Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Love

Plato described the ancient myth of humans in the distant past being perfect, round beings that the gods became jealous of and split into the two parts of male and female which are forever seeking to rejoin. It's hard to imagine being a round, male/female being; but, it's easy to identify with the intense longings for union that express themselves through history as sex, love, and marriage. The love part of this is often only a hormonal/genetic reaction or a selfish, disguised pleasure seeking. Of course, it can also mean a deep, romantic connection ground in realistic appreciation, genuine regard, loyalty, and commitment. It can also go far beyond personal attraction and manifest as compassion and a universal dedication to working for the physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being of all life.

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Quotes (120)

“Love is stronger than death.”

O​rpheus /ˈɔːrfiəs 1
"Greatest poet and musician of all time"

“Love shook my heart like the wind on the mountain rushing over the oak trees.”

Sappho 612 – 570 BCE
“The Poetess” and most famous Greek woman

Themes: Love

“The greatest pleasure of life is love.”

Euripides 480 – 406 BCE
Ancient humanitarian influence continuing today

Themes: Pleasure Love

“Love is all we have, the only way that each can help the other.”

Euripides 480 – 406 BCE
Ancient humanitarian influence continuing today

Themes: Love

69. No Enemy

“If rulers really promoted them, people would turn to universal love and mutual benefit as naturally as fire tuns upward or water turns downward. Nothing in the world could stop them.”

Mozi 墨子 470 – 391 BCE via Burton Watson, Shan Dao
(Mòzǐ)
Chinese personification of Newton, da Vinci, and Jesus
from Universal Love

Themes: Love Water

“There was a time when male and female were one but God cut them into two and each became a half-shadow always searching for the other half. This desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.”

Plato Πλάτων 428 – 348 BCE via Will Durant, Shan Dao
from Symposium

Themes: Love Sex

“Chuang-tzu’s wife died. When Hui-tzu came to offer his condolences, he found him pounding on a tub and singing… Chuang-tzu said, ‘The same process that brought her to birth, in time brought her to death, as naturally as fall turns into winter and spring into summer... if I went around wailing and pounding my chest, it would only show that I didn’t understand the first thing about reality.’”

Chuang Tzu 莊周 369 – 286 BCE
(Zhuangzi)

52. Cultivating the Changeless

“Why place so much importance on love and loss of love when we know one day we must leave everyone?”

Lie Yukou 列圄寇/列禦寇/列子 1 via Zhang Zhan (370 CE) / Eva Wong
(Liè Yǔkòu, Liezi)
from Liezi "True Classic of Simplicity and Perfect Emptiness”

Themes: Marriage Love

“Would anyone fall in love if he had never heard or read about such a delirium?”

Anonymous 1 via Will Durant
Freedom from the narrow boxes defined by personal history

Themes: Imagination Love

“Propitious Queen of Love whose vital power, air, earth and sea supplies… by they prolific might, springs and beholds the regions of the light”

Lucretius 99 – 55 BCE via Dryden
(Titus Carus)
from De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

“Love is lord of all, and is in all the same.”

Virgil 70 – 19 BCE via John Dryden
(Publius Vergilius Maro)
from Georgics (29 BC)

Themes: Love

“Love is the force that leaves you colorless.”

Ovid oʊvɪd 43 BCE – 18 CE
(Publius Ovidius Naso)
Great poet and major influence on the Renaissance, Humanism, and world literature

from Metamorphoses, 8 CE

Themes: Love

“Every person creates his own world, according to that which he fears and that which he loves”

Jesus 3 BCE – 30 CE via Didymos Thomas
from Gospel According to Thomas

Themes: Fear Love

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”

Jesus 3 BCE – 30 CE via Corinthians (tr: Saint Paul)
from New Testament Διαθήκη

Themes: Love Anger

“Some have believed it was a madness... Those who are in love must be forgiven as though ill.”

Plutarch 46 – 120 CE
(Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus)

Themes: Love

“Love, and do what you like.”

Augustine ɔːɡəstiːn 354 – 430 CE
(Saint Augustine, Saint Austin, Augustine of Hippo)

Themes: Love

“If your mind wanders away, do not follow it. A mind disturbed by love and aversion is deluded; a mind free from delusion and reality alike is real, the Buddha-Mind.”

Hui Hai 大珠慧海 788 – 831 CE via John Blofeld, Shan Dao
from Essential Gate for Entry Into Sudden Enlightenment (Tun-wu ju dao yao-men)

Themes: Love Hate

“When right and wrong, other and self exist in their midst, love and hate will arise and attach each other. When love and hate arise and attack each other, warfare will flourish.”

