Love, Defined

Love, Defined

 
  1. Falling in love is like being thrown from a horse; if you let yourself go it doesn’t hurt as badly as if you try to save yourself —Edwin L. Blanchard
  2. It’s [love] very like a lizard; it winds itself around your heart and penetrates your gizzard —Anon rhyme
  3. A love affair is like a work of art —Laurie Colwin
  4. Love is a hole in the heart —Ben Hecht
  5. Love is a science where great erudition and great application are needed —Anatole France
  6. Love is like a child that longs for everything that he can come by —William Shakespeare
  7. Love is like a cigar, the longer it burns the less it becomes —Punch, 1855
  8. Love is … like a coconut which is good while it’s fresh, but you have to spit it out when the juice is gone, what’s left tastes bitter —Bertold Brecht
  9. Love is like a cold. Easy to catch but hard to cure —Anon
  10. Love is like a dizziness —James Hogg

    This is the title and first line of a poem.

  11. Love is like a dream that’s too good to be true —Langston Hughes
  12. Love is like a friendship caught on fire —Bruce Lee
  13. Love is like a lovely rose —Christina Georgina Rossetti
  14. Love is like a repeating decimal; the figure is the same but the value gets less and less —Anon
  15. Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night —Sherwood Anderson
  16. Love is like butter, it goes well with bread —Yiddish proverb
  17. Love is like electricity. It flares up for a second and is soon extinguished —Isaac Bashevis Singer
  18. Love is like fire … wounds of fire are hard to bear; harder still are those of love —Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
  19. Love is like growing pains; something we all have to experience for ourselves —Anon
  20. Love is like heaven, a brief possession, unsearchable, hard to reconstruct with two-by-fours and building blocks —Leonard Casper

    In Casper’s story, Sense of Direction, the simile is in the past tense and the word building is spelled without the last letter.

  21. Love is like learning to walk; we all have to go through it —Anon
  22. Love is like linen, the more often changed, the sweeter —Phineas Fletcher

    The word ‘changed’ was originally ‘chang’d.’

  23. Love is like malaria. You never know when you’re going to catch it —Rita Mae Brown
  24. Love is like measles; you can get it only once, and the later in life it occurs the tougher it goes —Josh Billing

    The simile in Billings’ dialect: “Love iz like the meazles; we kant have it bad but onst, and the later in life we have it the tuffer it goes with us.” Medical science has made this much quoted comparison obsolete, though another illness, mishap, or a necessary learning experience could easily be substituted.

  25. Love is like quicksilver in the hand … leave the fingers open and it stays in the palm; clutch it, and it darts away —Dorothy Parker
  26. Love is like soup; it cools when the fire dies out —Anon
  27. Love is like the devil; whom it has in its clutches it surrounds with flames —Honoré de Balzac
  28. Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it —Jerome K. Jerome

    See the comment with Josh Billings love/measles simile above.

  29. Love is like a well: a good thing to drink out of, but a bad thing to fall into —Anon
  30. Love is like the wild rose-briar, friendship like the holly tree —Emily Brontë

    See Also: FRIENDSHIP

  31. Love is like those shabby hotels in which all the luxury is in the lobby —Paul Jean Toulet
  32. Love is trembling happiness —Kahlil Gibran
  33. Love is very much like a tennis match, you’ll never win consistently until you learn to serve well —Dan P. Herod
  34. Love is what is called the Milky Way in Heaven, a brilliant mass formed by thousands of little stars of which each perhaps is nebulous —Stendhal

    One wonders what he might have added had he known about black holes in space and their gravity so enormous it sucks up everything surrounding itself.

  35. Love … it’s like an ocean: if you’re no good, if you begin to make a bad smell in it, it just spews you up somewhere to die —William Faulkner
  36. Love, like a poker game starts with a pair; with her getting a flush, him showing a diamond and both ending up together with a full house —Anon
  37. Love, like death, a universal leveller of mankind —William Congreve
  38. Lovers are like drunkards; once a drunkard always a drunkard, once a lover always a lover. It is simply a matter of temperament —Guy De Maupassant
  39. Love’s like the measles, all the worse when it comes too late —Douglas Jerrold

    See comment following the Josh Billings love/measles simile above.

  40. Love without return is like a question without an answer —Anon
  41. Loving, like prayer, is a power as well a process. It’s curative. It is creative —Zona Gale
  42. The moods of love are like the wind —Coventry Patmore
  43. My love is as a fever —William Shakespeare

    Another famous author, Stendhal, also likened love to a fever, adding: “It comes and goes without the will having any part in the process.”

  44. My love is like a red red rose —Robert Burns

    This is the first line and title of Burns’ famous poem, in which love was spelled ‘luv.’

  45. An old man in love is like a flower in winter —Portugese proverb
  46. Romance is the poetry of circumstance —Robert Louis Stevenson
  47. True love is like seeing a ghost. We talk about it; few of us have seen one —Francois, Due de La Rochefoucauld

    Some quote La Rochefoucauld as linking the ghost comparison to perfect instead of true love.

  48. A woman’s love is like the dew. It falls as easily on the manure heap as on the rose —Donald McCaig
  49. Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep-burning, unquenchable —Henry Ward Beecher