Quotes and aphorisms on war
Quotes on war, aphorisms, quotations, ideas, and famous sentences by great authors and writers about the stupidity of every war and the cruelty of armies and soldiers.
Dear William, how is it that there are so many wars in this stupid world? Dear Brown, it’s because peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.
Carl William Brown via William Shakespeare
Iustum est bellum, quibus necessarium. - War is right for those for whom it is needed -.
Tito Livio, Ab urbe condita, I sec.
The aim of war is not to kill the enemy, but to destroy his will to fight.
General Sir Frank Kitson
War is what happens when language fails.
Margaret Atwood
All war is a crime against humanity.
Leo Tolstoy
Wars serve no purpose other than to fill cemeteries, and there are no enemies in cemeteries.
Carl William Brown
Before all else, be armed.
Niccolo Machiavelli
The essence of the Navy, its very soul, is that it is always ready for war.
Admiral Sir John Fisher
The Ayatollah is no longer here; he has finally been sent to the afterlife; but he will remain a great memory in the history of stupidity.
Carl William Brown
The enemy is not beaten until he thinks he is.
Field Marshal Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck
If my soldiers started thinking, no one would stay in my ranks.
Frederick II King of Prussia
If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone de Beauvoir
Frederick II King of Prussia once said: “If my soldiers started thinking, no one would stay in my ranks.”. That’s why a dictator who favors war is without brain just as well, capable of nothing, but only of a good action, that of dying.
Carl William Brown
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
Bertrand Russell
How wonderful it would be if the human race, like some animal species, practiced mass suicide in a finally serious and convincing way, not as it has done up to now playing with wars.
Carl William Brown
When war is declared, Truth is the first casualty.
Arthur Ponsonby
War is fear cloaked in courage.
William Westmoreland
War: a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other.
Paul Valery
All’s fair in love and war.
Francis Edward Smedley
War cemeteries. The dead in war are nothing but advertisements to enrich the funereal marketing of world stupidity.
Carl William Brown
War is what happens when language fails.
Margaret Atwood
If the frontline people do count, you couldn’t prove it by examining the reward systems in most organizations.
Karl Albrecht
War on nations changes maps. War on poverty maps change.
Muhammad Ali
You don’t have to fight too often with an enemy, otherwise you will teach them all your warfare.
Napoleon I
The most important wars in history were the result of trivial causes. Those who know when they have had enough are wealthy.
Fred Van Amburgh
A coward is one who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.
Ambrose Bierce
O can’t you see, brother - Death’s a congested road for fighters now, and hero a cheap label.
C. D. Andrews
In war, moral considerations count for three quarters, the ratio of real forces only for the other quarter.
Napoleon I
In the arena of human life the honors and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action.
Aristotle
From the happy expression on their faces you might have supposed that they welcomed the war. I have met with men who loved stamps, and stones, and snakes, but I could not imagine any man loving war.
Margot Asquith
A skillful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.
Samuel Butler
Necessity can set me helpless on my back, but she cannot keep me there; nor can four walls limit my vision.
Margaret Fairless Barber
The destructive forces of humanity are directly proportional to the scientific, technological, sociological, economic, political and military capabilities of its imbecility.
Carl William Brown

Napoleon on war
The cannon thunders… limbs fly in all directions… one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice… it’s humanity in search of happiness.
Charles Baudelaire
It takes twenty years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only twenty seconds of war to destroy him.
Baudouin I
A wage hike is very hard to take away, but bonuses and profit-sharing can disappear very quickly in hard times… More people are realizing that bonuses look like raises, but really aren’t.
Al Bauman
If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits.
Ruth Benedict
Any soldier who fights for money and for a dictator is a waste of society, an object without a brain, only capable of a good action, that of dying.
Carl William Brown
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
Walter Benjamin
All war represents a failure of diplomacy.
Tony Benn
The inevitableness, the idealism, and the blessing of war, as an indispensable and stimulating law of development, must be repeatedly emphasized.
Friedrich Von Bernhardi
If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for, but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of Persia.
Hans A. Bethe
Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.
Otto Von Bismarck
Hell and damnation, life is such fun with a ragged greatcoat and a Jerry gun!
Alexander Blok
Neither situations nor people can be altered by the interference of an outsider. If they are to be altered, that alteration must come from within.
