“Human love, the love of mother, husband, and friend rank above it, and first of all stands the love of God.”

“Robert Bruce, on his death-bed, bequeathed his heart to his friend, the good Lord James, to be borne in war against the Saracens.”

— Walter Scott《The Lady of the Lake》

“The sons and daughters of the Love-Star instantly ceased their own soft musical conversation, and Zaidie sang the old plantation song through for the first time that a human voice had sung it to ears other than human.”

— George Griffith《A Honeymoon in Space》

“Say thou dost love me, love me, love me—toll The silver iterance!—only minding, Dear, To love me also in silence with thy soul.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning《Sonnets from the Portuguese》

“A great desire to love and be friends, to love everybody, to be friends with everybody, seemed to be invading Lotty—a desire for sheer goodness.”

— Elizabeth von Arnim《The Enchanted April》

“A woman with so passionate a nature as hers, married against her will to a man she could never love, and meeting once more the man whom she loved, the man who really loved her, must find such friendship a dangerous pitfall.”

— Grant Allen《Linnet》

“You wish me to love you: this is the man whom I love, and whom I have sworn to love during my whole life: make the comparison yourself.”

— Antoine François Prévost《Manon Lescaut》

“To her, my thoughts I daily dedicate; To her, my heart I nightly martyrise; To her, my love I lowly do prostrate; To her, my life I wholly sacrifice: My thought, my heart, my life, my love, is she! &c.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson《The Romance of Biography (Vol 1 of 2): or Memoirs of Women Loved and Celebrated by Poets, from the Days of the Troubadours to the Present Age. 3rd ed. 2 Vols.》

“I, unhappy that I am, these eight years have I loved thee more than my life, and thou, as I have felt, art all afire and all consumed with love of a strange woman, wicked and perverse man that thou art!”

— Giovanni Boccaccio《The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio》

“The life we lead is all love: The love we hold is all death, Nor ought I crave to feed life, Nor ought I seek to shun death, But only that my goddess, My life my death do count hers.”

— Philip Sidney《The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia》

“Sometimes love, for a woman, means only shelter; often, for a man, love means the blending of all knowledge, of all beauty, all ambition, of all that he has learned from books and from life.”

— E. Phillips Oppenheim《The Zeppelin's Passenger》

“It is only in trembling that any human soul can see one they love uplifted to such a height of extravagant joy as that on which Prue now sits queening it over the workaday world.”

— Rhoda Broughton《Doctor Cupid》

“Rome, thou art a whole world, it is true, and yet without love this World would not be the world, Rome would cease to be Rome.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe《Roman Elegies》