Love

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

Victor Hugo

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

Lao Tzu

We deal here with a rather pleasant motif. Love.

Nothing makes a man so great and noble than the unflinching love of a good woman.

Nothing makes a man so beastly and cruel when he loses the woman he loves.

No agony is so intense as one feels when one fails in love. The scar remains all life. It stays raw fresh and keeps gnawing at you. You lose your innocence, your goodness, your sense of humor. A shell remains. A hard shell. Inside is bitterness, hatred and anger against all.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.

Andre Breton

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.

Plato

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I fell in love with a woman some years ago. Something inside me told me that she was the one I was looking for. I met her everyday, send her flowers, send her gifts. In short everything a man in love does. She seemed to be reciprocating. She like my company. She liked spending time with me. She seemed to have accepted me as I was. She even slept with me. (Though I was not very keen about it. For me her company and presence was enough. I would have gladly lived separately for years and waited for her so that she could do whatever she wanted in life. All I asked for was her love.)

One day I asked her if she loved me. She parried the question. On further pressing she bluntly said no. She said she would always remain my friend but she would not admit that she loved me.

I begged for her love on bended knee. One feels no shame when begging for the most precious thing in the world. May be I was wrong. In love there is no begging. Anyway she laughed at me and made some rude comments.

That was the last time I saw her. Years later she sent me a Facebook friend request. I refused.

I don't blame her. May be I have a lot to learn about how the world works. The guiles and tricks of a man-woman relationship. May be I don't want to learn them. I think my love is the best way to love. May be it is impractical, Utopian.... I don't care.

There is no woman in my life right now.....
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For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul.

Judy Garland

Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship - never.

Charles Caleb Colton

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.

Albert Einstein

I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence.

Theodore Dreiser

If you could only love enough, you could be the most powerful person in the world.

Emmet Fox

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.

Michel de Montaigne

Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.

Khalil Gibran

Love is a game that two can play and both win.

Eva Gabor

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

George Bernard Shaw

Love is my religion - I could die for it.

John Keats

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

H. L. Mencken

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Now a few dampeners....

Love is the self-delusion we manufacture to justify the trouble we take to have sex.

Daniel S. Greenberg

Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.

John Ciardi

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Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.

Andre Breton

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

James A. Baldwin

Love that is not madness is not love.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca

One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.

Paulo Coelho

Take away love and our earth is a tomb.

Robert Browning

The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.

George Edward Moore

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.

Mother Teresa

'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

To say "I love you" one must first be able to say the "I."

Ayn Rand

When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law.

Boethius