job you love and you'll never have to work again.
- Unknown
Love is a game that two can play and both win.
- Eva Gabor (1921-)
Love is the noblest frailty of the mind.
- John Dryden (1631-1700)
Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
- Robert Browning (1812-1889)
I love my country too much to be a nationalist.
- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
Love conquers all things: let us too give in to Love.
- Virgil (70-19 B.C.)
Love cures people -- both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
All I know of love is that love is all there is.
- Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Love, the quest; marriage, the conquest; divorce, the inquest.
- Helen Rowland
Children need love, especially when they do not deserve it.
- Harold S. Hulbert
He alone may chastise who loves.
- Rabindranath Tagore, "The Crescent Moon", 1913
God told us to love our enemies, not to like them.
- Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)
He who cannot love must learn to flatter.
- Johann Wolfang von Goethe (1749-1832)
I believe that love cannot be bought, except with love.
- John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.
- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Hate the sin and love the sinner.
- Mohandas [Mahatma--The Great One] Gandhi (1869-1948)
It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.
- Andre Guide
It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.
- Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) "Justine", 1957
Lovers of wisdom must be inquirers into very many things indeed.
- Heraclitus (535-475 B.C.)
The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.
- Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)
We pardon to the extent that we love.
- Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), "Maxims", 1665
A scholar who loves comfort is not fit to be called a scholar.
- Confucius (551-479 B.C.), "Analects"
I love my country better than my family but I love humanity better than my country.
- Francois F‚nelon
The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them.
- Moliere [Jean Baptiste Poquelin] (1622-1673)
Love of money is the disease which makes men most groveling and pitiful.
- Longinus (first century A.D.)
Minds are conquered not by arms but by love and magnanimity.
- Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), "Ethics", 1677
To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind.
- Theophile Gautier (1811-1872)
A man who seeks truth and loves it must be reckoned precious to any human society.
- Frederick the Great.
Love truth, but pardon error.
- Voltaire [Francois Marie Arouet] (1694-1778), to Frederick the Great, 1740
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
- Iris Murdoch (1919-)
Politicians neither love nor hate. Interest, not sentiment, governs them.
- Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)
For us, patriotism is the same as the love of humanity.
- Mohandas [Mahatma--The Great One] Gandhi (1869-1948)
Love: Understanding, that must include all.
- Mr. Alfred J. Parker (1897-1964), Founder, Kabalarian Philosophy
Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends.
- S. Weir Mitchell
Never forget that the most powerful force on earth is love.
- Nelson Rockefeller (1908-1979) (to Henry Kissinger)
None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence.
- John Milton (1608-1674)
Work and love -- these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis.
- Theodor Reik, "Of Love and Lust", 1957
If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you;
but if you really make them think they'll hate you.
Love yields to business. If you seek a way out of love, be busy; you'll be safe then.
- Ovid (43 B.C.- 18 A.D.)
In jealousy there is more self-love than love.
- Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), "Reflections", 1678
A speech is like a love affair. Any fool can start it, but to end it requires considerable skill.
- Lord Mancroft
The love of novels is the preference of sentiment to the senses.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Journals", 1831
The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
- William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
In France quarrels strengthen a love affair, in America they end it.
- Ned Rorem, "The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem", 1966
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of.
- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Love is the world's greatest antidote to selfishness.
- Mr. Alfred J. Parker (1897-1964), Founder, Kabalarian Philosophy
However fastidious we may be in love, we forgive more faults in love than in friendship.
- Jean de La BruyŠre (1645-1696)
Sexuality throws no light upon love, but only through love can we learn to understand sexuality.
- Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.
- Victor Hugo (1802-1885), "Les Mirerables", 1862
My early and invincible love of reading, which I would not exchange for the treasures of India.
- Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)
Universal love is a glove without fingers which fits all hands alike, and none too closely.
- Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825)
It is a great help for a man to be in love with himself. For an actor, however, it is absolutely essential.
- Robert Morley, 1979
It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.
- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling and havoc wreaking.
- Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
- Bertrand Russell [Lord Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970)
Confronted by outstanding merit in another, there is no way of saving one's ego except by love.
- Johann Wolfang von Goethe (1749-1832)
No disguise can long conceal love where it exists, or long feign it where it is lacking.
- Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.
- Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)
By accident of fortune a man may rule the world for a time, but by virtue of love he may rule the world forever.
- Lao-tzu (604-531 B.C.)
Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.
- John Wesley (1703-1791), "Love of Wesley", 1820
One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
- Oscar Wilde [Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde] (1854-1900)
Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944)
Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.
- Lao-tzu (604-531 B.C.)
