Quotes About Love

One wants to be understood because one wants to be loved, and one wants to be loved because one loves.

The variations of the Duchess's judgment spared no one, except her husband. He alone had never been in love with her, in him she had always felt an iron character, indifferent to the caprices that she displayed, contemptuous of her beauty, violent, of a will that would never bend, the sort under which alone nervous people can find tranquillity.

To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!

It is a mistake," Labruyère tells us, "to be in love without an ample fortune.

I loved her; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to do her some injury, to force her to keep some memory of me.

Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps, old snuff-boxes, or even to paintings and statues.

His life and family circle changed considerably between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother Robert married and left the family apartment. His father died in September of the same year. Finally, and most crushingly, Proust's beloved mother died in September 1905.

Pois a posse do que se ama é uma alegria ainda maior do que o amor.

Lying is essential to humanity. It plays as large a part perhaps as the quest for pleasure, and is moreover governed by that quest. One lies in order to protect one's pleasure, or one's honour if the disclosure of one's pleasure runs counter to one's honour. One lies all one's life long, even, especially, perhaps only, to those who love one. For they alone make us fear for our pleasure and desire their esteem.

It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as there is a choice it can only be a bad one.

A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.

As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by my loves, I have lived them, I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing or thinking them.

And continued to regard all their absurdities in the most rosy light through the admiring eyes of love.

I should have been struck down by the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come.

I had indeed suffered successively through Gilberte, through Mme de Guermantes, through Albertine. Successively also I had forgotten them and only my love, dedicated at different times to different beings, had lasted.

But you are our equal, if not our superior," the Guermantes seemed, in all their actions, to be saying; and they said it in the nicest way imaginable, in order to be loved and admired, but not to be believed; that one should discern the fictitious character of this affability was what they called being well-bred; to suppose it to be genuine, a sign of ill-breeding.

For Swann was finding in things once more, since he had fallen in love, the charm that he had found when, in his adolescence, he had fancied himself an artist; with this difference, that what charm lay in them now was conferred by Odette alone.

But what revealed to me all of a sudden the Princess's love was a trifling incident upon which I shall not dwell here, for it forms part of quite another story, in which M. de Charlus allowed a Queen to die rather than miss an appointment with the hairdresser who was to singe his hair for the benefit of an omnibus conductor who filled him with alarm.

With the wisdom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus.

One felt that in her renunciation of life she had deliberately abandoned those places in which she might at least have been able to see the man she loved, for others where he had never trod.

Love is space and time made apprehensible to the heart.

The links between another person and ourselves exist only in our minds. Memory weakens them as it fades, and despite the illusions which we hope will deceive us and with which, whether from love, friendship, politeness, human respect or from duty, we hope to deceive others, we exist on our own. Man is a being who cannot move beyond his own boundaries, who knows others only within himself, and if he alleges the contrary, he is lying.

For in this respect love is not like war; after the battle is ended we renew the fight with keener ardour, which we never cease to intensify the more thoroughly we are defeated, provided always that we are still in a position to give battle.

so great can the gulf be between a lying woman's invention and the idea which her lover, relying on her lies, has formed of the truth.