The 5 Best Quotes About Love in Literature
There are many unforgettable quotes about love in literature. In fact, literature has always been a fertile ground to shed the illusions, sorrows, and forgetfulness of love. Love and poetry always go hand in hand.
Any selection of the best love quotes in literature is arbitrary. Some are chosen, but there are many others that deserve to be part of this list. We’re not trying to be unfair.
“Love is a wonderful flower, but you need to have the courage to go look at the edge of a horrible precipice”.
-Stendhal-
The wonderful thing about all these quotes is that they manage to capture essential meanings in an eternal and universal feeling. Quotes about love in literature make revelations that clarify a feeling that, in the end, is always impossible to fully understand. These are some of them.
1. Quotes about love in Tolstoy’s literature
Tolstoy gave us one of the greatest quotes about love in literature. He speaks to the essence of love. The quote says: “In getting to know thoroughly one’s wife, if one loves her, as someone has said, one gets to know all women better than if one knew thousands of them“.
This quote emphasizes that knowledge about love isn’t measured by the number of infatuations, but by the depth of a relationship. After all, we don’t discover true love in a multitude of experiences. We discover it by immersing ourselves completely in a relationship.
2. Love and the divine
Borges wrote this beautiful quote: “To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god” And it’s true, there are loves that become religion. This is in the sense that they seem to approach sacredness, we venerate our loved one.
However, as Borges correctly notes, this god is fallible. It’s not a being from beyond our world, but someone human. Therefore, unlike the God of religion, this kind of false god can fail. It’s worth pointing out that Borges, in this case, is speaking about falling in love and not of a love that grows beyond this first phase of the relationship.
3. Crazy people know about love
One of the most beautiful quotes about love in literature was written by Jacinto Benavente. He says: “In matters of love the crazy ones are the ones that have more experience. Of love, you never ask the sane ones. The sane ones love heartily that is like never to have loved.”
The quote emphasizes that thinking is an obstacle in love. If you think about it too much, it’s impossible to love. Calculation and logic have no place here. Therefore, only those who allow themselves to go a little crazy know what this feeling is about. Those who involve their logic will never know.
4. Nonetheless…
Feeling loved by the one you love is, without doubt, one of the great sources of joy in life. Love always creates happiness. But when the feeling is fully reciprocated, the satisfaction is indescribable, more than wonderful.
Why? Victor Hugo says it like this: “The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves“. Another’s love is like a forgiveness for our failures. A way to redeem ourselves.
5. True love
Since we’re talking about the best quotes about love in literature, we must include Antonio Gala. One of his quotes is: “True love is not self-love, it is the one that gets the lover to open up to other people and life, does not harass, does not isolate, does not reject, does not persecute: only accepts“.
In this beautiful quote, he speaks of love as a force that gives life, not one that takes it away. It’s an active power that is reflected in the welfare of the other. It takes the loved one out of their shell and empowers them to open up to the world. But, above all, it accepts them as they are.
All these quotes about love in literature are, above all, an occasion to reflect. In one way or another, it’s impossible to describe love with words. However, all these creators manage to touch the heart with their words. They show us, in a beautiful way, that this feeling is unlimited and amazing.