Best lines about love

[rpmckill]

In light of the time of year, what would you consider the best lines in literature that describe or involve love. I've seen so much on these forums about poetry and was wondering what other areas of literature have to offer.

I think my all time favorite is in Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning:

"The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved."

[Rosethorn]

"I hate love."
- What every teenager says at least once in their life. =P

'Nuff said.

....

....

Okay, my true favorite is said by my mom. -/////-

"Love can really suck sometimes, but it can be great, too. The thing is, you've got to figure out if it's worth the sucky parts to get to the good stuff."

Which can actually be said about anything. But I digress.

[olichka]

Pushkin's lines from "Eugene Onegin" with regard to Prince Gremin ( I am paraphrasing ) :

ALL AGES ARE SUSCEPTIBLE TO LOVE.
In one's youth, love is refreshing like spring rain, but in mature years, it can wreak havoc.

[Cien]

Corinthians 13: 1-7

4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

[Guzmán]

If music be the food of love, play on - Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

[olichka]

If music be the food of love, play on - Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

It's certainly true, music can certainly "fuel" passions--as has been demonstrated with horror by Tolstoy in his "The Kreutzer Sonata" !!! :flare:

[F.Emerald]

I think these lines from a short Wilde play are wonderful.

“My lovers hang garlands round the pillars of my house. At night time they come with the flute players and the players of the harp. They woo me with apples, and on the pavement of my courtyard they write my name in wine.
From the uttermost parts of the world my lovers come to me.”
La Sainte Courtisane

[Gibran]

When I stood a clear mirror before you, you gazed into me and saw your image.Then you said, "I love you."
But in truth you loved yourself in me.

That's my favourite line from SAND AND FOAM.
Wilde's poems impressed me so much, especially Ode to the Reading Jail.

[zanna]

"I'm just a girl, asking a boy to love her."
-the character Ana Scott, in Notting Hill
's a pretty good one.

[bazarov]

Maybe it sounds strange, but it's beautifully said...From War and Peace:

Dolokhov himself during his convalescence spoke to Rostov in a way no one would have expected of him.

"I know people consider me a bad man!" he said. "Let them! I don't care a straw about anyone but those I love; but those I love, I love so that I would give my life for them, and the others I'd throttle if they stood in my way. I have an adored, a priceless mother, and two or three friends- you among them- and as for the rest I only care about them in so far as they are harmful or useful. And most of them are harmful, especially the women. Yes, dear boy," he continued, "I have met loving, noble, high-minded men, but I have not yet met any women- countesses or cooks- who were not venal. I have not yet met that divine purity and devotion I look for in women. If I found such a one I'd give my life for her! But those!... and he made a gesture of contempt. "And believe me, if I still value my life it is only because I still hope to meet such a divine creature, who will regenerate, purify, and elevate me. But you don't understand it."

"Oh, yes, I quite understand, "answered Rostov, who was under his new friend's influence.

[F.Emerald]

"I'm just a girl, asking a boy to love her."
-the character Ana Scott, in Notting Hill
's a pretty good one.

Actually its:

"I'm just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her."

[Scheherazade]

I love this quote by Faulkner:
Loving all of it even while he had to hate some of it because he knows now that you don't love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

[byquist]

Othello:

"It it were now to die, T'were now to be most happy
For I fear my soul hath her content so absolute
That not another comfort like to this succeeds in unknown fate."

[crisaor]

Some lines, not necessarily my favourites, just the ones I came upon first:

"If you love something, set it free; if it comes back it's yours, if it doesn't, it never was."
- Richard Bach

“Women are made to be loved, not understood.”
- Oscar Wilde

"At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet."
- Plato

"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."
- Bertrand Russell

"One is in love when one realizes that the other person is unique."
-Jorge Luis Borges


The bit in Paul's letter to the Corinthians is specially nice.

[ennison]

'At the point of parting the realisation that there was more .... to say to do to feel ......... but no more time for it'

[truth_forest]

I line the line form The Hours, the movie. In the last scene, Virginia Woolf wrote her suicide note to Leonard, her husband,
"Dear Leonard, to look life in the face, always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last, to know it, to love it, for what it is and then to put it away. Leonard, always the years between us, always the years, always the love. Always the hours."