Phyllis Bottome
Let me have war, say I: it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it’s spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.
William Shakespeare
When a war breaks out, everyone hopes it will end soon, the only ones who want it to continue as long as possible are those who died first.
Carl William Brown
For cowards the road of desertion should be left open; they will carry over to the enemy nothing, but their fears.
John Christian Bovee
Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them must share in the guilt for the dead.
Omar Nelson Bradley
War is like love, it always finds a way.
Bertolt Brecht
To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize, there stands myself. And what I do not recognize, I shall continue not to recognize.
Andre Breton
You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.
Buddha
How many feasible projects have miscarried through despondency, and been strangled in their birth by a cowardly imagination.
Jeremy Collier
Faint heart never won fair lady.
Miguel De Cervantes
War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can.
Winston Churchill
The sinews of war, a limitless supply of money.
Marcus T. Cicero
In war, more than anywhere else in the world, things happen differently from what we had expected, and look differently when near from what they did at a distance.
Karl Von Clausewitz
It was once said that to have peace one had to prepare for war, but I prefer to argue that to have peace one must exterminate war.
Carl William Brown
War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of politics by other means.
Karl Von Clausewitz

Stupidity of wars
It is far easier to make war than to make peace.
Georges Clemenceau
A ‘just war’ is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.
Alexander Cockburn
That cowardice is incorrigible which the love of power cannot overcome.
Charles Caleb Colton
He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own.
Confucius
To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice.
Confucius
Blessings ever wait on virtuous deeds, and though a late, a sure reward succeeds.
William Congreve
When war rages in order to obtain peace you have to fight.
Carl William Brown
I would often be a coward, but for the shame of it.
Ralph Connor
Perhaps the reward of the spirit who tries is not the goal but the exercise.
E. V. Cooke
The giving of blood is imbued with the psychology of peace, for it leaves its humanitarian mark in the hearts of those who give for their fellowman.
Red Cross Courier
That strange feeling we had in the war. Have you found anything in your lives since to equal it in strength? A sort of splendid carelessness it was, holding us together.
Noel Coward
Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.
Bruce Crampton
Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.
Quentin Crisp
The idea of thanking staff should mean giving them something that they would never buy for themselves.
Jayne Crook
No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.
Edward Dahlberg
War is the trade of Kings.
John Dryden
War, he sang, is toil and trouble; Honor but an empty bubble.
John Dryden
Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.
Gerald Early
America is addicted to wars of distraction.
Barbara Ehrenreich
In past times during the various battles mostly soldiers died, nowadays progress has meant that in times of war mostly civilians die.
Carl William Brown
Covetousness like jealousy, when it has taken root, never leaves a person but with their life. Cowardice is the dread of what will happen.
Epictetus
I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Albert Einstein
Keep on sowing your seed, for you never know which will grow – perhaps it all will.
Albert Einstein
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.
T. S. Eliot
Although I am opposed to war, as we live in a society of bitter conflicts and bitter competition, it is obvious that to change the state of things a mythical struggle must be undertaken, first of all against stupidity.
Carl William Brown
I feel sure that coups d'etat would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.
Edmond and Jules De Goncourt
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Carl William Brown
War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.
Desiderius Erasmus
A coward turns away, but a brave man’s choice is danger.
Euripides
Moderation in war is imbecility.
Admiral John Fisher
We would be cowards, if we had courage enough.
Thomas Fuller
Cowards can never be moral.
Mahatma Gandhi
Fear has its use but cowardice has none.
Mahatma Gandhi
It is open to a war resister to judge between the combatants and wish success to the one who has justice on his side. By so judging he is more likely to bring peace between the two than by remaining a mere spectator.
Mahatma Gandhi
Stupidity and aggression, selfishness and greed lead to war, but people don’t seem to worry too much, at least until the grenades fall on their feet.
Carl William Brown
Morality is contraband in war.
Mahatma Gandhi
Cowards are cruel, but the brave love mercy and delight to save.
John Gay
Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.
Martha Gellhorn
How many joys are crushed under foot because people look up at the sky and disregard what is at their feet?
Catharina Elisabetha Goethe
The coward threatens when he is safe.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree I planted.
George Noel Gordon
A reward cannot be valued if it is not understood.
Phillip C. Grant
The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.
Robert Graves
War is hell and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peace time.
