Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

Alan Watts

 

To love deeply in one direction makes us more loving in all others.

Anne-Sophie Swetchine

 

Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.

Anton Chekhov (1860 - 1904)

 

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970), Marriage and Morals (1929) ch. 19

 

Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone - but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.

Bette Davis (1908 - 1989)

 

Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves

Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)

 

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)

 

Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.

Charles M. Schulz (1922 - 2000), Charlie Brown in "Peanuts"

 

To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.

David Viscott, How to Live with Another Person, 1974

 

There's a lot to be said for self-delusionment when it comes to matters of the heart.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, First Snow, 1993

 

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.

Dorothy Parker (1893 - 1967), Not So Deep as a Well (1937), "Comment"

 

All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a mansion built upon sand.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, O Magazine, February 2004

 

Love is everything it's cracked up to be…It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.

Erica Jong, O Magazine, February 2004

 

When love is in excess it brings a man no honor nor worthiness.

Euripides (484 BC - 406 BC), Medea, 431 B.C.

 

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900), "On Reading and Writing"

 

What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives, acts, and experiences otherwise than we do…?

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900)

 

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

 

Sometimes when you look back on a situation, you realize it wasn't all you thought it was. A beautiful girl walked into your life. You fell in love. Or did you? Maybe it was only a childish infatuation, or maybe just a brief moment of vanity.

Henry Bromel, Northern Exposure, The Big Kiss, 1991

 

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), Journal, July 25, 1839

 

Just because you love someone doesn’t mean you have to be involved with them. Love is not a bandage to cover wounds.

Hugh Elliott, Standing Room Only weblog, February 16, 2004

 

Listen. Do not have an opinion while you listen because frankly, your opinion doesn’t hold much water outside of Your Universe. Just listen. Listen until their brain has been twisted like a dripping towel and what they have to say is all over the floor.

Hugh Elliott, Standing Room Only weblog, 02-14-2003

 

Passion makes the world go round. Love just makes it a safer place.

Ice T, The Ice Opinion

 

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Iris Murdoch (1919 - 1999)

 

We can only learn to love by loving.

Iris Murdoch (1919 - 1999), O Magazine, February 2004

 

When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love.

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, 2005

 

But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.

Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Northanger Abbey

 

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love

Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Northanger Abbey

 

 

I cannot think well of a man who sports with any woman's feelings; and there may often be a great deal more suffered than a stander-by can judge of.

Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Mansfield Park

 

I pay very little regard...to what any young person says on the subject of marriage. If they profess a disinclination for it, I only set it down that they have not yet seen the right person.

Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Mansfield Park

 

The enthusiasm of a woman's love is even beyond the biographer's.

Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Mansfield Park