Wang Zhen 809 – 859 CE via Ralph D. Sawyer
from Daodejing Lunbing Yaoyishu, The Tao of War

2. The Wordless Teachings

“If thou and I be sitting in the wilderness, —
that would be a joy to which no sultan can set bounds.”

Omar Khayyám 1048 – 1131 CE via Edward Heron-Allen
Persian Astronomer-Poet, prophet of the here and now

from Rubaiyat

Themes: Happiness Love

“'Tis a thousand times more easy to renounce the world than love.”

Peter Abelard Pierre Abélard 1079 – 1142 CE
from Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian

Themes: Love

“You have entered into my heart and limbs.”

Genghis Khan 1162 – 1227 CE via Jack Weatherford

Themes: Love Marriage

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

Rumi مولانا جلال‌الدین محمد بلخی 1207 – 1283 CE
(Rumi Mawlānā Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī)

Themes: Love

“The astrolabe of the mysteries of God is love.”

Rumi مولانا جلال‌الدین محمد بلخی 1207 – 1283 CE
(Rumi Mawlānā Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī)

Themes: Love

“Love takes up where knowledge leaves off.”

Thomas Aquinas 1225 – 1274 CE

Themes: Love

“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.”

Petrarch 1304 – 1374 CE

Themes: Love Shambhala

39. Oneness

“Love may turn into an inordinate clinging to the love object, compassion can turn into sentimentality and a feeling of helplessness, joy can turn into a feeling of elation and over-excitement that gets lost in unrealistic goals, but equanimity brings us back to solid ground. It’s still vulnerable to apathy but this is countered by love completing the cycle.”

Longchenpa ཀློང་ཆེན་རབ་འབྱམས་པ། 1308 – 1364 CE via Herbert V. Guenther, Shan Dao
(Longchen Rabjampa, Drimé Özer)
from Kindly Bent to Ease Us, Trilogy of Finding Comfort and Ease ངལ་གསོ་སྐོར་གསུམ་

“All I know is Love,
And I find my heart Infinite
And Everywhere!”

Hafiz خواجه شمس‌‌الدین محمد حافظ شیرازی 1315 – 1394 CE
(Hafez, Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad)
Inspiring friend to the true and free human spirit

“And since you may not justly love deny, then take it as a virtue of the mind… For love at last must all constrain and bind… therefore pray take heed to follow love that best can guide and lead.”

Geoffrey Chaucer 1343 – 1400 CE via George Philip Krapp
“Father of English literature”
from Troilus and Cressida

Themes: Virtue Love

“Don't forget love; it will bring all the madness you need to unfurl yourself across the universe.”

Meera 1498 – 1546 CE
(Mirabai, Meera Bai )
Inspiring poet, cultural freedom inspiration

Themes: Love

“It is love alone that gives worth to all things.”

Teresa of Avila 1515 – 1582 CE
from Way of Perfection

Themes: Love

12. This Over That

“Love, what a strange and wonderful thing that can give me life and deprive me of wits.”

Gaspara Stampa 1523 – 1554 CE via Jane Tylus
from The Complete Poems

Themes: Love

25. The Mother of All Things

“Where there is no love, put love, and you will draw out love.”

John of the Cross 1542 – 1591 CE

Themes: Love

“Love in young men for the most part is not love but sexual desire, and its accomplishment is the end.”

Miguel de Cervantes 1547 – 1616 CE
One of the world's best novelists

Themes: Sex Love

“Love is everything, and it affects everything”

Giordano Bruno 1548 – 1600 CE

“Love comforteth like sunshine after rain.”

William Shakespeare 1564 – 1616 CE

Themes: Love

“Love, built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.”

John Donne 1572 – 1631 CE
from Songs and Sonnets

Themes: Beauty Love

12. This Over That

“Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. Love still stands when all else has fallen.”

Blaise Pascal 1623 – 1662 CE
One of the greatest French writers of all time

Themes: Love

“Man knows that love is, but not what it is”

Emanuel Swedenborg 1688 – 1772 CE
Scientist, mystic, influential philosopher

from Divine Love and Wisdom

Themes: Love

“He that falls in love with himself, will have no rivals.”

Benjamin Franklin 1706 – 1790 CE
from Poor Richard's Almanack

Themes: Egolessness Love

67. Three Treasures

“Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.”