Ian Hay
Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.
William Hazlitt
War is stupidity, just as stupidity is the existential war of man.
Carl William Brown
Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.
Joseph Heller
Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.
Joseph Heller
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
Ernest Hemingway
War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow men.
Napoleon Hill
Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues.
Thomas Hobbes
When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.
Eric Hoffer
I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.
Abbie Hoffman
Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.
Herbert Clark Hoover
Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.
A. E. Housman
No man who does a good deed should expect gratitude. The reward of a good deed is in having done it.
Elbert Hubbard
What we believe is more important than our material existence, therefore warfare is a legitimate extension of values.
Edward Johnson

Charlie Chaplin against war
War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene.
Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
Aldous Huxley
It is better to be the widow of a hero than the wife of a coward.
Dolores Ibarruri
The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy with the least harm to ourselves; and this of course is to be effected by stratagem.
Washington Irving
A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.
Thomas Jefferson
In spite of all of the training you get and the precautions you take to keep yourself alive, it’s largely a matter of luck that decides whether or not you get killed.
James Jones
It is the coward who fawns upon those above him. It is the coward who is insolent whenever he dares be so.
Junius
Criminals and law enforcement agencies, a fratricidal struggle, a civil war between rival gangs.
Carl William Brown
The best-educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he is placed.
Helen Keller
Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
John F. Kennedy
Oh, the brave Music of a distant drum!
Omar Khayyam
War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.
Martin Luther King Jr.
And that is called paying the Dane-geld; but we’ve proved it again and again, that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld you never get rid of the Dane.
Rudyard Kipling
If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.
Rudyard Kipling
A coward is a hero with a wife, kids, and a mortgage.
Marvin Kitman
Dishonesty, cowardice and duplicity are never impulsive.
George A. Knight
The most persistent sound which reverberates through man’s history is the beating of war drums.
Arthur Koestler
Where do all the women who have watched so carefully over the lives of their beloved ones get the heroism to send them to face the cannon?
KaThe Kollwitz
How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.
Karl Kraus
Sure war is a bad thing, but at least it helps bring down unemployment.
Carl William Brown
War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.
Karl Kraus
The more prosperous and settled a nation, the more readily it tends to think of war as a regrettable accident; to nations less fortunate the chance of war presents itself as a possible bountiful friend.
Lewis H. Lapham
Cowards cannot see that their greatest safety lies in dauntless courage.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters – not to talk in armies and nations and numbers – but to track it home.
D. H. Lawrence
Of course in war all madnesses come out in a man. That is the fault of war not of a man or a nation.
Frieda Lawrence
I have been up to see the Congress and they do not seem to be able to do anything except to eat peanuts and chew tobacco, while my army is starving.
Robert E. Lee
Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war –for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I’d say we deserve ours more.
John Lennon
I sincerely wish war was a pleasanter and easier business than it is, but it does not admit of holidays.
Abraham Lincoln
Let him not boast who puts his armor on as he who puts it off, the battle done.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I have known war as few men now living know it. Its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes.

Best quotes on love
Best quotes on love. Great quotes, ideas and aphorisms chosen from the most famous authors, with a complete free ebook edited by Carl William Brown to download.
Faith is a mystery, love is a mystery, death is a mystery! However, I have never liked mysteries.
Carl William Brown
Teach only love for that is what you are.
Anonymous
Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.
Diane Ackerman
There is a law that man should love his neighbor as himself. In a few hundred years it should be as natural to mankind as breathing or the upright gait; but if he does not learn it, he must perish.
Alfred Adler
On this earth if there were no love there would certainly be no hatred and perhaps stupidity would not reign undisturbed.
Carl William Brown
Love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go, and it makes the end so easy.
Louisa May Alcott
Miserable is that love that needs words to express itself.
Carl William Brown
Love is a great beautifier.
Louisa May Alcott
I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox.
Woody Allen
Gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.
Herman Hesse
If you are really interested in this topic and you want more quotes you can also download and read this book of Quotes and aphorisms on Love Edited by Carl William Brown

Quotes on love
Eros and Thanatos, two inseparable themes, deeply romantic and fascinating. Love of common sense and hatred of vanity; life instinct towards equity and death drive towards stupidity.
Carl William Brown
Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.
