Love, Love Nothing But Love

By Casey Sinha

This book is a compilation of hundreds of love quotations from the works of great authors and poets of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Casey Sinha
• Release date: Feb 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310361340

Book preview

Introduction

For millenia, love has been pondered and written about. What can be said about this elusive love? It is complex, conjuring at once many sentiments: romantic, tragic, bittersweet, scornful... It is transcendent, occupying hearts and minds spanning time and geographic boundaries. And it is boundless. The great 'Bard' William Shakespeare himself wrote the immortal lines Love, love, nothing but love, still more....

What follows is a selection of hundreds of lively quotations from the works of great authors and poets of the world about love.

Casey J. Sinha,

Editor

Love

Quotations

- A -

Mysterious love, uncertain treasure,

Hast thou more of pain or pleasure . . .

Endless torments dwell about thee;

Yet who would live, and live without thee!

Joseph Addison (in Rosamond, Act III) (U.K.)

Real love can not be confused.

It is quiet and can not be heard.

Anna Akhmatova (in Forty-seven Love Poems) (Russia)

Love wins. Love always wins.

Mitch Albom (in Tuesdays with Morrie) (U.S.)

To love and be beloved, this is the good

Which for most sovereign all the world prove.

William Alexander (in Aurora, Sonnet xli) (Scotland)

To every captive soul and gentle heart

Unto whose sight may come the present word,

That they thereof to me their thoughts impart

Be greeting in Love’s name, who is their Lord.

Dante Alighieri (in The New Life, trans. by C. Eliot Norton) (Italy)

Romance cannot be put into quantity production –

the moment love becomes casual, it becomes commonplace.

Frederick Lewis Allen (in Only Yesterday) (U.S.)

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;

Girls aren’t like that.

Kingsley Amis (in A Bookshop Idyll) (U.K.)

Western wind, when will thou blow?

The small rain down can rain?

Christ, if my love were in my arms

And I in my bed again!

Anonymous – Popular Poem (15th Century Britain)

I know how pettiness ruins the greatest love.

Jean Anouilh (in L’Hermine) (France)

Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the

inbetween which relates us to and separates us from the other.

Hannah Arendt (in The Human Condition) (U.S.)

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.

Aristotle (Greece)

Somewhere there waiteth in this world of ours

For one lone soul another lonely soul, . . .

And meeting strangely at one sudden goal,

Then blend they,

. . . Into one beautiful perfect whole;

Edwin Arnold (in Somewhere There Waiteth) (U.K.)

Oh, listen! Love lasts! Love will never die.

Edwin Arnold (in She and He) (U.K.)

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Matthew Arnold (in Dover Beach) (U.K.)

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him.

We were falling women.

We believed in it, this downward motion so lovely,

like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely.

Margaret Atwood (in The Handmaid’s Tale) (Canada)

Nobody dies from lack of sex.

It’s lack of love we die from.

Magaret Atwood (in The Handmaid’s Tale) (Canada)

We must love one another or die.

W. H. Auden (September 1, 1939) (U.K., U.S.)

When it comes, will it come without warning? . . .

O tell me the truth about love.

. . . I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong.

W. H. Auden (in Twelve Songs) (U.K., U.S.)

I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you

Till China and Africa meet

And the river jumps over the mountain

And the salmon sing in the street,

W. H. Auden (in As I Walked Out One Evening) (U.K., U.S.)

To be loved, love.

Ausonius (in Epigrams) (Rome)

All the privilege I claim for my own sex . . . is that of loving longest, when existence or hope is gone.

Jane Austen (in Persuasion) (U.K.)

A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.

Jane Austen (in Pride and Prejudice) (U.K.)

Ever anew my heart aches!

Again and again I brush off the burning tears.

My love, once peaceful at my side, grows restless.

My heart aches!

Avvaiyar (India) (in Basham’s The Wonder that Was India)

I loved thee once; I’ll love no more.

Thine be the grief as is the blame.

Robert Ayton (in To an Inconstant Mistress) (Scotland)

- B -

Love can find entrance,

not only into an open heart,

but also into a heart well fortified,

watch be not well kept.

Francis Bacon (in Essays: Of Love) (U.K.)

Nuptial love maketh mankind;

friendly love perfecteth it;

but wanton love corrupteth and embaseth it.

Francis Bacon (in Essays: Of Love) (U.K.)

The sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love.

P. J. Bailey (in Festus) (U.K.)

Love spends his all, and still hath store.

P. J. Bailey (in Festus) (U.K.)

Ask not of me, love, what is love?

P. J. Bailey (in Festus) (U.K.)

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 (in Another Country) (U.S.)

It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to show a ready wit all day long than to say a good thing occasionally.

Balzac (in The Physiology of Marriage) (France)

A lover tells a woman all that a husband hides from her.

Balzac (in The Physiology of Marriage) (France)

Here is wisdom: to love wine, beauty and the divine Spring.

That is enough, the rest is worthless.

Théodore de Banville (in Adolphe Gaiffe) (France)

He that loveth is void of all reason.

Alexander Barclay (in The Ship of Fools) (U.K. and Scotland)

Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.

Julian Barnes (in Talking It Over) (U.K.)

Love is a fiend, a fire, a heaven, a hell.

Where pleasure, pain, and sad repentance dwell.

Richard Barnfield (in The Shepherd’s Content) (U.K.)

My flocks feed not, my ewes breed not,

My rams speed not, all is amiss:

Love is denying, Faith is defying,

Heart’s renying, causer of this.

Richard Barnfield (in England’s Helicon) (U.K.)

In love-making, as in the other arts, those do it best who cannot tell how it is done.

J. M. Barrie (in Tommy and Grisel) (Scotland)

Dawn love is silver,

Wait for the west:

Old love is gold love –

Old love is best.

Katharine Lee Bates (in For a Golden Wedding) (U.S.)

A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.

L. Frank Baum (in The Wizard of Oz) (U.S.)

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

T. H. Bayly (in Isle of Beauty) (U.K.)

Where love is concerned, too much is not even enough.

Pierre-Augustin de