Passages about love and desire

I sing of arms and of the man who first came, a fugitive by fate, from the coasts of Troy to Italy and the Lavinian shores.

Can there be such anger in the minds of the gods?

Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.

Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.

The desire and pursuit of the whole is what we call love.

Love is not a god and not a mortal, but something in between, a spirit born of Poverty and Resource, always needy, always scheming, never rich and never destitute.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

Such evil deeds could religion prompt.

Nothing can ever be begotten of nothing by divine will.

In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing.

Sancho points out that the giants are windmills, and Quixote answers that the enchanter Freston turned them into windmills to rob him of the glory of the victory.

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.

All hope abandon, ye who enter in!

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, / And bathed every veyne in swich licour / Of which vertu engendred is the flour

Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynogh for me / To speke of wo that is in mariage.

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust. Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast.

Verweile doch! du bist so schön! Stay a while! You are so beautiful!

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.

Above him there was now nothing but the sky, the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with grey clouds slowly creeping across it.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.

Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow, said Mrs Ramsay. But you'll have to be up with the lark, she added.

What is the meaning of life? That was all, a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

My tongue swore, but my mind is unsworn.

We know the good and recognise it, but we do not work it out, some from idleness, and some from preferring some other pleasure to the good.

The country places and the trees won't teach me anything, but the people in the city do.

The greatest of goods come to us through madness, provided the madness is given by divine gift.

I saw him, I blushed, I turned pale at the sight of him.

It is Venus entire, fastened on her prey.

One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.

Humanity is male, and man defines woman not in herself but in relation to himself.

He seems to me equal to the gods, that man who sits opposite you and hears you speaking sweetly and laughing. It makes the heart in my breast take flight.

Some say an army of horsemen, some of foot soldiers, some of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth; but I say it is whatever one loves.

My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms.

Her limbs grew heavy and numb, a thin bark closed over her breast, her hair became leaves, her arms branches; her feet, so swift a moment before, stuck fast in sluggish roots.

I am not what I am.

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

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.

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

It was badly done, indeed!

She wanted to die, and she wanted to live in Paris.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.

He who saw the Deep, the country's foundation, who knew the proper ways, was wise in all matters.

My friend, whom I loved so dear, who with me went through every danger, Enkidu, whom I loved so dear, who with me went through every danger: the doom of mortals overtook him.

We must give up sex altogether. Why are you turning away? Where are you going? Why are you biting your lips and shaking your heads? Why have you gone pale?

First we wash the fleece to get the muck out. You should do the same with the city: beat out the scoundrels, pick off the burrs, card the ones who clump together for office, and comb the whole lot into one basket.

For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

For I, that God of Loves servantz serve, Ne dar to Love, for myn unliklynesse, Preyen for speed, al sholde I therfore sterve.

I am myn owene womman, wel at ese.

A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, / Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde, / Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine, / The cruell markes of many a bloody fielde.

Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.

All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven ages.

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.

She never told her love, / But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, / Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought, / And with a green and yellow melancholy / She sat like patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief.

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, / Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold; / Purple the sails, and so perfumed that / The winds were love-sick with them.

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety: other women cloy / The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies.

She was so innocent that when I asked her what was troubling her, she answered that the kitten had died.

Marriage, Agnes, is no laughing matter. The duties of a wife are strict, and the position I am raising you to is not one of pleasure and liberty.

I want us to be men, and on every occasion for the bottom of our hearts to show itself in what we say.

Sometimes it is a sign of honesty to hide what one thinks. Would it be right to tell a thousand people what one feels about them?

Thieves! Thieves! Assassins! Murderers! Justice, just heaven! I am undone, I am murdered, they have cut my throat, they have stolen my money.

Without a dowry.

In Italy six hundred and forty; in Germany two hundred and thirty-one; a hundred in France, in Turkey ninety-one; but in Spain, in Spain already one thousand and three.

Give me your hand, and say yes. It is not far; let us go from here.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down.

For a long time I went to bed early.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses.

There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house and studied the lighted square of window.

She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held her hand and she knew that he was speaking to her, saying something about the passage over and over again. All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart.

April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.

Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

O Sugarman done fly away, Sugarman done gone, Sugarman cut across the sky, Sugarman gone home.

Cicero writes to Atticus that he can bear his own exile, but not the destruction it has brought on his family, and asks his friend for nothing so much as continued honesty rather than comforting reassurance.

He tells Atticus he does not know which side to support, Caesar's or Pompey's, since he can see faults and dangers in both, and that indecision itself has become the most painful part of the whole crisis.

Friendship can only exist between good men, Laelius insists, and by good he means those who act with such good faith, integrity, fairness and generosity that nothing base or self-serving is mixed into their conduct.

He tells his sons-in-law that he can bear Scipio's death because Scipio himself, at the height of his fortune, needed nothing further from life, and that his own grief is for his own loss rather than any harm that has come to his friend.

In the first Eclogue Tityrus, reclining under his beech and playing his pipe, has kept his farm by the favour of a young god at Rome, while Meliboeus drives his goats into exile, dispossessed by a veteran.

The fourth Eclogue foretells a child whose birth will bring back the golden age, when the earth will give its fruits unasked and the serpent will die, a prophecy that Christians later read as foretelling Christ.

The father himself willed that the way of tillage should not be easy, and first stirred the fields by art, sharpening mortal wits with cares, so that labour conquered all, unrelenting labour and want pressing in hard times.

The first book ends with the sun darkened and the portents at Caesar's death, wars across the world, and a prayer that the gods allow Octavian to rescue an age overturned, the farmer's ploughshare turning up rusted javelins.

Horace advises seizing the day, trusting as little as possible in tomorrow, a piece of advice delivered within a specific ode addressing the shortness of life and the folly of relying on astrological calculation to predict how much time remains.

He claims to have built a monument more lasting than bronze and higher than the royal pyramids' structure, a boast that his poetry itself will outlast physical monuments, political power and even the erosion of time and weather that eventually destroys every material structure.

The Moralia collects Plutarch's seventy-eight surviving essays, dialogues and lectures on everything other than biography, including practical advice on listening to lectures, controlling anger, distinguishing a flatterer from a friend and consoling the bereaved.

The collection includes a defence of eating no meat, staking out an unusually early and considered position on animal ethics that extends moral consideration to non-human creatures in ways anticipating considerably later philosophical developments on this question.

Marie names herself directly as the author of these twelve lais, stating that she is retelling stories she heard from Breton minstrels, a claimed source that frames her considerable shaping intelligence as preservation and translation rather than pure invention.

In Bisclavret, a knight who is secretly a werewolf is betrayed by his own wife, who steals his clothes to trap him permanently in wolf form, and the tale's actual moral center rests not in his lycanthropy itself but in her specific betrayal of his trust.

Siegfried, killer of a dragon and owner of the Nibelung treasure, comes to Worms to win Kriemhild, sister of the Burgundian king Gunther, and helps Gunther by trickery to win the Icelandic queen Brünhild, a deception that will eventually prove fatal.

A quarrel between the two queens exposes the deceit by which Brünhild was won, and Gunther's vassal Hagen murders Siegfried and sinks the treasure in the Rhine, converting Kriemhild's husband's death and the lost treasure into a permanent grievance.

Ibn Arabi's poems mourn a departed beloved in the classical manner of the qasida, naming the abandoned desert campsites, the departing caravan, and the stations of the pilgrimage, working entirely within poetic conventions inherited from earlier Arabic love poetry.

He describes a heart that has become capable of every form, a pasture for gazelles and a convent for monks, a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Kaaba, and tables of the Torah and the scroll of the Quran, a single image absorbing multiple religious traditions' particular symbols into one unified capacity for love.

