Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
– Anais Nin
Tag: love
You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.
– Buddha
The life so brief, the art so long in the learning, the attempt so hard, the conquest so sharp, the fearful joy that ever slips away so quickly – by all this I mean love, which so sorely astounds my feeling with its wondrous operation, that when I think upon it I scarce know whether I wake or sleep.
– Geoffrey Chaucer
There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
If I had a flower for every time I thought of you… I could walk through my garden forever.
– Lord Alfred Tennyson
How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.
– Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Love does not dominate; it cultivates.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.
– Oscar Wilde
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.
– Oscar Wilde
Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.
– Oscar Wilde
When we live, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.
– Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
– Lao Tzu
Love is the whole thing. We are only pieces.
– Rumi
It is a mystery why we fall in love; It is a mystery how it happens
It is a mystery when it comes; It is a mystery why some love grows
And it is a mystery why some love fails.
You can analyze this mystery and look for reasons and causes,
But you will never do anymore than take the life out of the experience.
Just as life itself is more than the sum of the bones
And muscles and electrical impulses in the body,
Love is more than the sum of the interests
And attractions and commonalties that two people share.
And just as life itself is a gift that comes and goes in its own time,
So too, the coming and going of love must be taken as an unfathomable gift
That cannot be questioned in its ways.
Sometimes, hopefully at least once in your life –
The gift of love will come to you in full flower,
And you will take hold of it and celebrate it in all inexpressible beauty.
This is a dream we all share.
More often, it will come and take hold of you,
Celebrate you for a brief moment, then move on.
When this happens to young people,
They too often try to grasp the love and hold it to them,
Refusing to see that it is a gift that is freely given
And a gift that just as freely, moves away.
When they fall out of love,
They try desperately to reclaim the love that is lost
Rather than accepting the gift for what it was, then moving on.
They want answers where there are no answers.
They want to know what is wrong in them
That makes the other person no longer love them;
Or they try to get their lover to change,
Thinking that if some small things were different,
Love would bloom again. They blame their circumstances
And say that if they go far away and start a new life together,
Their love will grow.
They try anything to give meaning to what has happened.
But there is no meaning beyond the love itself,
And until they accept its own mysterious ways,
They live in a sea of misery.
You need to know this about love, and to accept it.
You need to treat what it brings you with kindness.
If you find yourself in love with someone who does not love you,
Be gentle with yourself. There is nothing wrong with you.
Love just didn’t choose to rest in the other person’s heart.
If you find someone else in love with you and you don’t love him,
Feel honored that love came and called at your door,
But gently refuse the gift you cannot return.
Do not take advantage; do not cause pain.
If you fall in love with another, and he falls in love with you,
And then love chooses to leave,
Do not try to reclaim it or to assess blame. Let it go.
There is a reason and there is a meaning. You will know in time.
Remember that you don’t choose love. Love chooses you.
Love has its own time, its own seasons,
And its own reason for coming and going.
You cannot bribe it or coerce it, or reason it into staying.
If it chooses to leave from your heart or from the heart of your lover,
There is nothing you can do and there is nothing you should do.
Love always had been and always will be a mystery.
Be glad that it came to live for a moment in your life.
If you keep your heart open, it will come again.
– Kent Nerburn, extract from Letters to my Son
Absence is to love what wind is to fire;
It extinguishes the small,
It enkindles the great.
– Comte Debussy-Rabutin
Hearts united in pain and sorrow
will not be separated by joy and happiness.
Bonds that are woven in sadness
are stronger than the ties of joy and pleasure.
Love that is washed by tears
will remain eternally pure and faithful.
― Khalil Gibran, The Love Poems of Khalil Gibran, “Love Letters in the Sand”
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
– T.S.Eliot, an excerpt from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Rainbow of Madness 