Quotes About Love

I was genuinely in love with Mme. de Guermantes. The greatest happiness that I could have asked of God would have been that He should overwhelm her under every imaginable calamity, and that ruined, despised, stripped of all the privileges that divided her from me, having no longer any home of her own or people who would condescend to speak to her, she should come to me for refuge. I imagined her doing so.

A w ko?cu, je?li chwile wytchnienia lub dystrakcji towarzyskich oka?? mi si? konieczne, czu?em, ?e bardziej od rozmów intelektualnych, które ludzie ?wiatowi uwa?aj? za po?yteczne dla pisarza, mi?ostki z zakwitaj?cymi dziewcz?tami b?d? moim pokarmem wybranym, któremu ostatecznie dam przyst?p do mojej wyobra?ni, przypominaj?cej owego s?ynnego konia karmionego tylko ró?ami.

from the moment when they were in love, it was superfluous to obey them, since they would only be more in love later on.

The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her love may win us admission is, of all the prerequisites of love, the one which it values most highly and which makes it set little store by all the rest.

She's an absolute idiot!" she added with the wisdom invariably shown by people who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the comma bacillus.

L'amour commence, on voudrait rester pour celle qu'on aime l'inconnu qu'elle peut aimer mais on a besoin d'elle, on a besoin de toucher moins son corps que son attention, son coeur.

Every woman feels that the greater her power over a man, the more impossible it is to leave him except by sudden flight: a fugitive precisely because a queen.

One can feel an attraction towards a particular person. But to release that fount of sorrow, that sense of the irreparable, those agonies which prepare the way for love, there must be -- and this is perhaps, more than a person, the actual object which our passion seeks so anxiously to embrace -- the risk of an impossibility.

At the start of a new love as its ending, we are not exclusively attached to the object of that love, but rather the desire to love from which it will presently arise (and, later on, the memory it leaves behind) wanders voluptuously through a zone of interchangeable charms -- simply natural charms, it may be, gratification of appetite, enjoyment of one's surroundings -- which are harmonious enough for it not to feel at a loss in the presence of any one of them.

Aliás, se o ciúme nos ajuda a descobrir certo pendor para a mentira na mulher que amamos, centuplica ele esse pendor quando a mulher descobre que somos ciumentos. Ela mente (em proporções como nunca nos tinha mentido antes), ou por pena, ou por medo, ou se furta instintivamente por uma fuga simétrica às nossas investigações.

A woman whom we love seldom satisfies all our needs, and we deceive her with a woman we do not love.

O ciúme nada mais é muitas vezes do que uma inquieta necessidade de tirania aplicada às coisas do amor.

Every person whom we love, indeed to a certain extent every person is to us like Janus, presenting to us the face that we like if that person leaves us, the repellent face if we know him or her to be perpetually at our disposal.

And indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no longer in love makes the people that they were or the person that we were then as good as dead?

And it is perhaps one of the causes of our perpetual disappointments in love, this perpetual displacement whereby, in response to our expectation of the ideal person whom we love, each meeting provides us with a person in flesh and blood who yet contains so little trace of our dream.

Not that the clear perception of certain weaknesses in those whom we love in any way diminishes our affection for them; rather that affection makes us find those weaknesses charming.

When we are in love, our love is too vast to be wholly contained within ourselves; it radiates outwards, reaches the resistant surface of the loved one, which reflects it back to its starting-point; and this return of our own tenderness is what we see as the other's feelings, working their new, enhanced charm on us, because we do not recognize them as having originated in ourselves.

love, and consequently fear, of the crowd being one of the most powerful motives in all human beings...

In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, excruciating.

Et en amour, il est plus facile de renoncer à un sentiment que de perdre une habitude.

There is a degree of resemblance between the women we love at different times; and this resemblance, though it devolves, derives from the unchanging nature of our own temperament, which is what selects them, by ruling out all those who are not likely to be both opposite and complementary to us, who cannot be relied on, that is, to gratify our sensuality and wound our heart. Such women are a product of our temperament, an inverted image or projection, a negative of our sensitivity.

And at once I fell in love with her, for if it is sometimes enough to make us love a woman that she should look on us with contempt, as I supposed Mlle Swann to have done, and that we should think that she can never be ours, sometimes, too, it is enough that she should look on us kindly, as Mme de Guermantes was doing, and that we should think of her as almost ours already.

One can seldom admire what one loves.

A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.