Madame de Staël 1766 – 1817 CE
(Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein)
"The greatest woman of her time"

Themes: Love

“The relation of the sexes is really the invisible and central point of all action and conduct... the cause of war and the end of peace; the basis of what is serious, the key to all illusions, and the meaning of all mysterious hints.”

Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860 CE
from The World as Will and Idea, 1819

Themes: Love Sex

“Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust;
Love in a palace is perhaps at last
More grievous torment that a hermit's fast.”

John Keats 1795 – 1821 CE
Writer of "poems as immortal as English"
from Lamia, 1820

Themes: Sex Love

“Love is the poetry of the senses.”

Balzac 1799 – 1850 CE
(Honoré de Balzac)

Themes: Love Poetry

“Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.”

Balzac 1799 – 1850 CE
(Honoré de Balzac)
from Père Goriot

Themes: Religion Love

“Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”

Victor Hugo 1802 – 1885 CE
Literary pioneer, poet, and social justice provocateur

Themes: Love

“There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.”

George Sand 1804 – 1876 CE
(Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin)

69. No Enemy

“Years of love have been forgot in the hatred of a minute.”

Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allen Poe 1809 – 1849 CE

Themes: Love Hate Aggression

“We loved with a love that was more than love.”

Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allen Poe 1809 – 1849 CE

Themes: Love

“See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.”

Herman Melville 1819 – 1891 CE
from Moby Dick or The Whale

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский 1821 – 1881 CE
from Brothers Karamatzov

Themes: Love

“Love is such a priceless treasure that you can purchase the whole world with it”

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский 1821 – 1881 CE
from Brothers Karamatzov

Themes: Love

“Love to throw yourself on the earth and kiss it with an unceasing, consuming love. Love all men, love everything. Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears. This is a great gift of God not given to many. Prize it.”

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский 1821 – 1881 CE via Constance Garnett, Shan Dao
from Brothers Karamatzov

Themes: Love Golden Rule

“When our hearts grow soft with infinite, universal, unquenchable love and we realize that each one of us is responsible for all of mankind and for every individual person, we will have the power to win over the whole world.”

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский 1821 – 1881 CE via Constance Garnett, Shan Dao
from Brothers Karamatzov

Themes: Power Love Victory

“To live is like to love — all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.”

Samuel Butler 1835 – 1902 CE
Iconoclastic philosopher, artist, composer, author, and evolutionary theorist

Themes: Love

“In for a penny, in for a pound
It's Love that makes the world go 'round!”

W. S. Gilbert 1836 – 1911 CE
Innovative, influential, inspiring dramatist

Themes: Love

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

Friedrich Nietzsche 1844 – 1900 CE

“The real man wants two different things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”

Friedrich Nietzsche 1844 – 1900 CE
from Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Themes: Love

“Until one has loved an animal a part of one's soul remains unawakened.”

Anatole France 1844 – 1924 CE
(Jacques Anatole Thibault)

Themes: Love

“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”

Oscar Wilde 1854 – 1900 CE
from Picture of Dorian Gray

Themes: Deception Love

“Love and work... work and love, that's all there is.”

Sigmund Freud 1856 – 1939 CE

Themes: Livelihood Love

“It’s not the love you make. It's the love you give.”

Nikola Tesla Никола Тесла 1856 – 1943 CE

Themes: Love

“Beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love.”

Rabindranath Tagore 1861 – 1941 CE

54. Planting Well

“All love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction. Love is therefore the only law of life. He who loves lives, he who is selfish is dying. Therefore love for love's sake, because it is the only law of life, just as you breathe to live.”

Swami Vivekananda ʃami bibekanɔnd̪o 1863 – 1902 CE
"The maker of modern India"

Themes: Love

“Love, however, cannot be forbidden. The more that flame is covered up, the hotter it burns. Love can always find a way.”

Edith Hamilton 1867 – 1963 CE
from Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, 1942

Themes: Love

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”

Marcel Proust 1871 – 1922 CE
Apostle of Ordinary Mind
from In Search of Lost Time

Themes: Love

“Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.”

Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970 CE
“20th century Voltaire”
from Unpopular Essays

Themes: Sex Love

“Love can flourish only as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought of duty. To say that it is your duty to love so-and-so is the surest way to cause you to hate him of her.”

Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970 CE
“20th century Voltaire”

Themes: Freedom Love

“It's easy to fall in love. The hard part is finding someone to catch you.”

Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970 CE
“20th century Voltaire”

Themes: Love

“If you go to thinking take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love.”

