Quotes About Love

Believe in a love that is preserved for you like a heritage, and trust that in this love there is a strength and a blessing which you are not bound to leave behind you though you may travel far!

Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over - one of them, ah, even one, is already too much for my blood. Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.

But sing, when you must, of great lovers: their fame has a long way to go before it's really immortal. Those you almost envied, the unrequited, whom you found more loving than the gratified, the content— begin again and again the praise you can never fully express.

No, we don't accomplish our love in a single year as the flowers do; an immemorial sap flows up through our arms when we love. (Siehe, wir lieben nicht, wie die Blumen, aus einem einzigen Jahr; uns steigt, wo wir lieben, unvordenklicher Saft in die Arme.)

We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them.

Don't petals of soft words float upon your blood?

You don't survive in me because of memories; nor are you mine because of a lovely longing's strength. What does make you present is the ardent detour that a slow tenderness traces in my blood. I do not need to see you appear; being born sufficed for me to lose you a little less.

La rose complète J'ai une telle conscience de ton être, rose complète, que mon consentement te confond avec mon cÅ"ur en fête. Je te respire comme si tu étais, rose, toute la vie, et je me sens l'ami parfait d'une telle amie.

C'est pourtant nous qui t'avons proposé de remplir ton calice. Enchantée de cet artifice, ton abondance l'avait osé. Tu étais assez riche, pour devenir cent fois toi-même en une seule fleur; c'est l'état de celui qui aime ... Mais tu n'as pas pensé ailleurs.

There is no more wretched prison than the fear of hurting someone who loves you.

El amor de un ser humano por otro, es posiblemente la prueba más difícil para cada uno de nosotros.

It is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it... that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it...To love is good, too: love being difficult.

A world will come over you, the happiness, the abundance, the incomprehensible immensity of a world. Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be repaid you a thousand and a thousand times, and however your life may turn,—it will, I am certain of it, run through the fabric of your growth as one of the most important threads among all the threads of your experience, disappointments and joys.

La solitude qui enveloppe les oeuvres d'art est infinie, etil n'estrien qui permette de moins les atteindre que la critique. Seul l'amour peut les appréhender, les saisir et faire preuve de justesse à leur endroit:

I want to utter you. I want to portray you not with lapis or gold, but with colors made of apple bark. There is no image I could invent that your presence would not eclipse.

I think of you at any time of the day and my worried thoughts accompany all your steps. The slightest breath on your forehead is a kiss from my lips and each dream speaks to you with my voice. My love is like a coat wrapped around you to protect and warm you up." —from letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé

Because he loves only as man, not as human being, there is in his sexual feelings something narrow, seemingly wild, malicious, temporal, finite, which weakens his art and makes it equivocal and dubious.

All we can offer where we love is this: to loose each other; for to hold each other comes easy to us and requires no learning.

So whoever loves must try to act as if he had a great work: he must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work; he must become something!

I believe in old age; to work and to grow old: this is what life expects of us. And then one day to be old and still be quite far from understanding everything - no, but to begin, but to love, but to suspect, but to be connected to what is remote and inexpressible, all the way up into the stars. (Letters on Life)

I believe that love remains so strong and powerful in your memory because it was your first deep experience of solitariness and the first inner work that you undertook on your life.

If you hold close to nature, to what is simple in it, to the small things people hardly see and which all of a sudden can become great and immeasurable; if you have this love for what is slight, and quite unassumingly, as a servant, seek to win the confidence of what seems poor – then everything will grow easier, more unified and somehow more conciliatory, not perhaps in the intellect, which, amazed, remains a step behind, but in your deepest consciousness, watchfulness and knowledge.

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive and lend it grandeur and height.

Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice.