The quote database

If I feel overshadowed and outdone by great neighbors, I can yet love; I can still receive; and he that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves.

Though slowly and with pain, the objects of the affections change, as the objects of thought do.

Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.

Thus even love, which is the deification of persons, must become more impersonal every day.

We say so because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it.

Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments; each of its joys ripens into a new want.

The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.

Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so only it have the countenance of the beloved object.

Their once flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and losing in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good understanding.

If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier.

A mind might ponder its thought for ages and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day.

Belief and love,--a believing love will relieve us of a vast load of care.

A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope of the heart.

Love should run out to meet love with open arms.

Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.

Indeed, the ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room.

Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world.

Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties.

The longer we live, and the more we think, the higher value we learn to put on the friendship and tenderness of parents and of friends.

Think only when you see me, that you see a man who loves you, and is proud and glad that you love him.

Love is a great thing, a good above all others, which alone maketh every heavy burden light, and equaliseth every inequality.

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Only in the chamber of death writhed the world's most piteous thing--a childless mother.

Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow for you.