Carl Jung 1875 – 1961 CE via Sonu Shamdasani
Insightful shamanistic scientist
from Red Book, Liber Novus

“One can beg, buy, be presented with and find love in the streets, but it can never be stolen.”

Hermann Hesse 1877 – 1962 CE via Hilda Rosner
from Siddhartha

Themes: Love

“There is no love greater than love.”

Helena Roerich Елéна Ивáновна Рéрих 1879 – 1955 CE

Themes: Love

“Love loves to love love.”

James Joyce 1882 – 1941 CE
from Ulysses

Themes: Love

“Some people care too much. I think it's called love.”

A.A. Milne 1882 – 1956 CE
(Alan Alexander Milne)
from Winnie the Pooh

Themes: Love

12. This Over That

“They lived and laughed and loved and left.”

James Joyce 1882 – 1941 CE
from Finnegan's Wake

“And think not that you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.”

Kahlil Gibran 1883 – 1931 CE
from The Prophet

Themes: Love

“Be it animals, birds, or humans, at each whirl of the dance the ephemeral masks are thrown off and behind all of them the same face is always revealed, the eternal face of love.”

Nikos Kazantzakis 1883 – 1957 CE via P. A. Bien
from Report to Greco

Themes: Love

“Clothed in no garment save that of beauty… they chanted melodies woven from dreams of love”

Kahlil Gibran 1883 – 1931 CE
from A Tear and a Smile

Themes: Love

“After all, what does it matter what price we pay for love?”

Will Durant 1885 – 1981 CE
Philosophy apostle and popularizer of history's lessons
from Transition

Themes: Love

“And so the first moment [he] put his eyes on her she was laughing and the sunlight fell on her and he saw her like this, her hair shining black and her cheeks red and her lips red and her teeth white and her head throw back in laughter, and he was struck as though a sword had fallen across his heart.”

Pearl Buck 1892 – 1973 CE
from Dragon Seed

“You want to be loved because you do not love; but the moment you love, it is finished, you are no longer inquiring whether or not somebody loves you.”

Krishnamurti 1895 – 1986 CE
(Jiddu Krishnamurti)

Themes: Love

“As long as we invent and progress in mechanical things and not in love, we shall not achieve happiness.”

Jean Giono 1895 – 1970 CE

80. A Golden Age

“A man who knows that he is silent, or knows that he loves, doesn’t know what love is, nor what silence is.”

Krishnamurti 1895 – 1986 CE
(Jiddu Krishnamurti)
from Awakening of Intelligence

56. One with the Dust

“All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase— 'I love you.'”

F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896 – 1940 CE
Prototype of "Jazz Age" exuberance
from The Offshore Pirate

Themes: Love

“In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love, you want the other person.”

Margaret Chase Smith 1897 – 1995 CE

Themes: Love

“A billion men have since professed his way and never followed it... What Christ is saying always, what he never swerves from saying, what he says a thousand times and in a thousand different ways... is love.”

Thomas Wolfe 1900 – 1938 CE
(Thomas Clayton Wolfe)
Father of autobiographical fiction
from You Can't Go Home Again, 1940

Themes: Love

“Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.”

Erich Fromm 1900 – 1980 CE
One of the most powerful voices of his era promoting the true personal freedom beyond social, political, religious, and national belief systems
from Art of Loving

Themes: Love

18. The Sick Society
12. This Over That

“If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers...”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 1900 – 1944 CE

Themes: Love

37. Nameless Simplicity

“Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. 'Patriotism' is its cult... Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.”

Erich Fromm 1900 – 1980 CE
One of the most powerful voices of his era promoting the true personal freedom beyond social, political, religious, and national belief systems

Themes: Nationalism Love

78. Water

“Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.”

Erich Fromm 1900 – 1980 CE
One of the most powerful voices of his era promoting the true personal freedom beyond social, political, religious, and national belief systems

3. Weak Wishes, Strong Bones

“Jealousy doesn't show how much you love someone, only how insecure you are.”

Margaret Mead 1901 – 1978 CE

Themes: Aggression Love

“Love is something that you can leave behind when you die. It's that powerful... it will roam and travel.”

John Fire Lame Deer 1903 – 1976 CE via Richard Erdoes
from Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

Themes: Love

“When people get married because they think it’s a long time love affair, they’ll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment… if the marriage isn’t a first priority in your life, you’re not married.”

Joseph Campbell 1904 – 1987 CE
Great translator of ancient myth into modern symbols
from Power of Myth

Themes: Love

“I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

Viktor Frankl 1905 – 1997 CE
Brave and insightful concentration camp survivor

from Man's Search for Meaning

Themes: Love

“Love slays what we have been,
That we may be what we were not.”

