To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you’re getting this down.
~ Woody Allen
For where love is wanting, the beauty of all virtue is mere tinsel, is empty sound, is not worth a straw, nay more is offensive and disgusting.
~ John Calvin
Hunger I can endure; love I cannot.
~ Claudian
Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.
~ Anton Chekhov
Oh, what a heaven is love! Oh, what a hell!
~ Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, in The Honest Whore
God is love. Not cheap, sentimental love, but redeeming love which cannot be said, but must be seen in the way we live.
~ Harry Denman
More and more I come to value charity and love of one’s fellow being above everything else . . . All our lauded technological progress—our very civilizations—is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.
~ Albert Einstein
Love can’t be pinned down by a definition, and is certainly something that can’t be proved. Love is people, is a person. A friend of ours, Hub Bishop of Mirfield, says in one of his books: “Love is not an emotion. It is a policy.”
~ Madeleine L’Engle, in A Circle of Quiet (NY: Harper, 1972), page 45
We love because it’s the only true adventure.
~ Nikki Giovanni
Love is not blind – it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less.
~ Rabbi Julius Gordon
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved—loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
~ Victor Hugo
When love is not madness, it is not love.
~ Pedro Calderon de la Barca
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
– C.S. Lewis
To live without loving is not really to live.
~ Jean Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
We can only learn to love by loving.
~ Iris Murdoch
Love among men is awakened by something in the beloved. But the love of God is free, spontaneous, unevoked, uncaused. God loves men because he has chosen to love them.
~ J. I. Packer
By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is,
Infinite, undying—
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
~ Dorothy Parker
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