Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ivan Turgenev

Love isn't actually a feeling at all--it's an illness, a certain condition of body and soul.... Usually it takes possession of someone without his permission, all of a sudden, against his will--just like cholera or a fever.

Ivan Turgenev

Love, I thought, is stronger than death or the fear of death. Only by it, by love, life holds together and advances.

Islom Karimov

May there always be peace, love and happiness in every house.

Iris Johansen

I can't be easy. It's not my nature. But it's my nature to love you.

Irvin D. Yalom

Mature love is loving, not being loved.

Iris Murdoch

Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.

Iris Murdoch

It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.

Iris Murdoch

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

Iris Murdoch

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

Iris Murdoch

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.

Iris Murdoch

Love is the source of our greatest errors; but when it is even partially refined it is the energy and the passion of the soul in its search for Good, the force that joins us to Good and joins us to the world through Good. Its existence is the unmistakable sign that we are spiritual creatures, attracted by excellence and made for the Good. It is a reflection of the warmth and light of the sun.

Iris Murdoch

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.

Iris Murdoch

Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.

Iris Murdoch

Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends -- and which redeems all the rest.

Iris Murdoch

Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.

Iris Murdoch

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Iris Murdoch

We can only learn to love by loving.

Ina May Gaskin

Breast stimulation is especially effective in starting labor at term when it is combined with sexual intercourse. Unless your partner is an abysmally poor lover, this combination is by far the most enjoyable method of induction.

Igor Stravinsky

Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?

Idries Shah

He that is purified by love is pure; and he that is absorbed in the Beloved and hath abandoned all else is a Sufi.Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah.

Huston Smith

Imagine a man besottedly in love: he won't waste time speculating whether other women equally merit his affection.

Gregory Maguire

He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.

Gregory Maguire

...and he kissed her and kissed her and kissed her, little by little by little.

Gloria Naylor

The music in his laughter had a way of rounding off the missing notes in her soul.

Gloria Vanderbilt

...that is the best-to laugh with someone because you both think the same things are funny.

Gloria Vanderbilt

I'm always in love. If it's not with a man, it's something else. I love beauty. I love the sky I see outside the window. There's so much beauty in the world.

Gloria Steinem

If you love your work, I'm not sure you have hobbies. I try to say no to things that other people could do and only say yes to things that only I could do.

Gloria Steinem

Romance is a means to the end of self-completion, but love is an end in itself.

Gloria Steinem

Some women and men seem to need each other.

Gloria Steinem

Being able to support oneself allows one to choose a marriage out of love and not just economic dependence. It also allows one to risk that marriage.

Geraldine McCaughrean

It's true: Everyone needs a reason to stay alive -- someone who justifies your existence. Someone who loves you. Not beyond all reason. Just loves you. Even just shows an interest. Even someone who doesn't exist, or isn't yours. No, no! They don't even have to love you! They just have to be there to love! Target for your arrows. Magnetic Pole to drag on your compass needle and stop it spinning and tell you where you're heading and...Someone to soak up all the yearning. That's what I think.

When we choose only love as the director of our mind we can experience the power and miracle of love.

Love is the part of us that is real.