Woody Allen
A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Ambrose Bierce
Well-ordered self-love is right and natural.
St. Thomas Aquinas
The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.
Mahatma Gandhi
Love is made by two people, in different kinds of solitude. It can be in a crowd, but in an oblivious crowd.
Louis Aragon
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces.
Hannah Arendt
Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life.
Aristotle
Wicked men obey from fear; good men, from love.
Aristotle
A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
W. H. Auden
We must love one another or die.
W. H. Auden
The best way to forget one’s self is to look at the world with attention and love.
Red Auerbach
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
Love makes labor light. Love alone gives value to all things.
St. Teresa of Avila
Real love stories never have endings.
Richard Bach
For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.
Francis Bacon
Nuptial love makes mankind; friendly love perfects it; but wanton love corrupts and debases it.
Francis Bacon
You cannot belong to anyone else, until you belong to yourself.
Pearl Bailey
Love is a precious commodity, and like all precious goods, you buy it at a high price, but if you want to resell it, as usual, you no longer take a penny.
Carl William Brown
Love is to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.
Honore De Balzac
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
Honore De Balzac
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
Roland Barthes
Naturally, love is the most distant possibility.
Georges Bataille

Best quotes and aphorisms on Love
It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.
Charles Baudelaire
The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.
Charles Baudelaire
Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.
Hermann Hesse
What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.
Charles Baudelaire
I no longer know if I wish to drown myself in love, wodka or the sea.
Franz Kafka
If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.
Jean Baudrillard
To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.
Jean Baudrillard
Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care, but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.
William Blake
For a long time I have been looking for love and have not found it, so I said to myself that perhaps it was better to look for stupidity, there I would have no problems, in fact it is a very common element in nature.
Carl William Brown
Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and myself founded empires; but what foundation did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded an empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him.
Napoleon Bonaparte
The only victory over love is flight.
Napoleon Bonaparte
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
Jorge Luis Borges
If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
Andre Breton
Love without attachment is light.
Norman O. Brown
When the girl I loved left me, I randomly went to a cemetery in a hilltop village, and there I buried my love. Every now and then I return and bring him some flowers.
Carl William Brown
Who so loves believes the impossible.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Never the time and the place and the loved one all together!
Robert Browning
Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
Robert Browning
Love the whole world as a mother loves her only child.
Buddha
The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.
Buddha
The desire for possession, the love of power, rivalry and vanity; here are the four basic components of stupidity.
Carl William Brown
No cord or cable can draw so forcibly, or bind so fast, as love can do with a single thread.
Robert Burton
A life without love, no matter how many other things we have, is an empty, meaningless one.
Leo Buscaglia
A loving person recognizes needs.
Leo Buscaglia
Don’t hold to anger, hurt or pain. They steal your energy and keep you from love.
Leo Buscaglia
Don’t smother each other. No one can grow in the shade.
Leo Buscaglia
Love acquires meaning only as it’s shared.
Leo Buscaglia
Love can never grow old. Locks may lose their brown and gold. Cheeks may fade and hollow grow. But the hearts that love will know, never winter’s frost and chill, summer’s warmth is in them still.
Leo Buscaglia
Love is life. And if you miss love, you miss life.
Leo Buscaglia
What love we’ve given, we’ll have forever. What love we fail to give, will be lost for all eternity.
Leo Buscaglia
When man has love he is no longer at the mercy of forces greater than himself, for he, himself, becomes the powerful force.
Leo Buscaglia
In her first passion, a woman loves her lover, in all the others all she loves is love.
Lord Byron
Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life.
Lord Byron
Lovers may be - and indeed generally are - enemies, but they never can be friends, because there must always be a spice of jealousy and a something of Self in all their speculations.
Lord Byron
Self-love for ever creeps out, like a snake, to sting anything which happens to stumble upon it.
Lord Byron
The best way will be to avoid each other without appearing to do so – or if we jostle, at any rate not to bite.
Lord Byron
Who loves, raves.
Lord Byron
In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.
Italo Calvino

Best quote on love ever
Love and war are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as in the other.
Miguel De Cervantes
The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.
Albert Camus
Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.
Thomas Carlyle
What a woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and running water.
