C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Love
To love is everything; love is God.
Love me little, love me long.
All mankind love a lover.
The religion of humanity is love.
Mutual love, the crown of all our bliss.
Who can deceive a lover?
Love is the fulfilling of the law.
The law of heaven is love.
The truth of truths is love.
O love, the beautiful and brief!
Paradise is always where love dwells.
Sweet is true love, though given in vain.
Love is the virtue of woman.
Love understands love: it needs no talk.
Love makes fools of us all, big and little.
It is an old story, yet remains ever new.
Love will find out the way.
Love can hope, where reason would despair.
Soon or late love is his own avenger.
In love we are all fools alike.
He loves but lightly who his love can tell.
Wish chastely, and love dearly.
At love’s perjuries they say Jove laughs.
Heaven’s harmony is universal love.
Imparadis’d in one another’s arms.
The sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love.
Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.
Love is an affair of credulity.
Love is the wine of existence.
Love is ownership.
Is not every true lover a martyr?
Love can sun the realms of night.
Love is an egotism of two.
Scorn, at first, makes after-love the more.
Love reflects the thing beloved.
Love can make us fiends as well as angels.
The first sigh of love is the last of wisdom.
Excessive love in loathing ever ends.
Love has made its best interpreter a sigh.
Opposition to a man in love is like oil to fire.
Love must be as much a light as a flame.
None but the brave and beautiful can love.
In love, anger is always false.
An oyster may be crossed in love.
That you may be beloved, be amiable.
True love is better than glory.
Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.
The only victory over love is flight.
O heart, love is thy bane and thy antidote.
He whom love guards, is well guarded.
Words of love are works of love.
Love will not be spurred to what it loathes.
Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned.
She that is loved is safe.
All true love is grounded on esteem.
Life is less than nothing without love.
Love has a tide.
’Tis what I love determines how I love.
Could I love less, I should be happier now.
For faults are beauties in a lover’s eyes.
The soul of woman lives in love.
One always returns to his first love.
Love is a thing full of anxious fears.
Love is more just than justice.
None ever loved, but at first sight they loved.
The greatest miracle of love is to eradicate flirtation.
In men desire begets love, and in women love begets desire.
Love gives itself, but is not bought.
Our first and last love is—self-love.
If you wish to be loved, love.
True love is the ripe fruit of a lifetime.
They do not love, that do not show their love.
True love, like the eye, can bear no flaw.
The greatest pleasure of life is love.
Love with life is heaven; and life, unloving, hell.
Love and a cough cannot be hid.
We should know (a person) before we love.
False love is only blind.
Love’s like virtue, its own reward.
Love is the art of hearts, and heart of arts.
Platonic love is platonic nonsense.
Love is the piety of the affections.
Love’s sweetest meanings are unspoken.
Prosperity is the very bond of love.
Equality is no rule in love’s grammar.
It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Love lessens woman’s delicacy and increases man’s.
Quarrels of lovers renew their love.
To be loved, be lovable.
I saw and loved.
Love supreme defies all sophistry.
Love seldom haunts the breast where learning lies.
Man, while he loves, is never quite depraved.
Love sacrifices all things to bless the thing it loves.
Love lieth deep; love dwells not in lip-depths.
Love reckons hours for months, and days for years; and every little absence is an age.
Why is it so difficult to love wisely, so easy to love too well?
A youth’s love is the more passionate; virgin love is the more idolatrous.
There is nothing half so sweet in life as love’s young dream.
Our very wretchedness grows dear to us when suffering for one we love.
There is in the heart of woman such a deep well of love that no age can freeze it.
As love without esteem is volatile and capricious, esteem without love is languid and cold.
I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old.
Though love use reason for its precision, he admits him not for his councillor.
The worst thing an old man can be is a lover.
Love with men is not a sentiment, but an idea.
The moods of love are like the wind; and none knows whence or why they rise.
No disguise can long conceal love where it is, nor feign it where it is not.
Love, one time, layeth burdens; another time, giveth wings.
To reveal its complacence by gifts is one of the native dialects of love.
O love, when thou gettest dominion over us, we may bid good-by to prudence.
Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship—never.
If fun is good, truth is still better, and love best of all.
It is not decided that women love more than men, but is indisputable that they love better.
Successful love takes a load off our hearts, and puts it upon our shoulders.
Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.
Man loves little and often, woman much and rarely.
O, how this spring of love resembleth the uncertain glory of an April day!
Honest men love women; those who deceive them adore them.
In her first passion, woman loves her lover; in all the others, all she loves is love.
Love dies by satiety, and forgetfulness inters it.
Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs.