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science. Men love to query, and that is the seed of philosophy.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
[Americans are] better at having a love affair that lasts ten minutes than any other people in the world.
- Stephen Spender, New York Post, 1975
A great deal may be done by severity, more by love, but most by clear discernment and impartial justice.
- Johann Wolfang von Goethe (1749-1832)
The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
- W. [William] Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), "The Summing Up", 1938
Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretense of keeping it alive.
- Havelock Ellis, "On Life and Sex: Essays of Love and Virtue", 1937
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
- Johann Wolfang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft.
- Pericles (circa 495-429 B.C.)
Economy is the art of making the most of life; the love of economy is the root of all virtue.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman", 1905
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), "Thoughts on Various Subjects", 1706
Women do not properly understand that when an idea fills and elevates a man's mind it shuts out love and crowds out people.
- Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825)
Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, or love and of thought, which, in the course of centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved.
- Andr‚ Malraux
Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.
- William Blake (1757-1827)
A crowd is not company, faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.
- Francis Bacon (1561-1626), "Of Friendship"
Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.
- George Santayana (1863-1952), "The Life of Reason: Reason in Art", 1906
Pain will come, just like pleasure. Hate will come, just like love. And when both are accepted, unaffected by the mind, then there will be peace.
- Baba Hari Das
Where love rules, there is no rule to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
- Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)
The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them.
- Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those whom they have slain.
- Feodor Dostoevski (1821-1881), "The Brothers Karamazov", 1880
One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.
- John Locke (1632-1704)
No man who is a lover of money, of pleasure, of glory, is likewise a lover of men; but only he that is a lover of whatsoever things are fair and good.
- Epictetus (50-138)
The chimerical pursuit of perfection is always linked to some important deficiency, frequently the inability to love.
- Bernard Grasset (-1955), "Les Chemins de l'ecriture"
'Love or perish' we are told and we tell ourselves. The phrase is true enough so long as we do not interpret it as 'Mingle or be a failure'.
- Phyllis McGinley (1905-1978)
The lover is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods.
- Theodor Reik, "Of Love and Lust", 1957
A tree is known by its fruit, a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost. He who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love.
- Basil (329-379)
I have seen the science I worshipped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.
- Charles Augustus Lindbergh (1902- ), Time, May 26, 1967
There is no skeptic who does not feel that men have doubted before, but no man who is in love thinks that anyone has been in love before.
- G. K. [Gilbert Keith] Chesterton (1874-1936)
Mankind will never see an end of trouble until lovers of wisdom come to hold political power, or the holders of power become lovers of wisdom.
- Plato (circa 429-347 B.C.), "The Republic"
Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; [but] without intelligence, love is impotent and freedom unattainable.
- Aldous leonard Huxley (1894-1963), "Brave New World", 1958
Compared to other feelings, love is an elemental cosmic force wearing a disguise of meekness. It is not a state of mind; it is the foundation of the universe.
- Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)
The greater one's love for a person the less room for flattery. The proof of true love is to be unsparing in criticism.
- Moliere [Jean Baptiste Poquelin] (1622-1673), "The Misanthrope", 1666
Philosophy, n. Literally, the love of wisdom; in actual usage, the science which investigates the facts and principles of reality and of human nature and conduct.
- Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
- Anais Nin (1903-1977)
There are two kinds of faithfulness in love: one is based on forever finding new things to love in the loved one; the other is based on our pride in being faithful.
- Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
The golden rule is, to help those we love to escape from us; and never try to begin to help people, or influence them till they ask, but wait for them.
- Friedrich von Hugel (1852-1926), "Letters to a Niece", 1928
A good disposition is a virtue in itself, and it is lasting; the burden of the years cannot depress it, and love that is founded on it endures to the end.
- Ovid (43 B.C.- 18 A.D.), "The Art of Beauty", circa 8 A.D.
A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
- Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918- ), "The First Circle", 1964
To keep marriage brimming
With love in the marriage cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.
- Ogden Nash [Frederick Odgen Nash] (1902-),
"A Word to Husbands, Everyone but Thee and Me", 1962
It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
- Honor‚ de Balzac (1790-1859), "Physiologie du Marriage", 1829
The knowledge of courtesy and good manners is a very necessary study. Like grace and beauty, it begets liking and an inclination to love one another at first sight.
- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592), "Essays", 1588
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
- George Santayana (1866-1952), "The Life of Reason: Reason in Society", 1906
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the world as a whole, not toward one object of love.
- Erich Fromm (1900-1980)
The discovery that one cannot well give back or be given back what one has given or been given in the same place is sometimes as painful as the discovery that one is being loved on principle and not from preference.
