Quotes about love

If pain is the weight of being, love is the purpose.

There comes a point in love, a unique moment which later on the soul seeks in vain to surpass

Socrates … said the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the beloved.

Amor, in sooth, is like the mathematician who in order to give children a knowledge of pure form must do so in the language of pictures; so, too, the god, in order to make visible the spirit, avails himself of the forms and colours of human youth, gilding it with all imaginable beauty that it may serve memory as a tool, the very sight of which then sets us afire with pain and longing.

Just as 'beauty' is not related to sex, neither is it related to love. Even having it does not bestow love on a woman, though the beauty myth claims that it must. It is because 'beauty' is so hostile to love that many beautiful women are so cynical about men. […] The beautiful woman is excluded forever from the rewards and responsibilities of particular human love, for she cannot trust that any man will love her 'for herself alone.' A hellish doubt inheres in the myth that makes impersonal 'beauty' a prerequisite for love: Where does love go when beauty vanishes? And, if a woman cannot be loved 'for herself alone,' for whom is she being loved?

“No one will ever love you more than you love your pain,” he had replied, his words ringing even louder in the dark. (p154)

remember that love is like kerosene. The more you have, the more you burn. (p199)

'...She cannot stay out of duty. The things one does, one should do out of love.' (p155)

Tante Atie once said that love is like the rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you. (p91)

All anyone can hope for is just a tiny bit of love...like a drop in a cup if you can get it, or a waterfall, a flood, if you can get that too. ("Children of the Sea")

She never dwelt on my lapses, and I couldn’t entirely parse why this made me feel so awful. There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.

"And she said, in a voice strangely unlike her own: “I see the vision of a poor, weak soul striving after good. It was not cut short, and in the end it learnt, through tears and much pain, that holiness is an infinite compassion for others; that greatness is to take the common things of life and walk truly among them; that”—She moved her white hand and laid it on her forehead—“happiness is a great love and much serving. It was not cut short; and it loved what it had learnt—it loved—and—”