Galius Valerius Catullus
Love, Arthur, is a poodle’s chance of attaining the infinite, and personally I have my pride.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
One who has not only the four S’s, which are required in every good lover, but even the whole alphabet; as for example… Agreeable, Bountiful, Constant, Dutiful, Easy, Faithful, Gallant, Honorable, Ingenious, Kind, Loyal, Mild, Noble, Officious, Prudent, Quiet, Rich, Secret, True, Valiant, Wise; the X indeed, is too harsh a letter to agree with him, but he is Young and Zealous.
Miguel De Cervantes
‘Tis said of love that it sometimes goes, sometimes flies; runs with one, walks gravely with another; turns a third into ice, and sets a fourth in a flame: it wounds one, another it kills: like lightning it begins and ends in the same moment: it makes that fort yield at night which it besieged but in the morning; for there is no force able to resist it.
Miguel De Cervantes
When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other, it seems to me, in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband, that they belong to each other in the name of Nature, and are lovers by Divine right, in spite of human convention or the laws.
Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort
How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something, but to be someone.
Coco Chanel
Love is blind.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Love, friendship, and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.
Anton Chekhov
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Can there be a love which does not make demands on its object?
Confucius
Love of kindness without a love of learning will be obscured by foolishness.
Confucius
Love of persistence without a love of learning will be obscured by stubbornness.
Confucius
Art is nothing but the profound sublimation of a supreme love for the universe; and this is why life is the highest form for the artist.
Carl William Brown
Love of straightforwardness without a love of learning will be obscured by misdirected judgment.
Confucius
Love of wisdom without a love of learning will be obscured by excessive speculation.
Confucius
To love a thing means wanting it to live.
Confucius
If there’s delight in love, 'Tis when I see that heart, which others bleed for, bleed for me.
William Congreve
Love is a tyrant sparing none.
Pierre Corneille
Men and women are not free to love decently until they have analyzed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex; and this means the acquisition of a profound philosophical theory based on wide reading of anthropology and enlightened practice.
Aleister Crowley
A loving heart is the truest wisdom.
Charles Dickens
I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.
Emily Dickinson
Glamour is assurance. It is a kind of knowing that you are all right in every way, mentally and physically and in appearance, and that, whatever the occasion or the situation, you are equal to it.
Marlene Dietrich
I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known.
Walt Disney
The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.
Charles Darwin
The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.
Walt Disney
There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can never end.
Benjamin Disraeli
We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.
Benjamin Disraeli
Busy old fool, unruly Sun, why dost thou thus through windows and through curtains call on us? Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?
John Donne
Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
John Donne
Love was as subtly caught as a disease; But being got it is a treasure sweet, which to defend is harder than to get: And ought not be profaned on either part, for though 'Tis got by chance, 'Tis kept by art.
John Donne
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
John Donne
Love all that has been created by God, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf and every ray of light. Love the beasts and the birds, love the plants, love every separate fragment. If you love each fragment, you will understand the mystery of the whole resting in God.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Love is love’s reward.
John Dryden
Love is not in our choice but in our fate.
John Dryden
Love works a different way in different minds, the fool it enlightens and the wise it blinds.
John Dryden
To love one child and to love all children, whether living or dead - somewhere these two loves come together. To love a no-good but humble punk and to love an honest man who believes himself to be an honest man - somewhere these, too, come together.
Marguerite Duras
It’s afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn’t necessarily prove that you loved him.
Marguerite Duras

Best quotes on love
It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.
Marguerite Duras
Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love
Albert Einstein
Love is a better teacher than duty.
Albert Einstein
A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman’s life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul’s highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.
George Eliot
But is it what we love, or how we love, that makes true good?
George Eliot
For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.
George Eliot
I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of literature and speech and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.
George Eliot
'Tis what I love determines how I love.
George Eliot
Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter.
T. S. Eliot
A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals.
Benjamin Franklin
He is not a lover who does not love forever.
Euripides
Love is all we have, the only way that each can help the other.
Euripides
At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That’s a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling and havoc-wreaking.
Gustave Flaubert
The first thing is to love your sport. Never do it to please someone else. It has to be yours.
Peggy Fleming
The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should love one another, or that a man in Portugal should love a man in Peru of whom he has never heard – it is absurd, unreal, dangerous. The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much.
Edward M. Forster
Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.
Anatole France
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
Sigmund Freud
One is very crazy when in love.
Sigmund Freud
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.
