by Mardy Grothe
Love is an ocean of emotions, entirely surrounded by expenses.
THOMAS DEWAR
The pain of love is the pain of being alive. It’s a perpetual wound.
MAUREEN DUFFY
Love ain’t nothin’ but sex misspelled.
HARLAN ELLISON
Ellison balanced this cynical observation with a sweet one: “Romantic love is the cloud of perfume through which you pass when you’re in a movie theater, and it reminds you of an aunt who hugged you when you were three years old.”
Of all the icy blasts that blow on love,
a request for money is the most chilly and havoc-wreaking.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Love’s tongue is in the eyes.
PHINEAS FLETCHER
This observation captures the role that beauty plays in love. The eyes almost drink in great beauty, much like the tongue savors a great wine. Sometimes, though, the wine that looks so full and hearty turns out to be thin and insipid. Emerson said it all in a famous analogy: “Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.”
On the banks of the grey torrent of life,
love is the only flower.
E. M. FORSTER
Love letters are the campaign promises of the heart.
ROBERT FRIEDMAN
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
Love, like a running brook, is disregarded, taken for granted;
but when the brook freezes over, then people begin to remember
how it was when it ran, and they want it to run again.
KAHLIL GIBRAN
This comes from a letter Gibran wrote to Mary Haskell, the head of a private girls’ school in Boston and a woman Gibran deeply loved. He proposed marriage to her, but she refused, feeling that it was not in his best interest to be married. Instead, she devoted her life to encouraging him to develop his talent.
We love because it’s the only true adventure.
NIKKI GIOVANNI
Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly
it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
MATT GROENING
This quotation is usually presented as if it reflected Groening’s personal opinion, but it is in reality his darkly comic version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s view of love. The quote comes from Groening’s pre-Simpsons days, when it appeared in his underground comic strip Life is Hell. Two other philosophers were featured under the heading What the Great Philosophers Have Said Vis-à-vis Love:
“Love is a slippery eel that bites like hell.” Bertrand Russell
“Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine-gun.” Kierkegaard
Love is a fan club with only two fans.
ADRIAN HENRI
Love fattens on smooth words.
KATHARINE HEPBURN
Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness,
of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gates of fear.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.
I have met on the street a very poor man who was in love.
His hat was old, his coat was out at the elbows,
the water passed through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.
VICTOR HUGO
This is from the 1862 classic Les Misérables, where Hugo also wrote, “To love another person is to see the face of God.” In yet another memorable metaphor, Hugo wrote, “Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”
Love, I find, is like singing.
Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves,
though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Elizabeth Bowen was describing a similar phenomenon when she wrote: “When you love someone, all your saved-up wishes start coming out.”
Love is…
the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart.
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
Love’s like the measles—
all the worse when it comes late in life.
DOUGLAS JERROLD, in an 1859 book
Forty years later, in 1889, Jerome K. Jerome wrote, “Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it. Also like the measles, we take it only once.”
I’m not sure at all
If love is salve
Or just
A deeper kind of wound
I do not think it matters.
ERICA JONG
Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn’t grow very well in a place where it was always dark.
STEPHEN KING
This comes from King’s 1978 horror classic The Stand, as the character Tom reflects on the absence of love in Las Vegas.
The truest comparison we can make of love is to liken it to a fever.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
La Rochefoucauld was a seventeenth-century nobleman who, until age fifty, was known more for political intrigue than anything else. In 1665, he published Maximes, a volume of about five hundred quotable quotes on a host of subjects. History’s greatest aphorist, he approached affairs of the heart with a keen metaphorical eye:
“Love, like fire, cannot survive without continual movement, and it ceases to live as soon as it ceases to hope or to fear.”
“Love is to the soul of him who loves what the soul is to the body.”
“It is with true love as with ghosts; everyone talks of it, but few have seen it.”
We love in another’s soul whatever of ourselves we can deposit in it;
the greater the deposit, the greater the love.