It is better to desire than to enjoy, to love than to be loved.
Love, which is only an episode in the life of man, is the entire history of woman’s life.
There are several remedies which will cure love, but there are no infallible ones.
It is more common to see an extreme love than a perfect friendship.
There are few people who are not ashamed of their amours when the fit is over.
One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.
The beings who appear cold, but are only timid, adore where they dare to love.
Love that has nothing but beauty to keep it in good health is short-lived.
The pleasure of love is in loving. We are happier in the passion we feel than in that we inspire.
The fountain of love is the rose and the lily, the sun and the dove.
What a miserable world!—trouble if we love, and trouble if we do not love.
To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.
Love is a familiar. Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but love.
The most precious possession that ever comes to a man in this world is a woman’s heart.
Riches take wings, comforts vanish, hope withers away, but love stays with us. Love is God.
No cord or cable can draw so forcibly, or bind so fast, as love can do with only a single thread.
Love is the beginning, the middle, and the end of everything.
A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and a man cannot live without love.
We never love heartily but once, and that is the first time we love.
We never can willingly offend where we sincerely love.
Only those who love with the heart can animate the love of others.
Love without faith is as bad as faith without love.
The happiness of love is in action; its test is what one is willing to do for others.
Love’s like the measles—all the worse when it comes late in life.
It is a wonderful subduer—this love, this hunger of the heart.
Love hath never known a law beyond its own sweet will.
Of the book of books most wondrous is the tender book of love.
He who determines to love only those who are faultless will soon find himself alone.
Ah! the spendthrift, love; it gives all and everything with the first sigh!
Compulsion hardly restores right; love yields all things.
What woman says to her fond lover should be written in air or the swift water.
The roots of the deepest love die in the heart, if not tenderly cherished.
Love is a reality which is born in the fairy region of romance.
In love as in war, a fortress that parleys is half taken.
A heart once poisoned by suspicion has no longer room for love.
The darts of love are blunted by maiden modesty.
Love and desire are the spirit’s wings to great deeds.
It is one of heaven’s best gifts to hold such a dear creature in one’s arms.
To enlarge or illustrate this power of the effects of love is to set a candle in the sun.
Lovers have an ineffable instinct which detects the presence of rivals.
Love conquers all things; let us yield to love.
Love manufactures every man into a poet while the fever lasts.
The magic of first love is the ignorance that it can ever end.
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.
There is no more delightful hour in life than that of an unconfessed but mutual love.
Love is the business of the idle, but the idleness of the busy.
Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the world is to be cured of sin.
I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more.
Love never dies of starvation, but often of indigestion.
It is not true that love makes all things easy; it makes us choose what is difficult.
Love is the life of the soul. It is the harmony of the universe.
Love is the road to God; for love, endless love, is Himself.
Love lives on, and hath a power to bless when they who loved are hidden in the grave.
Where confidence is wanting, the most beautiful flower in the garland of love is missing.
There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love, the first fluttering of its silken wings.
Men and women existed before creeds; love is the only religion.
Love is the only possession which we can carry with us beyond the grave.
Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.
Nothing more excites to everything noble and generous than virtuous love.
It is love that asks, that seeks, that knocks, that finds, and that is faithful to what it finds.
It is astonishing how little one feels poverty when one loves.
Love is old, old as eternity, but not outworn; with each new being born or to be born.
Love is more pleasing than marriage, because romances are more amusing than history.
Of all the paths leading to a woman’s love, pity is the straightest.
The greatest tyranny is to love where we are not loved again.
Love is the master-key that opens every ward of the heart of man.
Life is a sleep, love is a dream; and you have lived if you have loved.
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all and love but one.
Love has no age, as it is always renewing itself.
Humble love, and not proud science, keeps the door of heaven.
It is the beautiful necessity of our nature to love something.
The punishment of those who have loved women too much is to love them always.
The great lever by which to raise and save the world is the unbounded love and mercy of God.
The true one of youth’s love, proving a faithful helpmate in those years when the dream of life is over, and we live in its realities.
Love requires not so much proofs, as expressions, of love. Love demands little else than the power to feel and to requite love.
Her eyes, her lips, her cheeks, her shape, her features, seem to be drawn by love’s own hand, by love himself in love.
Love is but another name for that inscrutable presence by which the soul is connected with humanity.
Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another’s heart, or its flame burns low.
If thou wishest to put an end to love, attend to business (love yields to employment); then thou wilt be safe.
Two sentiments alone suffice for man, were he to live the age of the rocks—love, and the contemplation of the Deity.