Sigmund Freud
Immature love says: “I love you because I need you.” Mature love says: “I need you because I love you.”
Erich Fromm
Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.
Erich Fromm
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Erich Fromm
Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
Robert Frost
A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.
Mahatma Gandhi
Love has more force than a besieging army.
Mahatma Gandhi
My life is an indivisible whole, and all my attitudes run into one another; and they all have their rise in my insatiable love for mankind.
Mahatma Gandhi
Whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love.
Mahatma Gandhi
Where there is love there is life.
Mahatma Gandhi
All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
What then in love can woman do? If we grow fond they shun us. And when we fly them, they pursue: But leave us when they’ve won us.
John Gay
Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
Kahlil Gibran
If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don’t, they never were.
Kahlil Gibran
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.
Kahlil Gibran
Life without love is like a tree without blossom and fruit.
Kahlil Gibran
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love.

Quotes on Love
Quotes on love, aphorisms, ideas, thoughts and reflections on the main human phenomenon that can produce joy, life, and also a bit of sorrow.
Quotes on love. Teach only love for that is what you are.
Anonymous
Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.
Diane Ackerman (1948-, American poet, writer, naturalist)
If you are really interested in this topic and you want more quotes you can also download and read this book of Quotes and aphorisms on Love Edited by Carl William Brown

Quotes on love
There is a law that man should love his neighbor as himself. In a few hundred years it should be as natural to mankind as breathing or the upright gait; but if he does not learn it, he must perish.
Alfred Adler (1870-1937, Austrian psychiatrist)
What is love? Love is when you care more about someone else than you care about yourself.
George Akers
Love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go, and it makes the end so easy.
Louisa May Alcott
Miserable is that love that needs words to express itself.
Carl William Brown
Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.
Hermann Hesse
I need nothing but God, and to lose myself in the heart of God.
Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque
Love is a great beautifier.
Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888, American author)
She was one of those happily created beings who please without effort, make friends everywhere, and take life so gracefully and easily that less fortunate souls are tempted to believe that such are born under a lucky star.
Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888, American author)
Love is nothing more than the attempt to overcome the barrier of time, piercing the screen of space. But this is only appearance, in reality it is the restless matter that transforms itself.
Carl William Brown (Educator and aphorist)
The Impossible Generalized Man today is the critic who believes in loving those unworthy of love as well as those worthy - yet believes this only insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible.
Nelson Algren (1909-1981, American author)
I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox.
Woody Allen (1935-, American director, screenwriter, actor, comedian)
Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.
Woody Allen (1935-, American director, screenwriter, actor, comedian)
A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914, American author, editor, journalist, “The Devil’s Dictionary”)
In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past – a pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has disappeared.
Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881, Swiss philosopher, poet, critic)
Women wish to be loved not because they are pretty, or good, or well bred, or graceful, or intelligent, but because they are themselves.
Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881, Swiss philosopher, poet, critic)
In real love you want the other person’s good. In romantic love, you want the other person.
Margaret Anderson (1886 -1973, American literary editor and autobiographer)
If you aren’t good at loving yourself, you will have a difficult time loving anyone, since you’ll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren’t even giving to yourself.
Barbara De Angelis (American expert on relationship & love, author)
Love is a force more formidable than any other. It is invisible - it cannot be seen or measured, yet it is powerful enough to transform you in a moment, and offer you more joy than any material possession could.
Barbara De Angelis (American expert on relationship & love, author)
Love’s greatest gift is its ability to make everything it touches sacred.
Barbara De Angelis (American expert on relationship & love, author)
The more connections you and your lover make, not just between your bodies, but between your minds, your hearts, and your souls, the more you will strengthen the fabric of your relationship, and the more real moments you will experience together.
Barbara De Angelis (American expert on relationship & love, author)
A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning’s greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.
Maya Angelou (1928-, African-American poet, writer, performer)
There is love of course. And then there’s life, its enemy.
Jean Anouilh (1910-1987, French playwright)

Love quotes and aphorisms
Well-ordered self-love is right and natural.
St. Thomas Aquinas
Love is made by two people, in different kinds of solitude. It can be in a crowd, but in an oblivious crowd.
Louis Aragon (1897-1982, French poet)
Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.
Jean Anouilh Ardele (1910-1987, French dramatist)
Oh, love is real enough; you will find it someday, but it has one archenemy – and that is life.
