Love and stoplights can be cruel. , Sesame Street, U.S. children's television show

Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.
-- Diane Ackerman

Love begins with a smile, grows with a kiss, and ends with a teardrop.
-- Anonymous

The fate of love is that it always seems too little or too much.
-- Anonymous

We always believe our first love is our last, and our last love our first.
-- Anonymous

We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.
-- Anonymous

Wind is to fire like distance is to love; it extinguishes the small and enflames the great.
-- Anonymous

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.
-- Marcus Aurelius

If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.
-- Lynda Barry

All you need is love.
-- The Beatles, song title

And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.
-- The Beatles, The last lyric of their last song

ARDOR, n. The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

LOVE, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder... It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

NEIGHBOR, n. One whom we are commanded to love as ourselves, and who does all he knows how to make us disobedient.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

Love matches are made by people who are content, for a month of honey, to condemn themselves to a life of vinegar.
-- Countess of Blessington

Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.
-- Charlie Brown, character in "Peanuts" comic strip, created by Charles Schultz

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.
-- Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat

Better to have loved a short man than never to have loved a tall.
-- David Chambless

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
-- G. K. Chesterton

The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
-- G. K. Chesterton

Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.
-- Joan Crawford

Love is shown in your deeds, not in your words.
-- Fr. Jerome Cummings

Honor the ocean of love.
-- George de Benneville

Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and blows up the bonfire.
-- François de La Rouchefoucauld

It is with true love as it is with ghosts; everyone talks about it, but few have seen it.
-- François de La Rouchefoucauld

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.
-- François de La Rouchefoucauld

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

We cease loving ourselves if no one loves us.
-- Mme de Staël

Love is an ocean of emotions entirely surrounded by expenses.
-- Lord Dewar

Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love.
-- Albert Einstein

Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.
-- Albert Einstein

Love makes the time pass. Time makes love pass.
-- French Proverb

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
-- Sigmund Freud

Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."
-- Erich Fromm

Where there is love there is life.
-- Gandhi

It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.
-- Khalil Gibran

We love because it's the only true adventure.
-- Nikki Giovanni

We look forward to the time when the power to love of will replace the love of power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.
-- William Gladstone

There is a courtesy of the heart; it is allied to love. From it springs the purest courtesy in the outward behavior.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine gun.
-- Matt Groening, Love is Hell

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
-- Matt Groening, Love is Hell

People need loving the most when they deserve it the least.
-- John Harrigan

Love is the great miracle cure. Loving ourselves works miracles in our lives.
-- Louise Hay

The story of a love is not important - what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.
-- Helen Hayes

Love is only the game that is not called on account of darkness.
-- M. Hirschfield

Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important.
-- Lisa Hoffman

The love we give away is the only love we keep.
-- Elbert Hubbard

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
-- Victor Hugo

Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.
-- Zora Neale Hurston

The closer I'm bound in love to you, the closer I am to free.
-- Indigo Girls, song lyric

I would rather live and love where death is king than have eternal life where love is not.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.
-- Samuel Johnson

Everybody can be great... because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. you only need a heart full of grace. a soul generated by love.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it.
Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it.
Hatred darkens life; love illumines it.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. the foundation of such a method is love.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

To love someone deeply gives you strength. Being loved by someone deeply gives you courage.
-- Lao Tzu

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.
-- D. H. Lawrence

Love one another and you will be happy. It's as simple and as difficult as that.
-- Michael Leunig

An act of love that fails is just as much a part of the divine life as an act of love that succeeds, for love is measured by fullness, not by reception.
-- Harold Loukes

To love another person is to see the face of God.
-- Lyric from Les Miserables

For the memory of love is sweet, though the love itself were in vain. And what I have lost of pleasure, assuage what I find of pain.
-- Lyster

Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.
-- W. Somerset Maugham

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
-- H. L. Mencken

Love is the delusion that one man or woman differs from another.
-- H. L. Mencken

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
-- H. L. Mencken

Love cures people, both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
-- Dr. Karl Menninger

Age does not protect you from love but love to some extent protects you from age.
-- Jeanne Moreau

The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.
-- Mother Teresa

We can do no great things; only small things with great love.
-- Mother Teresa

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
-- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.
-- George Jean Nathan

True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, First Part: On Reading and Writing

To be able to say how much love, is love but little.
-- Petrarch

Love is an attempt to change a piece of the dream-world into reality.
-- Theodor Reik

We cannot really love anybody with whom we never laugh.
-- Agnes Repplier

Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.
-- Mary Roberts Rhinehart

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
-- Tom Robbins

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
-- George Santayana

In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality....The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.
-- George Santayana, Reason in Religion

The course of true love never did run smooth.
-- William Shakespeare

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
-- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act i. Sc. 1.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal consistency of the women who love me.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Soul meets soul on lovers lips.
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Trouble is a part of your life, and if you don't share it, you don't give the person that loves you enough chance to love you enough.
-- Dinah Shore

One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love.
-- Sophocles

Love is stronger than justice.
-- Sting

To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven.
-- Karen Sunde

'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, 1850, line 27, stanza 4

I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.
-- Mother Teresa

We can do not great things - only small things with great love.
-- Mother Theresa

The first duty of love is to listen.
-- Paul Tillich

If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?
-- Lily Tomlin

Infatuation is when you think that he's as sexy as Robert Redford, as smart as Henry Kissinger, as noble as Ralph Nader, as funny as Woody Allen, and as athletic as Jimmy Conners. Love is when you realize that he's as sexy as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Conners, as funny as Ralph Nader, as athletic as Henry Kissinger, and nothing like Robert Redford--but you'll take him anyway.
-- Judith Viorst

Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket, or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.
-- Judith Viorst

Love is the same as like except you feel sexier.
-- Judith Viorst

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.
-- John Wesley

Who, being loved, is poor?
-- Oscar Wilde

Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. The real miracle is the love that inspires them. In this sense everything that comes from love is a miracle.
-- Marianne Williamson

Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life. Meaning does not lie in things. Meaning lies in us.
-- Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love

You can't buy love, but you can pay heavily for it.
-- Henny Youngman