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The collection / 368 fragments

Love.

Explore passages mentioning love. Topic suggestions use transparent word matching, not scholarly classification. Editorial meanings and lexical matches are discovery aids, not independent authentication of a quotation.

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368 results · Page 9 of 16Play this collection ▷
03c. 1790 AD
We love a girl for very different things than understanding. We love her for her beauty, her youth, her mirth, her confidingness, her character, with its faults, caprices, and God knows what other inexpressible charms; but we do not love her for her understanding. Her mind we esteem (if it is brilliant), and it may greatly elevate her in our opinion; nay, more, it may enchain us when we already love. But her understanding is not that which awakens and inflames our passions.
Goethe / quote
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18c. 1842 AD
Give all to love; Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good-fame, Plans, credit, and the Muse,— Nothing refuse ... Cling with life to the maid; But when the surprise, First vague shadow of surmise Flits across her bosom young Of a joy apart from thee, Free be she, fancy-free; Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem Nor the palest rose she flung From her summer diadem. Though thou loved her as thyself, As a self of purer clay, Though her parting dims the day, Stealing grace from all alive; Heartily know, When half-gods go The gods arrive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson / quote
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19c. 1590 AD
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke. She did lie In her pavilion: on each side her Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, With divers-coloured fans.... Her gentlewomen, like the Nereïdes, So many mermaids tended her. At the helm A seeming mermaid steers: the silken tackle Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands.
William Shakespeare / quote
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