[P0IS0N]

I saw this in "You stupid man", and it's my favourite so far:
"More often or not, love is what kicks you in the gut and leaves you left for dead"

[Madhuri]

It was something like this:-

When do you say enough is enough...........Never :D (not the best, but a good one)

[kathycf]

I didn't care much for Ulysses (I don't care much for Joyce, actually--I hope Jean Babtise doens't read this ;) ) but I thought this soliquoy that Molly Bloom does at the end of the novel is just wonderful. Still sticks in my head after a good 15 years.


the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes..

It isn't a romance like Romeo and Juliet, but I liked it.

[bluevictim]

Here are some nice lines from Sappho 16:

Some folks say a squadron of horsemen -- others,
Th' infantry -- still others, a fleet of warships --
Is the greatest beauty in all the Earth; I
say, it's your true love.

EDIT: Oops, I just realized the thread wasn't supposed to be about poetry. Oh well, maybe some non-poetic lines about love will come to me later.

[Pensive]

Sorrow floats; love too; and - in the long run - doom. It floats too.

- The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving.

[Bebbin]

This has always been one of my ultimate favorite quotes/passages about love that I even memorized it. :lol:


... there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to protect and eagerness to do good and to give pleasure--if not unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence... Love is absorbing, it takes the lover out of himself; the most clear-sighted, though he may know, cannot realize that this love will cease; it gives body to what he knows is illusion, and, knowing it is nothing else, he loves it better than reality. It makes a man a little more than himself, an at the same time a little less. He ceases to be himself. He is no longer and individual, but a thing, an instrument to some purpose foreign to his ego.

From The Moon and Sixpence, by William Somerset Maugham.

[ebrokofsky]

"She is a friend of my mind, she gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."

Sixo from Toni Morrison's Beloved

[omegaxx]

Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. --"De Profundis" (Oscar Wilde)

I'm not religious, but this quote blew me away.

[Laindessiel]

Can I use quotes from movies?

"I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle in your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend a day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I wanna talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your lofe to start as soon as possible." Billy Crystal, When Harry Met Sally

"I'd rather die tomorrow knowing I met you than to live a hundred years without knowing you." John Smith, Pocahontas

Love don't make things nice -- it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed!" Nicolas Cage, Moonstruck

You complete me." Tom Cruise, Jerry Maguire

[Reccura]

Can I use quotes from movies?

"I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle in your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend a day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I wanna talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your lofe to start as soon as possible." Billy Crystal, When Harry Met Sally

Love don't make things nice -- it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed!" Nicolas Cage, Moonstruck

You complete me." Tom Cruise, Jerry Maguire

Oh, man! Those really touched the inner heart in me! :bawling: ?

That was REEEEEEAAALLLLLYYYYY nice. and this one too.


"I'd rather die tomorrow knowing I met you than to live a hundred years without knowing you." John Smith, Pocahontas
Oh, I wish someone would....

[Bii]

From Captain Corelli's Mandolin:

"Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivably that you should ever part. Because that's what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being 'in love', which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and an unfortunate accident."

[Cien]

From Captain Corelli's Mandolin:

"Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivably that you should ever part. Because that's what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being 'in love', which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and an unfortunate accident."

That is excellent. Thank you for sharing.

[Matrim Cuathon]

Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. --"De Profundis" (Oscar Wilde)

I'm not religious, but this quote blew me away.

that doesnt blow me away at all. for that to be valid you have to assume that god is real and that he really loves us. then you have to consider what your definition of worthy is. perfect in terms of love doesnt necesarily mean the best looker, athlete, the smartest, most emotional etc. you may love someone who is perfect for you, or they may not be perfect for you. if you consider that love doesnt necessitate a perfect object then the whole quote falls apart. it can only "blow you away" if you are perfectly in agreement with his semantics.

some women like needy men and some like masterful ones. some men like valley girl types and some like tomboys. obviously there is no ideal to which all could give eternal love.

but back to the most important point. your concept of worthy is what determines the value of the quote. and then only if you are religious. if god isnt real then he doesnt love us eternally.

that statement has value only if god is real, really loves all of us no matter what, and if your concept of what each word describes is the same as wilde's.

[Nick Rubashov]

"If you love something, set it free; if it comes back it's yours, if it doesn't, it never was."
- Richard Bach


that reminds me of one of my favorite Wayne's World quotes

Garth Algar: Uhm, Wayne? What do you do if every time you see this one incredible woman, you think you're gonna hurl?
Wayne Campbell: I say hurl. If you blow chunks and she comes back, she's yours. But if you spew and she bolts, then it was never meant to be