IRVING LAYTON
Love is like a friendship caught on fire.
In the beginning a flame,
Very pretty, often hot and fierce
But still only light and flickering.
As love grows older, our hearts mature
And our love becomes as coals,
Deep burning and unquenchable.
BRUCE LEE
According to Lee’s Widow, Lucy Lee Cadwell, Lee wrote this poem for her during their marriage. It first appeared in her 1975 book Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew. In the poem, Lee was clearly borrowing from both Jeremy Taylor and Henry Ward Beecher, whose observations we saw earlier.
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone,
it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Love is like a precious plant.
You can’t just accept it and leave it in the cupboard
or just think it’s going to get on by itself.
You’ve got to keep watering it.
You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.
JOHN LENNON, from a 1969 interview
Anger is the fluid that love bleeds when you cut it.
C. S. LEWIS
He is in love with an Ideal,
A creature of his own imagination,
A child of air; an echo of his heart;
And like a lily on a river floating,
She floats upon the river of his thoughts!
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
As the best wine doth make the sharpest vinegar,
so the deepest love turneth to the deepest hate.
JOHN LYLY
Love is like playing checkers. You have to know which man to move.
JACKIE “MOMS” MABLEY
In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything,
and two minus one equals nothing.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia—
to mistake an ordinary young man f
or a Greek god
or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
H. L. MENCKEN
Mencken, one of America’s great curmudgeons, railed at the folly of love for decades. He also wrote that “Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another” and “Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”
Love matches, as they are called,
have illusion for their father and need for their mother.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Several decades after Nietzsche wrote these words, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno continued the theme in his 1913 classic The Tragic Sense of Life: “Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.”
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.
ANAÏS NIN
Love is much like a wild rose,
Beautiful and calm,
But willing to draw blood in its defense.
MARK A. OVERBY
When the roses are gone, nothing is left but the thorns.
OVID
Love is the cheapest of religions.
CESARE PAVESE
People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man
can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera
because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus.
MARCEL PROUST
No, this is not a typo (common misspelled as comma). Comma bacillus is the term for a microscopic, comma-shaped bacteria that causes Asiatic cholera in humans.
Love rules his kingdom without a sword.
ENGLISH PROVERB
Other memorable proverbs on the subject include these:
“Love is the bridge between two hearts.” (American)
“Love, and a cough, cannot be hid.” (English)
“Love teaches even donkeys to dance.” (French)
“The eyes are the doors of love.” (German)
“Love is a game in which both players cheat.” (Irish)
“Love cures the wound it makes.” (Latin)
The lover is a monotheist
who knows that other people worship different gods
but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods.
THEODOR REIK
Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.
JULES RENARD
Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules.
The most any of us can do is sign on as its accomplice.
TOM ROBBINS
A love song is just a caress set to music.
SIGMUND ROMBERG
Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination
and bottling the common-sense.
HELEN ROWLAND
Love must have wings to fly away from love,
And to fly back again.
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
Love should be a tree whose roots are deep in the earth,
but whose branches extend into heaven.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year.
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
This is from a 1922 sonnet. The passage poignantly describes the feeling of sadness when one’s heartfelt love for another is only partially reciprocated.
Love is a cunning weaver of fantasies and fables.
SAPPHO
Perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out;
perhaps the poets are right when they try to water it.
It is a blood-red flower, with the color of sin;
but there is always the scent of a god about it.
OLIVE SCHREINER
To say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
In his 1636 play El Cid, Pierre Corneille has a character say it this way: “Reason and love are sworn enemies.”
Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,
SHAKESPEARE, from Venus and Adonis
There lives within the very flame of love
A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it.
SHAKESPEARE,
from Hamlet
Therefore is love said to be a child
Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.
SHAKESPEARE, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The child reference here is to Cupid. In the same play, Shakespeare also writes: “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”
Love is the only disease that makes you feel better.
SAM SHEPARD
Love is like a game of poker.
