Flash Wisdom

AS A HOPELESS ROMANTIC, I've always been drawn to quotes about love, especially those that sing its praises and acknowledge its untamable power, its glory. But as a hapless romantic, who's had his heart sliced and diced and handed to him many times—and, regrettably, perhaps unavoidably, has done the same to others—I also value the quotes that look at the nitty-gritty of love—its harsh realities, but also its nuances, apparent contradictions, and unknowability. A number of the people here point out that a romantic, loving relationship, though it may start explosively and without warning, won't continue without hard work and sacrifice. A cluster a little over halfway through looks specifically at marriage. No snide comments about husbands or wives here, only thoughtful, hard-core observations about what can make a commitment last a lifetime. Speaking of hard-core, a set about sex comes next. As with love, some of these quotes revel in the power and beauty of the activity, while others offer grounded observations. A few poets coo in our ear, and we get opposing viewpoints on whether or not sex is dirty. (Either way, everyone is a fan.) Closing us out is a suite of gorgeous thoughts about a different kind of love—an all-embracing love of humanity, of all people.

For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.

A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.

Not the artful postures of love, but love that overthrows life. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart, and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.

Half—the most beautiful half—of life is hidden from him who has not loved passionately.

Measured with magnetic field meters,
the electromagnetic field that the heart
produces is some 5,000 times more
powerful than that created by the brain.

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. . . . It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

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.

Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love—first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

The hardest-learned lesson: that
people have only their kind of
love to give, not our kind.

We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love.

The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

Love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

The greatest happiness love can offer is the first pressure of hands between you and your beloved.

If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.

Is suffering so very serious? I have come to doubt it. It may be quite childish, a sort of undignified pastime—I'm referring to the kind of suffering a man inflicts on a woman or a woman on a man. It's extremely painful. I agree that it's hardly bearable. But I very much fear that this sort of pain deserves no consideration at all. It's no more worthy of respect than old age or illness.

When so many are lonely as seem to be
lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish
to be lonely alone.

Loving someone is a loss of freedom—but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.

Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.

I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one's being, or else live, come what may, a life of complete chastity.

Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find all Of the
barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice.

He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.

Let no one who loves be called altogether unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; in just the same way, you learn to love by loving.

For my part, I prefer my heart
to be broken. It is so lovely,
dawn-kaleidoscopic within
the crack.

Marriage is a public declaration of
a man and a woman that they have
formed a secret alliance, with the
intention to belong to, and share with
each other, a mystical estate; mystical
exactly in the sense that the real
experience cannot be communicated to
others, nor explained even to oneself
on rational grounds.

Only choose in marriage a woman whom you would choose as a friend if she were a man.

In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find, and continue to find, grounds for marriage.

One advantage of marriage is that, when you fall out of love with him or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you fall in again.

You don't marry one person; you marry three: the person you think they are, the person they are, and the person they are going to become as the result of being married to you.

Marriage isn't a love affair. It isn't even a honeymoon. It's a job. A long hard job, at which both partners have to work, harder than they've worked at anything in their lives before.

Wasn't marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded? Wasn't it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt?

Many married couples separate because they quarrel incessantly, but just as many separate because they were never honest enough or courageous enough to quarrel when they should have.

If you made a list of reasons why any couple got married, and another list of the reasons for their divorce, you'd have a hell of a lot of overlapping.

Love is the answer, but while you're waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.

How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?

Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.

After all, what is a kiss? A vow made at closer range, a more precise promise, a confession that contains its own proof, a seal placed on a pact that has already been signed; it's a secret told to the mouth rather than to the ear.

“Natural” is a very dangerous word to use about sexuality. . . . Our society's notions of normality are completely fake and meta-trendy, since they rely on the changing standards of superstition, religion, Christianity and gender bias to define themselves. Americans, in particular, exhibit very childish reactions to sexual practices that are new to them, much like little kids who are offered a vegetable they haven't seen before: “That's disgusting!” “But, darling, you haven't even tried it!” “I don't care, I hate it, I hate it!”

Tell me the smallest things about yourself so long as they are obscene and secret and filthy.

My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.

You must acknowledge deep in your heart of hearts that people are supposed to fuck. It is our main purpose in life, and all those other activities—playing the trumpet, vacuuming carpets, reading mystery novels, eating chocolate mousse—are just ways of passing the time until you can fuck again.

Doing dirt on sex; it is the crime of our times, because what we need is tenderness towards the body, towards sex, we need tender-hearted fucking.

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something that needs our love.

The important thing is not to think much,
but to love much,
and so to do what best
awakens us to love.

The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

LOVE