Kenneth Rexroth 1905 – 1982 CE
"Father of the Beats”

Themes: Love Progress

“To love in the sense of passion-love is the contrary of to live. It is an impoverishment of one's being, an askesis without sequel, an inability to enjoy the present without imagining it as absent, a never-ending flight from possession.”

Denys de Rougemont 1906 – 1985 CE
Non-conformist leader, influential cultural theorist
from Love in the Western World

Themes: Love

“Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political forces.”

Hannah Arendt 1906 – 1975 CE
Fearless researcher into the darker reaches of the human psyche

Themes: Love

“Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”

Albert Camus 1913 – 1960 CE

Themes: Love Middle Way

“Without love, we are self-centered, but love enables us to move the center of our lives outside our ego… it expands our lives”

Huston Smith 1919 – 2016 CE

“And so love goes. And so life goes. And so I go.”

Neal Cassady 1926 – 1968 CE

Themes: Love

“When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence. How can you love if you are not there?”

Thích Nhất Hạnh tʰǐk ɲɜ̌t hɐ̂ʔɲ 1926 CE –

Themes: Love

“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”

Maya Angelou 1928 – 2014 CE

Themes: Love

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

Martin Luther King Jr. 1929 – 1968 CE
Leading world influence for equality, peace, non-violence, and poverty alleviation

Themes: Love

“When we love, we think that we love an object. But really, love is inherent without the subject and only reflects to the object.”

Thinley Norbu གདུང་སྲས་ཕྲིན་ལས་ནོར་བུ 1931 – 2011 CE
(Kyabjé Dungse)
from Magic Dance (1981)

Themes: Love

“Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God”

Toni Morrison 1931 – 2019 CE
(Chloe Ardelia Wofford)
Story-telling voice of American wisdom
from Paradise (1997)​

Themes: Love

“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.”

Dalai Lama XIV Tenzin Gyatso 1935 CE –

Themes: Compassion Love

77. Stringing a Bow

“People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.”

Ken Kesey 1935 – 2001 CE

“There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done, nothing you can sing that can’t be sung... all you need is love”

John Lennon 1940 – 1980 CE
from Magical Mystery Tour

Themes: Love

“It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love or how you love, it matters only that you love.”

John Lennon 1940 – 1980 CE

69. No Enemy

“I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love.”

Paul McCartney 1942 CE – via Hard Days Night
(Sir James Paul McCartney)

Themes: Money Love

“I don't know how someone controlled you, they bought and sold you. I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps”

George Harrison 1943 – 2001 CE
Guitar-playing philanthropist

from While My Guitar Gently Weeps​

Themes: Control Love

“If she's amazing, she won't be easy. If she's easy, she won't be amazing. If she's worth it, you wont give up. If you give up, you're not worthy... Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.”

Bob Marley 1945 – 1981 CE

Themes: Love Suffering

“I must be in love with this woman... I don't have any choice... Danger may be lurking there, I might end up losing everything but there's no turning back even if it means I'll be burned up and gone forever.”

Haruki Murakami 1949 CE – via Philip Gabriel
from Sputnik Sweetheart

Themes: Perseverance Love

“lasting love is something a person has to decide to experience. Lifelong monogamous devotion is just not natural — not for women even, and emphatically not for men. It requires, for lack of a better term, what we can call an act of will.”

Robert Wright 1957 CE –
from Moral Animal — Why we are the Way we Are

Themes: Marriage Love

“The advantage of love at first sight is that it doesn't require a second look.”

Neil Gaiman 1960 CE –
Myth-transmitting creative maelstrom
from American Gods

Themes: Love

“You fall in love with your heart; you fall out of love with your head.”

Dzogchen Pönlop 1965 CE –

Themes: Love

“Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity… We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?”

Alain de Botton 1969 CE –
Philosophic link between ancient wisdom and modern challenge
from On Love

Themes: Love

“The difference between reading a love poem and being in love.”

David Mitchell 1969 CE –
from Bone Clocks

5. Christmas Trees

“Love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death.”

David Mitchell 1969 CE –

39. Oneness

“If love were a product, the queue at the faulty goods desk would stretch right round the universe and back. It doesn't work properly. The seams come apart and it's full of powdered glass.”

Charlie Brooker 1971 CE –
from Black Mirror

Themes: Love

“If you love someone, you don’t get to choose how they love you back.”

N. K. Jemisin 1972 CE –
from Broken Earth

Themes: Love

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