The girl, if she wants to win a hand that may affect her whole life,
should be careful not to show her cards before the guy shows his.
FRANK SINATRA
A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
STENDHAL
Love is a fruit, in season at all times and within the reach of every hand.
Anyone may gather it and no limit is set.
MOTHER TERESA
Love must be as much a light as a flame.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
To say that you can love one person all your life is like
saying that one candle will continue to burn as long as you live.
LEO TOLSTOY
There is the same difference in a person before and after he is in love
as between an unlighted lamp and one that is burning.
The lamp was there and was a good lamp,
but now it is shedding light, too, and that is its real function.
VINCENT VAN GOGH, in a letter to brother Theo
To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.
DAVID VISCOTT
Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by Imagination.
VOLTAIRE
Love…wears a bandage which conceals the faults of the beloved.
He has wings; he comes quickly and flies away the same.
VOLTAIRE
In this passage from the Philosophical Dictionary (1764), Voltaire uses the word bandage in a manner that is closer in meaning to the English word blindfold.
Love is like a cigar.
If it goes out, you can light it again, but it never tastes quite the same.
ARCHIBALD WAVELL
A man in love is like a clipped coupon—it’s time to cash in.
MAE WEST
All love that has not friendship for its base,
Is like a mansion built upon the sand.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
Love’s chemistry thrives best in equal heat.
JOHN WILMOT
That is, one-sided love is a pale imitation of the real thing. If one person heats up and the other doesn’t, there can be no chemical reaction.
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
chapter 9
Marriage Is a Souvenir of Love
Michel de Montaigne was born in 1533 at his family’s chateau near Bordeaux, France. The first child of a wealthy Catholic landowner and a mother of Spanish-Jewish descent, he had an unusual upbringing. While he was permitted to speak French when playing outside with friends or interacting with farmhands, in the home he was allowed to communicate only in Latin until he was six years old (a practice his father believed would greatly enhance the youngster’s mental development). As part of his grooming process, he was roused from his sleep each morning by the soothing sounds o
f a small chamber music ensemble and, as the day progressed, he was privately tutored in classical literature. Young Montaigne developed a great love of reading, a passion that continued until his death. Not much else is known about his early years, but he did go on to study law and, for a time, practiced law and dabbled in politics.
In 1570, at age thirty-seven, Montaigne stepped away from public life and retired to his family’s chateau. He spent most of his time in a circular tower room—his Solitarium—where he was surrounded by over a thousand books, an astonishing number for the time. Of his special room, he wrote, “I try to keep this corner as a haven against the tempest outside.” And of his treasured library, he wrote, “When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”
Montaigne broke new ground in the age-old method of introspection with the invention of a whole new literary genre: the essay. When the first two volumes of his work were published in 1580, they were titled Essais (in English, Essays). Before Montaigne, the word essay meant “to try; to attempt.” The root meaning was “to examine, to put to a test,” similar to the current term assay. After Montaigne, the word took on its modern meaning—a short written composition on a subject, usually presenting the personal view of the author.
When readers discover Montaigne for the first time—as I did when I was in college—they are often delighted to find so modern a thinker in someone writing almost 450 years ago. Montaigne was tolerant in an age of bigotry, curious in a time of dogmatism, and focused on self—a truly modern fixation—in an era when few others would admit to such a thing. And unlike anyone else in his time, he wrote in a loose and free-wheeling way, generously quoting ancient thinkers and meandering off the path with delightful digressions. Aldous Huxley once described his method as “free association, artistically controlled.”
In addition to writing about himself, Montaigne also wrote with wisdom—and often wit—on many other subjects. A classic is his description of marriage:
It may be compared to a cage,
the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair to get out.
When Montaigne’s three-volume collection of essays was translated into English in 1603, it became very popular in London’s literary circles (Shakespeare and Ben Jonson both read it with great interest). A few years later, somewhere between 1609 and 1612, John Webster’s play titled The White Devil featured the following passage, also about marriage:
