Image credit: Gustav Klimt, “The Kiss” (1907-1908), Austrian Gallery Belvedere, via Wikimedia Commons
By Jason Zweig | Feb. 14, 2018 6:14 am ET
Happy Valentine’s Day to lovers and friends of all ages, tastes, and types! A few ideas, images, and songs for us all to enjoy:
Love’s night is noon.
— Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Love and art embrace not what is beautiful but what by that embrace becomes beautiful.
— Karl Kraus
The birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.
— Christina Rossetti
Tanto é il bene ch’aspetto
Ch’ogni pena m’é diletto.
So great is the treasure to which I aspire
That all pain delights my desire.
— Medieval Tuscan poem
“Two women attempting to catch flying hearts,” from Pierre Sala, Petit Livre d’Amour (France, ca. 1500), Stowe MS 955, f13r, The British Library
O flower of love whose strong lips drink us downward into death, in all things far and fleeting, enchantress of our twenty thousand days, the brain will madden and the heart be twisted, broken by her kiss, but glory, glory, glory, she remains: Immortal love, alone and aching in the wilderness, we cried to you: You were not absent from our loneliness.
— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
The whole world round is not enough to fill
The heart’s three corners, but it craveth still.
— Christopher Hervey
Love seems the swiftest but is the slowest of all growths. No man and woman really know what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
— Mark Twain
To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.
— Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love
Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death.
— The Song of Songs, 8:6.
Give me some music; music, moody food
Of us that trade in love.
— Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
JEALOUS, n. Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.
–Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
Artemisia of Halicarnassus loved her husband so much that she dissolved his ashes in a suitably flavored liquid and drank them.
— Erwin Panofsky
He who loves knows more than he who does not love.
— San Bernardino of Siena
Those who love something are more likely to be right than those who don’t.
— Yehudi Menuhin
Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Giovanni(?) Arnolfini and His Wife (1434), The National Gallery
You know what a friend is? Someone who knows all about you and likes you anyway.
— Bill Parcells
But I always owe you love, the only debt which, after being repaid, still keeps one a debtor.
— St. Augustine
Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.
— Anthony Trollope
All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
— where there is no love there is no speech —
— William Goyen, The House of Breath