Love is an incredible emotion or feeling, it can bring out the best in people and it can also bring out the worst. It is so powerful that it can transform individuals. Here are some quotes from those who have tried to sum up this emotion in words.
"At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet." -Plato
The Greeks knew it, the birds and the bees knew it, and whether we are strolling alongside our first school crush, or trying to find the perfect match on our favourite dating sites, we know what it means to be in love.
As the power behind the "face that launched a thousand ships," it is hard to argue with the notion that love is one of the strongest of all human emotions. Love has started wars and ended friendships, brought together feuding households and turned the greatest of men weak at the knees. For thousands of years men and women have tried to distil the great emotion down to truest form. Millions of words have been written, in care, in jest, in despair and in hope to find the absolute beauty that exists behind so simple a word and so complicated a feeling.
Arguably the greatest of all English-language writers, William Shakespeare is perhaps as well known today for his musings on love as he is for his plays. Whether he was comparing "to a summer's day," or observing- "Love is a spirit all compact of fire," or simply questioning, "Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" the insights of the bard have helped to shape our view of romantic love from dating sites to Valentine's Day cards.
Still, Shakespeare was not the first and he would not be the last to catch love in a bottle. In the years since, perhaps John Donne has given us some of the most useful understandings for the great emotion. After all, the poet is the one who implored us remember, "Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies," and "Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Then again, perhaps we should from the poets to the scientists, where even one of the greatest of all time, the man who unlocked many of the secrets to our physical universe was at such a loss he would throw up his hands, declaring that even "the laws of gravity cannot be held responsible for people falling in love." Of course, Albert Einstein, the father of relativity, did not think love and science as mutually exclusive; "When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it's only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think its two hours. That's relativity.
Perhaps, in the end, it is as F. Scott Fitzgerald's great love Zelda Fitzgerald, said, "Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold."
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