What is Love?
Definitions from a NY Poster
Love n. (1): a strong affection for another rising out of kinship or personal ties (2): attraction based on sexual desire (3): affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests. –Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary.
There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand different versions. –La Rochefoucould
Love is a universal migraine, a bright stain on the vision, blotting out reason. –Robert Graves
Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. –Robert Frost
Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes. –Ella Wilcox
True Union, or Love Proper, exists only between living beings who are alike in power and thus in one another’s eyes. –Georg Hegel
Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within the reach of every hand. –Mother Theresa
I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry. –Donne
There is abundant testimony that if we choose love rather than self, we gain immeasurably. –Charles Field
Love withers under constraint; /Its very essence is liberty; /It is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear; /It is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited, where its Votaries live in confidence, equality, and unreserved… -Mary Shelley
Our lives are shaped by those who love us and by those who refuse to love us. –Anonymous
Love is the strange bewilderment which overtakes one person on account of another person. –James Thurber & E.B. White
I love love. –Too Much Coffee Man
Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. –Oscar Wilde
Who so loves believes the impossible. –Elizabeth Barrett Browning
As long as one can admire and love, then one is young forever. –Pablo Casals
Love that does not reveal itself is as bitter as the flowers that grow among the thickets on the moors in the summer. –Manyo Shu
Love ain’t nothing but sex misspelled. –Harlan Ellison
When you have nothing left but love, then for the first time you become aware that love is enough. –Anonymous
The loving are the daring. –Bayard Taylor
Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. –Tennyson
Love is a human religion in which another is believed in –Robert Seidenberg
Love is a furnace, but it will not cook the stew. –Spanish Proverb
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. –Victor Hugo
Love is one of many passions … and has no great influence on the sum of life. –Samuel Johnson
On this earth, /though far and near, /without love, there is only fear. –Pearl S. Buck
Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties. –Jules Renard
It’s better to have loved and lost, than to have loved and caught something. –Too Much Coffee Man
…Sooner or later we fall in love, and that is a pretty strange business, too, another wonderful, awful, sometimes unbelievable business. –Ray Bradbury
Where you find no love, put love, and you will find love. –John of the Cross
Love makes difficult things easy and almost unworthy of note. –St. Thomas Aquinas
Love is the idler’s occupation, the warrior’s relaxation, and the sovereign’s ruination. –Napoleon Bonaparte
Another aspect of the pattern is that one falls in love not by design and conscious choice, but according to some accident of fate over which the victim has no control. –Sydney M. Greenfield
Tis a brave master; /Let it have scope, /Follow it utterly, /Hope beyond hope. –Ralph Waldo Emerson
All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase – ‘I love you’. –F. Scott Fitzgerald
That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love. –Samuel Beckett
A grave mental disease. –Plato
Love sought is good, but giv’n unsought is better. –Shakespeare
In love there is always one who kisses, and one who offers the cheek. –French Proverb
Love is the wisdom of the fool, and the folly of the wise. –Samuel Johnson
Love is simple to understand if you haven’t got a mind soft and full of holes. It’s a crutch, that’s all, and there isn’t any one of us that doesn’t need a crutch. –Norman Mailer
There is the same difference in a person before and after he is in love, as there is in an unlighted lamp and one that is burning. –Vincent Van Gogh
The heart has eyes which the brain knows nothing of. –Charles Perkhurst
The paradox of love is that it is the highest degree of awareness of the self as a person and the highest degree of absorption in the other. –Rollo May
It is impossible to love and be wise. –Francis Bacon
Listening is love in action. –Leo Buscaglia
No human creature can give orders to love. –George Bernanos
He who wants to do good, knocks at the gate. He who loves, finds the gate open. –Rabindranath Tagore
The great tragedy in life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love. –W. Somerset Maugham
Oh, love’s but a dance, where time plays the fiddle! –Henry Austin Dobson
Love can do all but raise the dead. –Emily Dickinson
Tarzan, if he gave the matter much thought at all, probably reasoned that his growing attachment for the young female could be easily accounted for by the fact that of the former playmates she and he alone retained any desire to frolic as of old. –Edgar Rice Burroughs
There is no greater glory than love, nor any greater punishment than jealosy. –Lope de Vega
Love is letting go of fear. –Gerald G. Jampolsky
Absence from whom we love is worse than death. –William Cowper
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist upon its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices at the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 1 Corinthians 13:4 R.S.V.
