Let me not to the marriage of true minds
admit impediments. Love is not love
which alters when it alteration finds,
or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! It is an ever-fixed mark
that looks on tempests and is never shaken;
it is the star to every wandering bark,
whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
within his bending sickle's compass come:
love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
but bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-- William Shakespeare

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Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous; love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offense, and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people's sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.

Love does not come to an end.

--I Corinthians 13: 4-8
Jerusalem Bible

Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex, which causes each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other and by common desire to carry out all of love's precepts in the other's embrace.

--Andreas Capellanus

Alas, I thought I knew so much
Of love, and yet I know so little!
For I cannot stop myself loving her
From whom I shall never have joy.
My whole heart, and all of me from myself
She has taken, and her own self,
and all the world,
For when she took herself from me,
she left me nothing
But desire and a yearning heart.

--Bernard de Ventadour

And if my homage she'd receive,
My wooing and my service true--
The sleepless nights I have been through,
The grief I bear from morn till eve,
Could never take me from her sight;
I'd be a slave unto delight,
All burdens I would gladly bear
And for my heart's grief I'd not care.

--Guiraut de Bornelh

I have never had power over myself,
Nor was I mine from that moment
When she let me look into her eyes,
Into a mirror that much pleases me
Mirror, since I mirrored myself in you,
I have been slain by sighs from the depths,
And thus I was lost, just as
The fair Narcissus lost himself in the pool.

--Bernard deVentadour

Through their kisses and caresses they experienced a joy and wonder the equal of which has never been known or heard of,
But I shall be silent...for the rarest and most delectable pleasures are those which are hinted at, but never told.

--Chre'tien de Troyes, 
Lancelot

"Someone Digging in the Ground"

An eye is meant to see things,
The soul is here for its own joy.
A head has one use: for loving a true love.
Legs: to run after.

Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind,
for learning what men have done and tried to do.
Mysteries are not to be solved. The eye goes blind
when it only wants to see why.

A lover is always accused of something.
But when he finds his love, whatever was lost
in the looking comes back completely changed.
On the way to Mecca, many dangers: thieves,
the blowing sand, only camel's milk to drink.
Still each pilgrim kisses the black stone there
with pure longing, feeling in the surface
the taste of the lips he wants.

This talk is like stamping new coins. They pile up,
while the real work is done outside
by someone digging in the ground.

--The Essential Rumi,
Translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

Tell me, O people, tell me! Who among you would not wake from the sleep of life if love were to brush your spirit with its fingertips?
Who among you would not forsake your father and your mother and your home if the girl whom your heart loved were to call to him?
Who among you would not cross the seas, traverse deserts, go over mountains and valleys to reach the woman whom his spirit has chosen?
What youth would not follow his heart to the ends of the earth to breathe the sweetness of his lover's breath, feel the soft touch of her hands, delight in the melody of her voice?
What man would not immolate his soul that its smoke might rise to a god who would hear his plea and answer his prayer?

--The Beloved:
Reflections on the Path of the Heart
by Kahlil Gibran

It is love that fashions us into the fullness of our being--not our looks, not our work, not our wants, not our achievements, not our parents, not our status, not our dreams. These are all the fodder and the filler, the navigating fuels of our lives, but it is love: who we love, how we love, why we love and that we love which ultimately shapes us.

--Daphne Rose Kingma

[Infinite Love] is a weapon of matchless potency.
It is the "summum bonum" of Life.
It is an attribute of the brave, in fact it is their all.
It does not come within the reach of the coward.
It is no wooden or lifeless dogma but a living and life-giving force.
It is the special attribute of the heart.

--Mahatma Gandhi

Love courses through everything,
No, Love is everything.
How can you say, there is no love,
when nothing but Love exists?
All that you see has appeared because of Love.
All shines from Love,
All pulses with Love,
All flows from Love--
No, once again all is Love!

--Fakhruddin Araqi,
Translated by Jonathan Star

It doesn't matter how long we may have been stuck in a sense of our limitations,
If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light,
it doesn't matter if the room has been dark for a day, or a week, or ten thousand years--
we turn on the light and it is illumined. Once we contact our capacity for love and happiness...the light has been turned on.

--Sharon Salzberg

The cure for all
the ills and wrongs,
the cares, the sorrows
and crimes of
humanity, all lie in
that one word "love."
It is the divine vitality
that produces and
restores life.
To each and every one
of us it gives
the power of
working miracles,
if we will.

--Lydia M. Child

Love is something you and I must have. We must have it because our spirit feeds upon it. We must have it because without it we become weak and faint.
Without love our self-esteem weakens. Without it our courage fails. Without love we can no longer look confidently at the world. We turn inward and begin to feed upon our own personalities, and little by little we destroy it ourselves. With it we are creative. With it we march tirelessly. With it and with it alone, we are able to sacrifice for others.

--Chief Dan George

Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility...It is therefore able to undertake all things, and it completes many things, and warrants them to take effect, where he who does not love would faint and lie down. Love is watchful and sleeping, slumbereth not. Though weary, it is not tired; though pressed, it is not straitened; though alarmed, it is not confounded...

--Thomas A. Kempis

"Sonnet 55"

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
but you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.

--William Shakespeare: 

"If Thou Must Love Me"

If thou must love me, let it be for naught
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
"I love her for her smile...her look...her way of speaking
gently-
For a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day."
For these things in themselves, beloved, may be changed, or changed for thee--and love so wrought may be unwrought so.
Neither love me for thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry-
A creature might forget to weep, who bore their comfort long, and lose
their love thereby
But love me for love's sake, that evermore thou mayst love on,
Through love's eternity.

--Elizabeth Barrett Browning

In one year they sent a million fighters forth
South and North,
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
As the sky
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force--
Gold, of course.
O heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth's returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumph and their glories and the rest!
Love is best.

--Robert Browning
from "Love Among the Ruins"

"Words"

I had this thought a while ago,
"My darling cannot understand
What I have done, or what would do
In this blind bitter land."
And I grew weary of the sun
Until my thoughts cleared up again,
Remembering that the best I have done
Was done to make it plain;
That every year I have cried, "At length
My darling understands it all,
Because I have come into my strength,
And words obey my call;"
That had she done so who can say
What would have shaken from the sieve?
I might have thrown poor words away
And been content to live.

--William Butler Yeats

"Love in a Life"

I
Room after room,
I hunt the house through
We inhabit together.
Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her--
Next time, herself!--not the trouble behind her
Left in the curtain, the couch's perfume!
As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew:
Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather.

II
Yet the day wears,
And door succeeds door;
I try the fresh fortune--
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.
Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter.
Spend my whole day in the quest,--who cares?
But 'tis twilight, you see,--with such suites to explore,
Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!

--Robert Browning

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go:
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

--William Shakespeare

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