Jean Anouilh Ardele (1910-1987, French dramatist)
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975, German-born American political philosopher)
Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life.
Aristotle (BC 384-322, Greek philosopher)
Wicked men obey from fear; good men, from love.
Aristotle (BC 384-322, Greek philosopher)
One can be a soldier without dying, and a lover without sighing.
Edwin Arnold (1832-1904, British poet, journalist)
In a great romance, each person plays a part the other really likes.
Elizabeth Ashley (American actress)
Love is the victim’s response to the rapist.
Ti-Grace Atkinson (1938-, American feminist writer)
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them; there ought to be as many for love.
Margaret Atwood (1939-, Canadian novelist, poet, critic)
A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
W. H. Auden (1907-1973, Anglo-American poet)
We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country, because such affections come naturally to us and are good in themselves, although we may corrupt them. We are commanded to love our neighbor because our “natural” attitude toward the “other” is one of either indifference or hostility.
W. H. Auden (1907-1973, Anglo-American poet)
We must love one another or die.
W. H. Auden (1907-1973, Anglo-American poet)
Pure love is a revolutionary sentiment, which is why the true philanthropist can only be a subversive.
Carl William Brown (Educator and aphorist)
The best way to forget one’s self is to look at the world with attention and love.
Red Auerbach (1917-, American basketball coach)
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 (121-180, Roman emperor, philosopher)
Love is the foundation and keystone of life.
Lou Austin
Not all of us have to possess earthshaking talent. Just common sense and love will do.
Myrtle Auvil
Holy church - that mother who is also a queen because she is a king’s bride.
St. Teresa of Avila
Love makes labor light. Love alone gives value to all things.
St. Teresa of Avila
The best thing must be to flee from all to the All.
St. Teresa of Avila
Real love stories never have endings.
Richard Bach (1936-, American author)
For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626, British philosopher, essayist, statesman)
Nuptial love makes mankind; friendly love perfects it; but wanton love corrupts and debases it.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626, British philosopher, essayist, statesman)

Quotes on love by English culture
She soothed and solaced and celebrated, destroying her gift by maiming it to suit her hearers.
Martha Bacon
Love is the lamp that lights the universe: without that light …the earth is a barren promontory and man the quintessence of dust.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1837-1915, British novelist, playwright, editor)
When once estrangement has arisen between those who truly love each other, everything seems to widen the breach.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1837-1915, British novelist, playwright, editor)
Perhaps morality is nothing more than a great rational love.
Carl William Brown (Educator and aphorist)
The sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love.
Pearl Bailey (1918-1990, American vocalist, movie and stage actress)
What the world really needs is more love and less paper work.
Pearl Bailey (1918-1990, American vocalist, movie and stage actress)
You cannot belong to anyone else, until you belong to yourself.
Pearl Bailey (1918-1990, American vocalist, movie and stage actress)
Strong people don’t need strong leaders.
Ella Baker
I have an everyday religion that works for me. Love yourself first, and everything else falls into line.
Lucille Ball (1911-1989, American actress, producer)
Love is to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.
Honore De Balzac (1799-1850, French novelist)
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
Honore De Balzac (1799-1850, French novelist)
Do you want to know a good way to fall in love? Just associate with all your pleasant experiences with someone, and disassociate from all the unpleasant ones.
Richard Bandler (1950-, American therapist, co-founder of NLP)
I leave before being left. I decide.
Brigitte Bardot (1934-, French actress)
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
Julian Barnes (1946-, British lexicographer, critic, editor)
Lovers should also have their days off.
Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972, American-born French author)
The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight.
Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972, American-born French author)
The fate of love is that it always seems too little or too much.
Amelia E. Barr (1831-1919, Anglo-American novelist)
If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.
Lynda Barry (1956-, American cartoonist, painter, essayist)
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
Roland Barthes (1915-1980, French semiologist)
Let us love others and let God make them good.
Marilyn A. Bass
Violence and love are nothing but the two sides of the same coin, life.
Carl William Brown (Educator and aphorist)
Naturally, love is the most distant possibility.
Georges Bataille (1897-1962, French novelist, critic)
The general rule is that people who enjoy life also enjoy marriage.
Phyllis Battelle
The greatest weakness of most humans is their hesitancy to tell others how much they love them while they’re still alive.
