Quotes About Love

We had better stop seeing each other, life is forcing us apart." No doubt when I was writing those words to Gilberte, I was saying to myself that when I next loved, not her but some other person, the excess of my love would diminish the love that that person might otherwise feel for me, as if between two people there were inevitably a fixed amount of love, so that where one loved more the other must love less, and from that other, as from Gilberte, I should be forced one day to separate.

And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her?

And by a strange coincidence, that reasoned fear of danger was born at the very moment when the idea of death had become indifferent to me. The fear of no longer existing had formerly horrified me at each new love I experienced—for Gilberte, for Albertine—because I could not bear the thought that one day the being who loved them might not be there; it was a sort of death. But the very recurrence of this fear led to its changing into calm confidence.

When one is in love one has no love left for anyone.

prizes worth winning, which they would not have seemed if they had been mere medals, however fine, rather than lockets with mementos of love hidden inside.

and though I was obliged to see her magnificent hat, at least I managed to banish from her face the signs of a joy that I ought to have been happy to share with her, but which, as so often happens while those whom we love best are still alive, can strike us as a mere irritant, a mark of something silly and small-minded, rather than the precious revelation of the happiness we long to give to them.

These are the creatures we usually fall in love with, only to suffer the more. For each new anxiety they cause us blots out from our eyes a part of their personality. We were resigned to suffering, thinking we loved something outside ourselves, and we come to realize that our love is a function of our sadness, that perhaps it is our sadness, and that its object is only to a small extent the young girl with raven hair.

From a certain age onwards vanity and wisdom combine to ensure that the things we desire the most are those that seem not to matter to us. But in love, simple foresight—which is probably not real wisdom—forces us to develop this talent for duplicity early in life.

never cease to kiss him. Every kiss provokes another. Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life. How closely, in their abundance, are they pressed one against another; until lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour, as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.

You can make a new version of what you love only by renouncing it.

was nevertheless still young, since I had been able to write her one, by means of which I hoped, in telling her of my solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her. The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their experience has shown.

It has been said that silence is a force; in another and widely different sense it is a tremendous force in the hands of those who are loved.

my mother waited for me, gazing at the canal with a patience that she would never have shown before, in Combray, in the days when she invested in me hopes that had never been rewarded and wanted to hide from me the extent of her love for me. Now she clearly felt that a show of coldness would change nothing, and the affection which she lavished on me resembled the food that is no longer forbidden to a sick person when we realize that they have no chance of recovery.

Having a liking for someone is one thing; but to be afflicted with the sadness, the feeling of something irreparable having happened, the anguish which all accompany the onset of love, what is necessary is the risk – which may even be the object to which passion in its fretfulness tries to cling, rather than to a person – of an impossibility.

Une œuvre est à la fois le souvenir de nos amours passées et la prophétie de nos amours nouvelles

With any one member of my little gang of girls, was I not bound to recall only the most recently glimpsed of her possible faces, given that the mind eliminates from our memories of anyone whatever does not contribute in an immediately useful way to our daily dealings with the person, even if—especially if!—these dealings are colored by a tincture of love, which, by being perpetually unsatisfied, lives forever in the coming moment?

O olhar de Robert, com efeito, parecia por momentos atingir uma profundidade que abandonava em seguida, como um mergulhador que tocou o fundo. Esse fundo, que tanto mal fazia a Robert quando o tocava que ele o deixava imediatamente para voltar um instante depois, era a lembrança de que havia rompido com a sua amante.

Every being we love, up to a point every being, is a Janus, showing us its pleasant face as it moves away from us, and its gloomy face if we know it is permanently available to us.

Tuo metu aš buvau ?simyl?j?s teatr?, žinoma, platoniška meile, nes t?vai dar niekad nebuvo leid? man tenai nueiti, ir tok? menk? tetur?jau supratim?, kas tai per malonumas, kad bemaž tik?jau, jog teatre kiekvienas ži?ri tartum pro stereoskop? ? dekoracijas, rodomas jam vienam, nors ir visai panašias ? t?kstan?ius kit?, kurias mato visi ži?rovai, tiktai kiekvienas atskirai.

O]ur 'inferiors,' who love us...take pleasure in wounding us in our self-esteem.

Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart; and what barrier is so insurmountable as silence? It has been said also that silence is torture, capable of goading to madness the man who is condemned to it in a prison cell. But what an even greater torture than that of having to keep silence it is to have to endure the silence of the person one loves!

Com os prazeres, dá-se o mesmo que com as fotografias. O que apanhamos na presença da criatura amada não passa de um negativo; revelamo-lo mais tarde, uma vez em casa, quando encontramos à nossa disposição essa câmara escura interior cuja entrada é proibida enquanto há gente à vista.

For it is a charming law of nature, which manifests itself in the heart of the most complex social organisms, that we live in perfect ignorance of those we love.

My darling, dear Marcel, I return less quickly than this cyclist, whose machine I would like to borrow in order to be with you sooner. How could you imagine that I might be angry or that I could enjoy anything better than to be with you? It will be nice to go out, just the two of us together; it would be nicer still if we never went out except together. The ideas you get into your head! What a Marcel! What a Marcel! Always and ever your Albertine.