Love is sparingly soluble in the words of men, therefore they speak much of it; but one syllable of woman’s speech can dissolve more of it than a man’s heart can hold.
Pure love and suspicion cannot dwell together: at the door where the latter enters, the former makes its exit.
The beginning and the end of love are both marked by embarrassment when the two find themselves alone.
Love is the occupation of the idle man, the amusement of a busy one, and the shipwreck of a sovereign.
In love it is only the commencement that charms. I am not surprised that we find pleasure in frequently recommencing.
What is it that love does to a woman? Without it she only sleeps; with it, alone, she lives.
Women hope that the dead love may revive; but men know that of all dead things none are so past recall as a dead passion.
There are women who love their husbands as blindly, as enthusiastically, and as enigmatically as nuns their cloister.
Nothing is so fierce but love will soften; nothing so sharp-sighted in other matters but it will throw a mist before its eyes.
All these inconveniences are incidents to love: reproaches, jealousies, quarrels, reconcilements, war, and then peace.
In lover’s quarrels, the party that loves most is always most willing to acknowledge the greater fault.
Where there exists the most ardent and true love, it is often better to be united in death than separated in life.
I say to you truly, the heart of him who loves is a paradise on earth; he has God in himself, for God is love.
A woman is more considerate in affairs of love than a man; because love is more the study and business of her life.
Ask the child why it is born; ask the flower why it blossoms; ask the sun why it shines. I love you because I must love you.
If there is anything that keeps the mind open to angel visits, and repels the ministry of ill, it is human love.
The more a man loves, the more he suffers. The sum of possible grief for each soul is in proportion to its degree of perfection.
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved, loved for ourselves—say rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
Love never reasons, but profusely gives; gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all, and trembles then lest it has done too little.
Take away love, and not physical nature only, but the heart of the moral world, would be palsied.
Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.
My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep; the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.
Divine love is a sacred flower, which in its early bud is happiness, and in its full bloom is heaven.
Those who have loved have little relish for friendship. The devotee of strong drink finds wine insipid.
A man is in no danger so long as he talks his love; but to write it is to impale himself on his own pot-hooks.
All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life or in physical contests.
Beauty may be the object of liking—great qualities of admiration—good ones of esteem—but love only is the object of love.
The heart of a young woman in love is a golden sanctuary which often enshrines an idol of clay.
In love we never think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.
It is possible that a man can be so changed by love that one could not recognize him to be the same person.
The heart needs not for its heaven much space, nor many stars therein, if only the star of love has arisen.
God gives us love. Something to love He lends us; but when love is grown to ripeness, that on which it throve falls off, and love is left alone.
Stimulate the heart to love and the mind to be early accurate, and all other virtues will rise of their own accord, and all vices will be thrown out.
Love seizes on us suddenly, without giving warning, and our disposition or our weakness favors the surprise; one look, one glance, from the fair fixes and determines us.
Love is full of unbefitting strains; all wanton as a child, skipping, and vain; formed by the eye, and therefore, like the eye, full of strange shapes, of habits, and of forms.
It is not love that steals the heart from love; it is the hard world and its perplexing cares, its petrifying selfishness, its pride, its low ambition, and its paltry aims.
Love delights in paradoxes. Saddest when it has most reason to be gay, sighs are the signs of its deepest joy, and silence is the expression of its yearning tenderness.
Affection can withstand very severe storms of rigor, but not a long polar frost of downright indifference. Love will subsist on wonderfully little hope, but not altogether without it.
The life of a woman may be divided into three epochs; in the first she dreams of love, in the second she makes love, in the third she regrets it.
However dull a woman may be, she will understand all there is in love; however intelligent a man may be, he will never know but half of it.
Love is like a charming romance which is read with avidity, and often with such impatience that many pages are skipped to reach the dénouement sooner.
Love is of all stimulants the most powerful. It sharpens the wits like danger, and the memory like hatred; it spurs the will like ambition; it intoxicates like wine.
A man does not entreat for love. It is the irresistible impulse towards each other of two souls, a union in which there is neither conscious giving nor receiving.
The first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity, in a girl it is boldness. The two sexes have a tendency to approach, and each assumes the qualities of the other.
If a man really loves a woman, of course he wouldn’t marry her for the world, if he were not quite sure that he was the best person she could by any possibility marry.
Love is strong as death. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.
Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.
No sooner met but they looked, no sooner looked but they loved, no sooner loved but they sighed, no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason, no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy.
A woman may live without a lover, but a lover once admitted, she never goes through life with only one. She is deserted, and cannot bear her anguish and solitude, and hence fills up the void with a second idol.