Orlando A. Battista
The greatest weakness of most humans is their hesitancy to tell others how much they love them while they’re still alive.
Orlando A. Battista
It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867, French poet)
The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867, French poet)
What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867, French poet)
If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.
Jean Baudrillard (French postmodern philosopher, writer)
To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.
Jean Baudrillard (French postmodern philosopher, writer)
A woman who is loved always has success.
Vicki Baum (1888-1960, American writer)
When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974, American psychologist, cultural anthropologist)
I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love.
Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887, American preacher, orator, writer)
Love is the river of life in the world.
Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887, American preacher, orator, writer)
Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep-burning, unquenchable.
Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887, American preacher, orator, writer)
Love ceases to be a pleasure, when it ceases to be a secret.
Aphra Behn (1640-1689, British playwright, poet)
In a world that holds books and babies and canyon trails, why should one condemn oneself to live day in, day out with people one does not like, and sell oneself to chaperone and correct them?
Ruth Benedict (1887-1948, American anthropologist)

Great quotes on love
Honor the ocean of love.
George De Benneville (1703-1793, French radical Christian)
I went back to being an amateur, in the sense of somebody who loves what she is doing. If a professional loses the love of work, routine sets in, and that’s the death of work and life.
Ada Bethune
Next to God we are indebted to women, first for life itself, and then for making it worth living.
Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955, American educator)
True and profound artistic creation comes from pain, only those who have suffered enormously in fact know the real value of love.
Carl William Brown (Educator and aphorist)
Without faith, nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible.
Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955, American educator)
It is sometimes the man who opens the door who is the last to enter the room.
Elizabeth Bibesco
Love is said to be blind, but I know some fellows in love who can see twice as much in their sweethearts as I do.
Josh Billings (1815-1885, American humorist, lecturer)
Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care, but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.
William Blake (1757-1827, British poet, painter)
Love is the immortal flow of energy that nourishes, extends and preserves. Its eternal goal is life.
Smiley Blanton (1882-1966, American author)
Love matches are made by people who are content, for a month of honey, to condemn themselves to a life of vinegar.
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington (1789-1849, Irish writer and socialite)
When you recover or discover something that nourishes your soul and bring joy, care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life.
Jean Shinoda Bolen (American medical doctor)
Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and myself founded empires; but what foundation did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded an empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821, French general, emperor)
The only victory over love is flight.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821, French general, emperor)
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986, Argentinean author)
Where there is laughter there is always more health than sickness.
Phyllis Bottome (1884-1963, American writer)
A proof that experience is of no use, is that the end of one love does not prevent us from beginning another.
Paul Bourget (1852-1935, French novelist)
Our first and last love is… self-love.
John Christian Bovee (1820-1904, American author, lawyer)
I can’t see or feel the conflict between love and religion. To me, they’re the same thing.
Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973, Anglo-Irish novelist)
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973, Anglo-Irish novelist)
The more helpless people become, the more books on love multiply.
Carl William Brown (Educator and aphorist)
When you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out.
Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973, Anglo-Irish novelist)
If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
Andre Breton (1989-1966, French surrealist)
If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
Andre Breton (1989-1966, French surrealist)
When love is out of your life, you’re through in a way. Because while it is there it’s like a motor that’s going, you have such vitality to do things, big things, because love is goosing you all the time.
Fanny Brice (1891-1951, American entertainer)
When first we met we did not guess that Love would prove so hard a master.
Robert Bridges (1844-1930, British poet)
All the little emptiness of love!
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915, British poet)
Infinite hungers leap no more I in the chance swaying of your dress; and love has changed to kindliness.
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915, British poet)
A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification.
Anita Brookner (1938-, British novelist, art historian)
Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.
Anita Brookner (1938-, British novelist, art historian)
A strong, positive self-image is the best possible preparation for success.
Dr. Joyce Brothers (1927-, American psychologist, television and radio personality)
When you come right down to it, the secret of having it all is loving it all.
Dr. Joyce Brothers (1927-, American psychologist, television and radio personality)
The white light streams down to be broken up by those human prisms into all the colors of the rainbow. Take your own color in the pattern and be just that.
Charles R. Brown
Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.
Charlie Brown (Peanuts comic strip character)
Don’t worry about growing older or pleasing others. Please yourself.