Sigmund draws the sword that Odin thrust into the tree in Volsung's hall, which no other man could move, and the saga follows the sword through its breaking and reforging into the hand of his son Sigurd.

Sigurd kills the dragon Fafnir, wins its cursed gold, tastes its blood and understands the birds who warn him of Regin's treachery, and rides to wake the valkyrie Brynhild from her enchanted sleep.

Dante recounts that when he first saw Beatrice, both of them nine years old, his vital spirit trembled so violently that he felt it in the most secret chambers of his heart, and from that moment love ruled over his soul.

In his sonnet on love and the gentle heart, Dante writes that love and the noble heart are a single thing, exactly as the philosopher says in his poem, one existing only where the other already is.

Dante and Virgil emerge from Hell to see again the stars, and Dante writes that to course over better waters the small vessel of his talent now hoists sail, leaving behind so cruel a sea.

Virgil explains that neither Creator nor creature was ever without love, natural or of the mind, and that natural love is never in error, but the love of the mind can err in its object, or in too much or too little vigor.

Dante writes that the glory of the One who moves all things penetrates the universe and shines in one part more and in another less, and that he has been in the heaven that receives most of that light, and has seen things that whoever descends from up there has neither the knowledge nor the power to retell.

Dante's ancestor Cacciaguida, encountered in the sphere of Mars, foretells Dante's coming exile from Florence in painful detail, and tells him that he will learn how salty another's bread tastes, and how hard the path is that goes up and down another's stairs.

It is time, sister, if you are not sleepy, to tell us one of your lovely little stories to while away the night.

Morning now dawned and Shahrazad broke off from what she had been allowed to say.

Julian describes seeing all creation as a small thing the size of a hazelnut, resting safely in the palm of God's hand, and understanding through this vision that everything exists and continues to exist only because God loves it and actively sustains it in being.

Julian relates the parable of the lord and the servant, in which a faithful servant falls into a ditch while hastening to do his lord's will, and the lord regards him not with anger but with compassion, reframing human sin's relationship to divine judgment through this unconventional parable.

Arthur draws the sword from the stone, proving his right to the throne, and subsequently founds the Round Table, establishing the fellowship of knights whose adventures, alliances and eventual internal betrayals will structure the entire remainder of the narrative.

Galahad alone achieves the quest of the Holy Grail, his exceptional purity succeeding where Lancelot's otherwise considerable chivalric excellence cannot, a pointed distinction between worldly knightly virtue and the specifically spiritual worthiness the Grail quest actually requires.

The king sits in Dunfermline town drinking his blood-red wine, and asks where he might find a good sailor to sail his ship, and an old knight names Sir Patrick Spens, who receives the king's letter and laughs once, then weeps, knowing the voyage the season demands will drown him.

Two ravens sit discussing, in a tone of complete and chilling indifference, where they shall dine, and settle on a newly slain knight lying behind an old turf wall, known to no one but his hawk, his hound and his lady, who has already taken another mate.

Teresa pictures the soul as a castle of crystal with seven suites of rooms, or mansions, and God at the centre, the journey of prayer being a movement inward from the outer rooms toward that centre.

The first three mansions describe the ordinary Christian life of prayer and its temptations, and the fourth the beginning of supernatural prayer, where the soul's own efforts give way to what God alone can give.

The new king Edward recalls his favourite Gaveston from exile, provoking the barons, led by Mortimer, to force Gaveston out, only for Edward to bring him back before the barons finally capture and kill him, establishing the play's central conflict between royal favoritism and baronial political authority.

Queen Isabella, neglected by her husband's devotion to his favorites, eventually joins Mortimer and returns from France with an army, deposing Edward and placing his young son on the throne, a transformation from wronged wife to political conspirator the play develops with genuine dramatic care.

In a framing scene a drunken tinker is tricked into thinking he is a lord and shown a play, destabilizing the entire main narrative's status from the outset and inviting audiences to question how the following comedy should actually be received.

