Quotations

“The best moments of love are those of a quiet, gentle melancholy, when you weep without knowing why.”

Original: I migliori momenti dell’amore sono quelli di una quieta e dolce malinconia, dove tu piangi e non sai di che. — Love reaches its deepest intensity for Leopardi where happiness and inexplicable sadness become inseparable. · Zibaldone, entry 142, 27 June 1820 (Italian)

Giacomo Leopardi

“Up till the time when I became a Catholic the guiding principle of my life was the desire to be loved and admired.”

A retrospective acknowledgement of his former need for affection and approval · The Autobiography of Lord Alfred Douglas, 1929

Alfred Douglas

“The years were immaterial. He liked my light summer dresses. Ezra was not consciously a love-image. But he lurked there, hid there, under the years.”

Reflecting on how an early attachment can remain hidden beneath decades of later experience · Memoir, End to Torment

Hilda Doolittle

“We must be in love before we can understand the mysteries of vision.”

Making love a prerequisite for the deepest forms of imaginative perception · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

Hilda Doolittle

“That energy is always there but can be transmitted only to another body or another mind that is in sympathy with it, or keyed to the same pitch.”

Describing creative and emotional connection as a form of sympathetic resonance · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

Hilda Doolittle

“The love-brain and over-brain are both capable of thought. This thought is vision.”

Treating visionary insight as a genuine mode of thought · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

Hilda Doolittle

“I first realised this state of consciousness in my head. I visualise it just as well, now, centred in the love-region of the body.”

Linking intellectual consciousness with embodied emotional experience · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

Hilda Doolittle

“Maybe the loss of Ezra left a vacuum; anyway, Frances filled it like a blue flame.”

A vivid recollection of how one intense relationship followed another · Memoir, End to Torment

Hilda Doolittle

“The old songs which she sang to me, so full of romance, love and sacrifice.”

Acknowledges the emotional inheritance received through his mother's songs · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

Francis Ledwidge

“I've been in love (truly) with five women, the Spanish Republic and the 4th Infantry Division.”

Mixing romantic, political and military loyalties in a characteristically extravagant confession · Letter to Marlene Dietrich, 1 July 1930

Ernest Hemingway

“Very few people ever really are alive and those that are never die; no matter if they are gone. No one you love is ever dead.”

Offering consolation after bereavement through the persistence of love and memory · Letter to Sara and Gerald Murphy, 19 March 1935

Ernest Hemingway

“The test of poetry is not in reason but in a delight not different from the delight that comes to a man at the first coming of love into the heart.”

Locating poetry's ultimate test in felt delight rather than intellectual argument · Essay, Why the Blind Man in Ancient Times Was Made a Poet

William Butler Yeats

“I entered into myself and pictured myself and not some essence when I was not seeking beauty at all, but merely to lighten the mind of some burden of love or bitterness.”

Describing authentic art as emerging from the need to release emotional burdens · Essay, The Tree of Life

William Butler Yeats

“Is not beauty, even as lasting love, one of the most difficult of the arts?”

Treating beauty and enduring love alike as achievements requiring sustained effort · Essay, The Looking-glass

William Butler Yeats

“Come what will my life has borne flower and fruit—it is a glorious, successful, felicitous life, I thank God and you.”

Looking upon his life as fulfilled after his marriage to Elizabeth · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 14 September 1846

Robert Browning

“I believe in you absolutely, utterly.”

A remarkably direct expression of the trust at the centre of their developing relationship · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 30 August 1845

Robert Browning

“For I think the world wider than I once thought it, and I see God's love broader than I once saw it.”

Expressing the expansion of her religious understanding through solitude and suffering · Letter to H. S. Boyd, March 1845

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“Don Quixote does more than fight Windmills—he radiates Love & Humour, & so saves the world by his very self-failure.”

Finding moral value in generous idealism despite apparent failure · Letter to George Bernard Shaw, 1891

Robert Williams Buchanan

“If ever two people, who love one another, come to breaking, it is for want of a timely eclaircissement, a full and precise one, without witnesses or mediators.”

Urging direct and honest communication before misunderstandings damage affection · Letter to Horace Walpole, November 1747

Thomas Gray

“Only those are worthy of love who carry within themselves the reason for being loved.”

Original: Ибо те одни достойны быть любимы, которые в себе самих заключают причину, побуждающую их любить. — Affection, in this view, should arise from qualities genuinely present in the person loved. · Essay “On Friendship”, 1792 (Russian)

Ivan Krylov

“Love is pictured with a blindfold; friendship removes it, looking carefully before it chooses.”

Original: Любовь пишется с завязанными глазами; но у дружества снимается сия завязка; дружество рассматривает прежде, нежели избирает. — A neat distinction between love's blindness and friendship's more deliberate judgement. · Essay “On Friendship”, 1792 (Russian)

Ivan Krylov

“In friendship, as in love, we should guard feeling and taste from growing dull; such caution is permissible.”

Original: В дружбе, как в любви, должно щадить чувства и вкус от притупления: сия предосторожность позволена. — Friendship, like love, needs care if familiarity is not to blunt feeling. · Essay “On Friendship”, 1792 (Russian)

Ivan Krylov