To love one who loves you, to admire one who admires you,—in a word, to be the idol of one’s idol—is exceeding the limit of human joy; it is stealing fire from heaven, and deserves death.
It is certain that there is no other passion which does produce such contrary effects in so great a degree. But this may be said for love, that if you strike it out of the soul, life would be insipid, and our being but half animated.
Love is the purification of the heart from self; it strengthens and ennobles the character, gives higher motives and a nobler aim to every action of life, and makes both man and woman strong, noble, and courageous.
The lover’s pleasure, like that of the hunter, is in the chase, and the brightest beauty loses half its merit, as the flower its perfume, when the willing hand can reach it too easily. There must be doubt; there must be difficulty and danger.
If thou neglectest thy love to thy neighbor, in vain thou professest thy love to God; for by thy love to God the love to thy neighbor is begotten, and by the love to thy neighbor, thy love to God is nourished.
What a man pays for bread and butter is worth its market value, and no more. What he pays for love’s sake is gold indeed, which has a lure for angels’ eyes, and rings well upon God’s touchstone.
The consciousness of being loved softens the keenest pang even at the moment of parting; yea, even the eternal farewell is robbed of half of its bitterness when uttered in accents that breathe love to the last sigh.
The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star,—she cannot be heaven if she stoops to such a one as he.
Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.
Days are like years in the love of the young, when no bar, no obstacle, is between their hearts,—when the sun shines, and the course runs smooth—when their love is prosperous and confessed.
Love is a flame which burns in heaven and whose soft reflections radiate to us. Two worlds are opened, two lives given to it. It is by love that we double our being; it is by love that we approach God.
Nothing but real love—(how rare it is; has one human heart in a million ever known it?)—nothing but real love can repay us for the loss of freedom—the cares and fears of poverty—the cold pity of the world that we both despise and respect.
There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman’s glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire.
Love is represented as the fulfilling of the law,—a creature’s perfection. All other graces, all divine dispensations, contribute to this, and are lost in it as in a heaven. It expels the dross of our nature; it overcomes sorrow; it is the full joy of our Lord.
A heat full of coldness, a sweet full of bitterness, a pain full of pleasantness, which maketh thoughts have eyes, and hearts, and ears; bred by desire, nursed by delight, weaned by jealousy, killed by dissembling, buried by ingratitude; and this is love.
Of all the agonies in life, that which is most poignant and harrowing; that which for the time annihilates reason, and leaves our whole organization one lacerated, mangled heart, is the conviction that we have been deceived where we placed all the trust of love.
The platform or the altar of love may be analyzed and explained; it is constructed of virtue, beauty, and affection. Such is the pyre, such is the offering; but the ethereal spark must come from heaven, that lights the sacrifice.
Love may be likened to a disease in this respect, that when it is denied a vent in one part, it will certainly break out in another; hence what a woman’s lips often conceal, her eyes, her blushes, and many little involuntary actions betray.
The cure for all the ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrows, and the crimes of humanity, all lie in that one word “love.” It is the divine vitality that everywhere produces and restores life. To each and every one of us, it gives the power of working miracles if we will.
Love is indeed heaven upon earth; since heaven above would not be heaven without it; for where there is not love, there is fear; but, “Perfect love casteth out fear.” And yet we naturally fear most to offend what we most love.
Love, it has been said, flows downward. The love of parents for their children has always been far more powerful than that of children for their parents; and who among the sons of men ever loved God with a thousandth part of the love which God has manifested to us?
No man, or woman, was ever cured of love by discovering the falseness of his or her lover. The living together for three long, rainy days in the country has done more to dispel love than all the perfidies in love that have ever been committed.
Providence has so ordained it, that only two women have a true interest in the happiness of a man—his own mother, and the mother of his children. Besides these two legitimate kinds of love, there is nothing between the two creatures except vain excitement, painful and vain delusion.
A man may be a miser of his wealth; he may tie up his talent in a napkin; he may hug himself in his reputation; but he is always generous in his love. Love cannot stay at home; a man cannot keep it to himself. Like light it is constantly traveling. A man must spend it, must give it away.
If a man loves a woman for her beauty, does he love her? No; for the smallpox, which destroys her beauty without killing her, causes his love to cease. And if any one loves me for my judgment or my memory, does he really love me? No; for I can lose these qualities without ceasing to be.
A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman’s life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul’s highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills; to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness.
It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know it has begun. A thousand heralds proclaim it to the listening air, a thousand messengers betray it to the eye. Tone, act, attitude and look, the signals upon the countenance, the electric telegraph of touch—all these betray the yielding citadel before the word itself is uttered, which, like the key surrendered, opens every avenue and gate of entrance, and renders retreat impossible.