The fortune-hunter Petruchio takes the job, marries Kate against her will and subjects her to a regime of hunger, sleeplessness and contradiction until she submits, staging psychological domination with unusual explicit detail within a comic framework.

Two sets of identical twins, both pairs separated as infants in a shipwreck, end up in the same city of Ephesus on the same day without knowing it, doubling the confusion beyond Shakespeare's classical Roman source's single pair of twins.

Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant Dromio are mistaken at every turn for their local twins, who are also called Antipholus and Dromio, entangling wives, merchants, a courtesan and a goldsmith in escalating confusion throughout the city.

Spenser's twenty-four stanzas follow the wedding day from the poet waking the bride before dawn, through the procession, the church service and the feast, to nightfall and the wedding bed, ending with a prayer for children, a comprehensive single-day structure.

The structure tracks the hours of the day and the year, giving the wedding cosmic significance beyond private celebration, a single couple's marriage mirrored in and validated by the sun's own daily progress and the calendar's larger seasonal rhythm.

Romeo Montague crashes a Capulet feast and falls in love with Juliet Capulet, and they are married in secret by Friar Laurence the next day, their love's compressed timeframe giving it genuinely dangerous intensity from its very first meeting.

Romeo kills Juliet's cousin Tybalt to avenge his friend Mercutio and is banished, demonstrating how thoroughly the older generation's feud reasserts itself even within the younger generation's attempted escape from it through violent, inherited obligation.

Hermia, ordered by her father to marry Demetrius, runs into the woods outside Athens with Lysander, followed by Demetrius and by Helena, who loves him, establishing the tangled romantic pursuit the woods' magic will further complicate.

Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, are quarrelling over a changeling boy, and Oberon's servant Puck misapplies a love potion, the lovers' affections tangle, and the weaver Bottom is given an ass's head and Titania's love.

The poet walks by the Thames and sees two swans, white as the brides, gliding down to Essex House while nymphs strew flowers, and follows them to the wedding, staging the river's natural setting as an extended allegorical mirror for the human betrothal.

Between the pageant Spenser laments his own disappointed hopes at court and praises the Earl of Essex, revealing genuine personal grievance and practical patronage concerns surfacing through occasional verse's conventional public celebratory form.

To finance his friend Bassanio's courtship of the heiress Portia, the merchant Antonio borrows from the Jewish moneylender Shylock, whom he has long abused, and agrees in jest to forfeit a pound of his flesh if he defaults on the loan.

Bassanio wins Portia by choosing the right casket, but Antonio's ships are lost and Shylock demands the bond, converting the romantic plot's happy resolution into direct confrontation with the financial crisis threatening Antonio's actual life.

Returning from war to Messina, the young lord Claudio falls for Hero, the governor's daughter, while Benedick and Hero's cousin Beatrice resume a running battle of insults their friends will need only manipulate into acknowledged mutual attraction.

The prince's bastard brother Don John stages a scene that makes Claudio think Hero is unfaithful, and Claudio denounces her at the altar, staging a genuinely brutal public humiliation the play's title ironically frames as much ado about nothing.

Simon Eyre greets his workers each morning with a torrent of boisterous, half-nonsensical exclamations and endearments, mad Hyperboreans and princes among prentices, establishing from his first appearance the exuberant comic energy that carries the play.

Rowland Lacy disguises himself as a Dutch shoemaker, Hans, and takes work in Eyre's shop specifically to remain near Rose after being forbidden by his uncle the Earl to marry her, a disguise plot that lets a gentleman move, temporarily and by choice, into the working world the play otherwise celebrates.

In the seventh year of the Trojan War, the Trojan prince Troilus loves Cressida, whose father has defected to the Greeks, and her uncle Pandarus brings them together, staging romance within a war already grinding well past its initial heroic excitement.

