Valentine's Day

[John Simkin]

Select from below for your Valentine Day card:

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction." Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Love life and life will love you back. Love people and they will love you back.” Arthur Rubinstein

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” Friedrich Nietzsche

To be loved for what one is, is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him, their own selves, their version of him.” Goethe

“Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.” Mark Twain

“Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.” Arthur Pinero

“Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you. Love me and I may be forced to love you.” William Arthur Ward

“The little unremembered acts of kindness and love are the best parts of a person's life.” William Wordsworth

“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.” Martin Luther King

“Life is not a romance; one has romantic memories and romantic hopes – that’s all. Our most burning ecstasies are merely the shadows of what we have felt elsewhere or of what we hope to feel someday.” Oscar Wilde

“The primary questions for an adult are not why or how, but when and where.” Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

"Love doesn't make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile." Franklin P. Jones

"Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired." Robert Frost

"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence." Henry Louis Mencken

"Love is a friendship set to music." E. Joseph Cossman

"Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life." Lord Byron

"It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." Alfred Tennyson:

"The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for." Allan Chalmers

“Love: a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.” Ambrose Bierce:

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.” Anais Nin

“If you have love in your life it can make up for a great many things you lack. If you don't have it, no matter what else there is, it's not enough.” Ann Landers

“Loving your enemy is manifest in putting your arms not around the man but around the social situation, to take power from those who misuse it -- at which point they can become human too.” Bayard Rustin

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.” Blaise Pascal:

“Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.” C.S. Lewis:

“For there is one thing I can safely say: that those bound by love must obey each other if they are to keep company long. Love will not be constrained by mastery; when mastery comes, the God of love at once beats his wings, and farewell -- he is gone. Love is a thing as free as any spirit; women naturally desire liberty, and not to be constrained like slaves; and so do men, if I shall tell the truth.” Chaucer

“The love we give away is the only love we keep.” Elbert Hubbard

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.” Elie Wiesel

“All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a mansion built upon the sand.” Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you." Erich Fromm

“There is no remedy for love but to love more.” Henry David Thoreau:

“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.” Ingrid Bergman:

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.” Jimi Hendrix

“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” Jonathan Swift

“Love cures people -- both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.” Karl Menninger

“If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?” Lily Tomlin

“In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual, delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted, atrocious.” Marcel Proust

“Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.” Mark Twain

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” Martin Luther King

“We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.” Martin Luther King

“Forgiveness is choosing to love. It is the first skill of self-giving love.” Mohandas K. Gandhi

“Hatred ever kills, love never dies. Such is the vast difference between the two. What is obtained by love is retained for all time. What is obtained by hatred proves a burden in reality for it increases hatred.” Mohandas K. Gandhi

“The best love affairs are those we never had.” Norman Lindsay

“Do you love me because I'm beautiful, or am I am beautiful because you love me?” Oscar Hammerstein, II:

“Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.” Oscar Wilde

“The first duty of love is to listen.” Paul Tillich

“A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.” Pearl S. Buck

“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,

Therefore, we are saved by hope.

Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;

Therefore, we are saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.

Therefore, we are saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;

Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.” Reinhold Niebuhr

“I love you, not only for what you are, but for what I am, when I am with you.” Roy Croft