- Charles Williams
Hatred: A precious liquid, a poison dearer than that of the Borgias -- because it is made from our blood, our health, our sleep, and two-thirds of our love -- we must be stingy with it.
- Charles Baudelaire, "Advice to Young Writers", 1867
Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good plays, good company, good conversation -- what are they? They are the happiest people in the world.
- William Lyon Phelps
To be fond of learning is near to wisdom; to practice with vigor is near to benevolence; and to be conscious of shame is near to fortitude. He who knows these three things knows how to cultivate his own character.
- Confucius (551-479 B.C.)
A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology (theory of knowledge).
- H. L. [Henry Louis] Mencken (1880-1956), "Prejudices, Third Series", 1922
There is a law that man should love his neighbor as himself. In a few hundred years it should be as natural to mankind as breathing or the upright gait; but if he does not learn it he must perish.
- Alfred Adler (1870-1937), "Social Interest"
'Ahimsa' [nonviolence] means the largest love. It is the supreme law. By it alone can mankind be saved. He who believes in nonviolence believes in a living God.
- Mohandas [Mahatma--The Great One] Gandhi (1869-1948), "Sayings" S. Hobhouse, 1939
Three passions, simple but overwhelming, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
- Bertrand Russell [Lord Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970), Autobiography, 1967
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), "Walden", 1854
Say 'Yes' to the seedlings and a giant forest cleaves the sky. Say 'Yes' to the universe and the planets become your neighbors. Say 'Yes' to dreams of love and freedom. It is the password to utopia.
- Brooks Atkinson (1894-) "Once Around the Sun", 1951
What one needs is to be able to combine opposites; the love of virtue with an indifference to public regard, the love of work with an indifference toward fame, and a regard for one's health with an indifference towards living.
- S‚bastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort (1740-1794)
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
The opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
- Elie Wiesel, U.S. News and World Report, December 27, 1986
The root of the matter is love, Christian love, or compassion. If you feel this, you have a motive for existence, a guide for action, a reason for courage and for intellectual honesty.
- Bertrand Russell [Lord Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970), "Impact of Science on Society", 1952
The things we admire in men: kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest: sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.
- John Ernst Steinbeck (1902-), "Cannery Row"
To love our neighbor as ourselves does not mean that we should love all people equally, for I do not have an equal love for all the modes of existence of myself. Nor does it mean that we should never make them suffer, for I do not refuse to make myself suffer. But we should have with each person the relationship of one conception of the universe to another conception of the universe, and not to a part of it.
- Simone Weil (1909-1943)
What is spiritual responsibility? It is man's realization that the divine plan of equilibrium and love is completely dependent upon the evolution of human mind, upon man's concept of life and law, and his application to it; that man alone is the creative channel upon this earth; that nothing happens outside of mind; that mind is responsible for all things, to Universal Reason and to life.
- Mr. Alfred J. Parker (1897-1964), Founder, Kabalarian Philosophy
He dedicated his entire life to discovering the principles of life that would guarantee health, happiness, success, and spiritual fulfillment for mankind. His love and vision were so great that no effort was spared to help his fellowman. No matter what the obstacle, no matter how difficult the challenge, he persisted. Today, because of his efforts, we have the Principle of Life that we have all come to cherish and respect.
- said of Mr. Alfred J. Parker (1897-1964), Founder, Kabalarian Philosophy
+ The Highest
9. Love
8. Understanding
7. Philosophical
6. Giving
5. Sharing
4. Tolerant, kind, considerate
3. Contemplating
2. Analytical
1. Serious
------------------------------
1. Self
2. Restlessness
3. Confusion
4. Moodiness
5. Depression
6. Critical
7. Anger
8. Jealousy & Covetousness
9. Sexual Desire & Lust
10. Murder
- The Lowest
- Mr. Ivon Shearing (1932-)
The best man in his dwelling loves the earth.
In his heart, he loves what is profound.
In his associations, he loves humanity.
In his words, he loves faithfulness.
In government, he loves order.
In handling affairs, he loves competence.
In his activities, he loves timeliness.
It is because he does not compete that he is without reproach.
- Lao-tzu (604-531 B.C.)
TIME
Take time to be friendly, it is the road to happiness
Take time to dream, it is hitching your wagon to a star
Take time to laugh, it is the music of the heart
Take time to love and be loved, it is nourishment for the soul
Take time to play, it is the secret of perpetual youth
Take time to read, it is the fountain of wisdom
Take time to share, it is too short a life to be selfish
Take time to think, it is the source of power
Take time to work, it is the price of success.
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This page last modified: April 11, 1998