The next morning Cressida is traded to the Greek camp for a prisoner, and Troilus watches from hiding as she gives herself to the Greek Diomedes, staging betrayal witnessed rather than merely reported and forcing the audience to share his devastating position.

The Duke of Vienna pretends to leave the city and hands power to the strict deputy Angelo, then stays behind disguised as a friar to watch, allowing him to observe his own city's actual moral condition and his deputy's real character firsthand.

Angelo revives a dormant law and condemns Claudio to death for getting his fiancée pregnant, and offers to spare him if Isabella sleeps with him, revealing absolute power's genuine corrupting potential with unusual directness.

Oh, that thou hadst been so happy to have died before this hour.

I am no man, but the poor shadow of a maid that loved you, and to follow you disguised, took this way of Bellario.

Leontes, king of Sicilia, suddenly convinces himself that his pregnant wife Hermione has been unfaithful with his friend Polixenes, king of Bohemia, staging jealousy as genuinely irrational psychological eruption rather than response to actual evidence.

He imprisons Hermione, has the newborn daughter abandoned on the Bohemian coast, and learns from the oracle that he was wrong just as his son and, apparently, his wife die, one man's delusion inflicting cascading harm across his entire family.

The widowed Duchess secretly marries her steward Antonio, wooing him herself since he cannot woo her, against the wishes of her brothers, who have set the malcontent Bosola to spy on her.

Ferdinand torments the imprisoned Duchess with a dead man's hand, wax figures of her husband and children, and a chorus of madmen, and then has Bosola strangle her, her children and her maid; she dies saying, I am Duchess of Malfi still.

Sir Giles Overreach, a ruthless extortioner modelled on a real monopolist of the period, has ruined his own nephew Wellborn financially and schemes coldly to marry his daughter Margaret to a lord, treating both family relationships as purely instrumental to his own financial and social advancement.

Wellborn, with the help of the rich widow Lady Allworth, tricks Overreach into believing he is about to marry her and so restore his ruined credit, a deception that uses financial manipulation with genuine poetic justice against a man who built his fortune through exactly this kind of calculated scheme.

If they be two, they are two so as stiff twin compasses are two, thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show to move, but doth, if the other do; and though it in the center sit, yet when the other far doth roam, it leans, and hearkens after it.

Mark but this flea, and mark in this, how little that which thou deniest me is; me it sucked first, and now sucks thee, and in this flea our two bloods mingled be.

Rodrigue asks himself whether he should avenge his father and lose Chimène, or keep Chimène and live with a father's dishonor, and concludes that a single moment's hesitation would itself be a second, unforgivable dishonor added to the first.

Chimène tells the king that she demands Rodrigue's death not because her love for him has died, but precisely because it has not, and that only justice, not diminished feeling, drives her to ask for his execution.

Polyeucte tells Néarque, who urges caution, that he can no longer bear to see idols worshipped as gods, and that he will overturn them at the very altar, whatever the cost to himself, since faith once truly received cannot be practiced only in secret.

Pauline pleads before Félix, her own father, that whatever crime Polyeucte has committed against the state's gods, he remains her husband and an innocent man by every standard that actually matters, and that condemning him would be an injustice dressed as law.

Don Juan, a nobleman who takes any woman he wants and believes in nothing but arithmetic, abandons his new wife Elvire and moves from seduction to seduction with his servant Sganarelle protesting behind him throughout the play's entire action.

Don Juan mocks a beggar's faith, cheats a creditor, rejects his father's pleas, and finally adopts hypocrisy as a calculated strategy rather than experiencing any genuine change of heart, escalating his cruelty toward everyone around him.

Andromache, Hector's widow, is the captive of Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, who loves her and will spare her son Astyanax only if she marries him, weaponizing his considerable political power over a captive woman into coercive romantic leverage.

Andromache agrees to marry Pyrrhus intending to kill herself afterwards, staging maternal duty and personal integrity in irreconcilable tension, accepting a repugnant marriage purely to save her son while privately refusing to actually survive the compromise.