Of the systems above us, angelic and seraphic, we know little; but we see one law, simple, efficient, and comprehensive as that of gravitation,—the law of love,—extending its sway over the whole of God’s dominions, living where He lives, embracing every moral movement in its universal authority, and producing the same harmony, where it is obeyed as we observe in the movements of nature.
When God formed the rose, He said, “Thou shalt flourish and spread thy perfume.” When He commanded the sun to emerge from chaos, he added, “Thou shalt enlighten and warm the world.” When He gave life to the lark, He enjoined upon it to soar and sing in the air. Finally, He created man and told him to love. And seeing the sun shine, perceiving the rose scattering its odors, hearing the lark warble in the air, how can man help loving?
Love is an alchemist that can transmute poison into food—and a spaniel, that prefers even punishment from one hand to caresses from another. But it is in love, as in war, we are often more indebted for our success to the weakness of the defence than to the energy of the attack; for mere idleness has ruined more women than passion; vanity more than idleness, and credulity more than either.
Must love be ever treated with profaneness as a mere illusion? or with coarseness as a mere impulse? or with fear as a mere disease? or with shame as a mere weakness? or with levity as a mere accident? whereas it is a great mystery and a great necessity, lying at the foundation of human existence, morality, and happiness,—mysterious, universal, inevitable as death.
The plainest man that can convince a woman that he is really in love with her has done more to make her in love with him than the handsomest man, if he can produce no such conviction. For the love of woman is a shoot, not a seed, and flourishes most vigorously only when ingrafted on that love which is rooted in the breast of another.
Do anything but love; or if thou lovest and art a woman, hide thy love from him whom thou dost worship; never let him know how dear he is; flit like a bird before him; lead him from tree to tree, from flower to flower; but be not won, or thou wilt, like that bird, when caught and caged, be left to pine neglected and perish in forgetfulness.
This is the great instrument and engine of nature, the bond and cement of society, the spring and spirit of the universe. Love is such an affection as cannot so properly be said to be in the soul, as the soul to be in that. It is the whole man wrapt up into one desire, all the powers, vigor, and faculties of the soul abridged into one inclination.
Oh, how beautiful is love! Even thou that sneerest and laughest in cold indifference or scorn if others are near thee,—thou too must acknowledge its truth when thou art alone, and confess that a foolish world is prone to laugh in public at what in private it reveres as one of the highest impulses of our nature; namely, love.
Love is the weapon which Omnipotence reserved to conquer rebel man when all the rest had failed. Reason he parries; fear he answers blow for blow; future interest he meets with present pleasure; but love, that sun against whose melting beams the winter cannot stand—that soft subliming slumber which wrestles down the giant, there is not one human being in a million, nor a thousand men in all earth’s huge quintillion, whose clay heart is hardened against love.
We love a girl for very different things than understanding. We love her for her beauty, her youth, her mirth, her confidingness, her character, with its faults, caprices, and God knows what other inexpressible charms; but we do not love her understanding. Her mind we esteem (if it is brilliant), and it may greatly elevate her in our opinion; nay, more, it may enchain us when we already love. But her understanding is not that which awakens and inflames our passions.
There can be no barrenness in full summer. The very sand will yield something. Rocks will have mosses, and every rift will have its windflower, and every crevice a leaf; while the fertile soil will be reared a gorgeous troop of growths, that will carry their life in ten thousand forms, but all with praise to God. And so it is when the soul knows its summer. Love redeems its weakness, clothes its barrenness, enriches its poverty, and makes its very desert to bud and blossom as the rose.
Love is the river of life in this world. Think not that ye know it who stand at the little tinkling rill, the first small fountain. Not until you have gone through the rocky gorges, and not lost the stream; not until you have gone through the meadow, and the stream has widened and deepened until fleets could ride on its bosom; not until beyond the meadow you have come to the unfathomable ocean, and poured your treasures into its depths—not until then can you know what love is.
When a man is in love with one woman in a family, it is astonishing how fond he becomes of every person connected with it. He ingratiates himself with the maids; he is bland with the butler; he interests himself about the footman; he runs on errands for the daughters; he gives advice and lends money to the youngest son at college; he pats little dogs which he would kick otherwise; he smiles at old stories which would make him break out in yawns, were they uttered by any one but papa; he drinks sweet port wine, for which he would curse the steward and the whole committee of a club; he bears even with the cantankerous old maiden aunt; he beats time when darling little Fanny performs her piece on the piano; smiles when wicked, lively little Bobby upsets the coffee over his shirt.