We do not love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we have done them. –Leo Tolstoy
Love is a canvass, furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination. –Voltaire
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught from itself. Love possesses naught, nor would it be possessed; for love is sufficient to love. –Kahil Gibran
A hostile transaction, very necessary to keep the world going, but by no means a sinecure to the parties concerned. –Lord Byron
Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it. –Jerome Jerome
You not only can’t explain love … Actually, you can’t even talk about it. –Charlie Brown / Charles Schultz
The speaking in a perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but love. –Francis Bacon
The man who foolishly does me wrong, I will return to him the protection of my most ungrudging love. –Buddha
Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love. –Lao Tzu
Infatuation is when you think he’s as sexy as Robert Redford, as smart as Henry Kissinger, as noble as Ralph Nader, as funny as Woody Allen, and as athletic as Jimmy Conners. Love is when you realize that he’s as sexy as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Conners, as funny as Ralph Nader, as athletic as Henry Kissinger, and nothing like Robert Redford – but you’ll take him anyway. –Judith Viorst
And in the end, the love you take / Is equal to the love you make. –John Lennon & Paul McCartney
In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two. –Eric Fromm
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another. –H.L. Mencken
Love cures people – both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it. –Dr. Karl Menninger
Nothing else but an insatiate thirst of enjoying a greedily desired object. –Montaigne
The best way to know God is to love many things. –Vincent Van Gogh
If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it. –Ernest Hemmingway
The difference between sex and love is that sex relieves tension and love causes it. –Woody Allen
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. –H.L. Mencken
Since we shall love each other, I shall be great, and you rich. –Victor Hugo
The only way to speak the truth is to speak lovingly. –Henry David Thoreau
Love, kindled by virtue, always kindles another love, providing its flame shines forth. –Dante
Love is like an epidemic – the more one is afraid, the more vulnerable one is. –S.R.N. Camfort
Love is the self-delusion we manufacture to justify the trouble we take to have sex. –Dan Greenburg
Loving, like prayer, is a power as well as a process. It’s curative. It is creative. –Zona Gale
If love is the answer, could you repeat the question? –Lily Thomlin
Love kills. –Sid Vicious
If you would be loved, love and be lovable. –Benjamin Franklin
How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved! –Sigmund Freud
Love yourself first and everything else falls in line. –Lucille Ball
Love is a fiend, a fire, a heaven, a hell, where pleasure, pain and sad repentance dwell. –Richard Barnfield
Our love must not be a thing of words and fine talk. It must be a thing of action and sincerity. –1 John 3:18
Sexual love makes of the loved person an object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry. –Immanuel Kant
Romantic love is mental illness. But it’s a pleasurable one. It’s a drug. It distorts reality, and that’s the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone you really saw. –Fran Lebowitz
Love does not consist in gazing at each other but looking in the same direction together. –Antonne de Saint-Exupery
My love, she sleeps. Oh, may her sleep, as it is lasting, be so deep! Soft may the worms around her creep! –Edgar Allen Poe
I’ve never loved another person the way I loved myself. –Mae West
I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I’ve ever known. –Walt Disney
Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. –Katherine Ann Porter
Love, and a cough, cannot be hid. –George Herbert
Love is a kind of warfare. –Ovid
Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin – it’s the triumphant twang of a bedspring! –S.J. Perlman
When you’re in love it’s the most glorious two-and-a-half days of your life. –Richard Lewis
One forgives to the degree one loves. –La Rochefaucould
Love is supreme and unconditional; like is nice but limited. –Duke Ellington
The contact of two epidermises. –Sebastien Chamfort
Where love is concerned, too much is not even enough. –Pierre-Augustin de Beumarchais
To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind. –Theophile Gautier
Thousands have lived without love, no one without water. –W.H. Auden
Love and desire are the spirit’s wings to great deeds. –Goethe
Some people never say the words ‘I love you’, but like a child they’re longing to be told. –Paul Simon
Love is an attempt to change a piece of the dream-world into reality. –Theodor Reik
Say not you love a roasted fowl / But you may love a screaming owl / And, if you can, the unwieldy toad … -Wordsworth
In love it is the victim who looks most like a hero. –Charles Pilsnier
Just another four-letter word. –Tennesee Williams
Any time that is not spent on love is wasted. –Torquato Tasso
Love is nothing but the fear of mortal man at the thought of solitude. –Theodor Storm
Two souls with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one. –Von Munch Bellinghausen
The greater the man’s soul, the deeper he loves. –Leonardo DaVinci
Don’t threaten me with love, baby. –Billie Holiday
Love is such a tissue of paradoxes, and exists in such endless variety of forms and shades that you may say almost anything about it that you please, and it is likely to be correct. –Henry Finck
It’s easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one’s neighbor. –Eric Hoffer
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love. –Thornton Wilder
Everything we do in life is based on fear, especially love. –Mel Brooks
Those who are faithless know the pleasures of love; it is the faithful who know love’s tragedies. –Oscar Wilde
He who is not impatient is not in love. –Italian Proverb
Love is an ideal thing, marriage is a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Love is so much better when you are not married. –Maria Callas
If I love you, what business is that of yours? –Goethe
Love is not for the easily defeated or the quickly disillusioned. –Leo Buscaglia
We cannot really love anybody with whom we never laugh. –Agnes Repplier
Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine gun. –Matt Groening
No knight can be brave unless he is in love; love gives the knight his courage. –Philippe de Mezieres
The giving of love is an education in itself. –Eleanor Roosevelt
A warrior is always joyful because his love is unalterable and his beloved, the earth, embraces him and bestows upon him inconceivable gifts. –Don Juan, Tales of Power by Carlos Casteneda
I am sick of love. –King Solomon
[I found these quotations on a poster in a little shop just off Times Square in New York City. We visited there just after we'd enjoyed the view from the observatory level of the World Trade Center ...]