Amorous Quotes

Implied Subjection, but requir'd with gentle sway, And by her yielded, by him best receiv'd,- Yielded with coy submission, modest pride, And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.

John Milton

Sweet, Pride, Delay

John Milton, Henry John Todd (1852). “The Poetical Works of John Milton: With Notes of Various Authors; and with Some Account of the Life and Writings of Milton, Derived Principally from Original Documents in Her Majesty's State-paper Office”, p.72

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I can no longer think of anything but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me.

Honore de Balzac

Love, Romantic, Thinking Of You

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What dire offence from am'rous causes springs, What mighty contests rise from trivial things.

Alexander Pope

Spring, Causes, Trivial Things

'The Rape of the Lock' (1714) canto 1, l. 1

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Men and women are not born inconstant: they are made so by their early amorous experiences.

Andre Maurois

Women, Infidelity, Born

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Fantastic tyrant of the amorous heart. How hard thy yoke, how cruel thy dart. Those escape your anger who refuse your sway, and those are punished most, who most obey.

Matthew Prior

Love, Anger, Heart

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He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship -- it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out.

Virginia Woolf

Summer, Horse, Heart

Virginia Woolf (2014). “Orlando”, p.8, Lettere Animate Editore

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Fancy your having no sunshine in London yesterday! Here it was glorious, like full summer, and I sat up with the window wide open, listening to the discourse of two amorous thrushes.

Marie Corelli

Summer, Sunshine, Two

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Unless a woman has an amorous heart, she is a dull companion.

Samuel Johnson

Heart, Dull, Companion

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The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love. In the morning mist, hazy and amorous, London was delirious. London squinted as it floated along, milky pink, without caring where it was going.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Morning, Being In Love, Caring

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But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph.

William Shakespeare

Love, Glasses, Nymphs

'Richard III' (1591) act 1, sc. 1, l. 9

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As Darwin puts it in The Descent of Man, 'Male snakes, though appearing so sluggish, are amorous.' Isn't that just like Darwin? It was one of his main ideas, you know, that the males of almost all animals have stronger passions than the females. Since then we've learned a thing or two. At any rate, the female snake is right there when spring arrives in the woods.

Will Cuppy

Spring, Passion, Men

Will Cuppy (1944). “The Great Bustard and Other People: Containing: How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes and How to Become Extinct”

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Be warm, be pure, be amorous, but be chaste.

Lord Byron

Chastity, Chaste, Pure

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Now piercèd is her virgin zone; She feels the foe within it. She hears a broken amorous groan, The panting lover's fainting moan, Just in the happy minute.

John Wilmot

Broken, Lovers, Fainting

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in the press, my sex life was something else again. I was Lady Bountiful of the Sheets. Some of the best fiction of the Sixties was written about my amorous adventures with an assortment of lovers who could have only been chosen by a berserk random sampler.

Doris Day

Sex, Adventure, Fiction

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...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.

Alain de Botton

Love, May, Ends

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But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionable That dogs bark at me as I halt by them,-- Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my shadow in the sun.

William Shakespeare

Dog, Glasses, Breathing

'Richard III' (1591) act 1, sc. 1, l. 9

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All my desires are born of my dreams. And I have proven my love with words. To what fantastic creatures have I entrusted myself, in what dolorous and ravishing world has my imagination enclosed me? I am sure of having been loved in the most mysterious of domains, my own. The language of my love does not belong to human language, my human body does not touch the flesh of my love. My amorous imagination has always been constant and high enough so that nothing could attempt to convince me of error.

Paul Eluard

Dream, Errors, Imagination

Paul Eluard, “At The Window”

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Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapped power. Let us roll our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball And tear our pleasures with rough strife Through the iron gates of life: Thus, while we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Andrew Marvell

Sports, Running, Morning

c.1650-1652 'To His Coy Mistress' (published 1681).

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She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.

Isabel Allende

Mother, Wall, Fate

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a connotation of infinity sharpens the temporal splendor of this night when souls which have forgot frivolity in lowliness,noting the fatal flight of worlds whereto this earth’s a hurled dream down eager avenues of lifelessness consider for how much themselves shall gleam, in the poised radiance of perpetualness. When what’s in velvet beyond doomed thought is like a woman amorous to be known; and man,whose here is alway worse than naught, feels the tremendous yonder for his own— on such a night the sea through her blind miles of crumbling silence seriously smiles

e. e. cummings

Dream, Night, Men

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To the garden of the world anew descending,
Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding,
The love, the life of their bodies, meaning and being,
Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber,
The revolving cycles in their wide sweep having brought me again,
amorous, mature, all beautiful to me, all wondrous,
My limbs and the quivering fire that ever plays through them, for reasons, most wondrous,
Existing I peer and penetrate still,
Content with the present, content with the past,
By my side or back of me Eve following,
Or in front, and I following her just the same.

Walt Whitman

Beautiful, Daughter, Spring

Walt Whitman, “To The Garden The World”

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Now came still evening on, and twilight gray Had in her sober livery all things clad; Silence accompany'd; for beast and bird, They to their grassy couch, these to their nests, Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale; She all night long her amorous descant sung; Silence was pleas'd. Now glow'd the firmament With living sapphires; Hesperus, that led The starry host, rode brightest, till the moon, Rising in clouded majesty, at length Apparent queen unveil'd her peerless light, And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.

John Milton

Life, Queens, Twilight

'Paradise Lost' (1667) bk. 4, l. 598

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Lovers can do their amorous rites by their own beauties

William Shakespeare

Love, Romantic Romeo And Juliet, Rite

William Shakespeare (1853). “The life and beauties of Shakespeare: comprising careful selections from each play, with a general index, digesting them under proper heads”, p.294

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The great and amorous sky curved over the earth, and lay upon her as a pure lover. The rain, the humid flux descending from heaven for both man and animal, for both thick and strong, germinated the wheat, swelled the furrows with fecund mud and brought forth the buds in the orchards. And it is I who empowered these moist espousals, I the great Aphrodite.

Aeschylus

Strong, Rain, Animal

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Rohan, one of us is an unmarried man with superior mathematical abilities and no prospects for the evening. The other is a confirmed lecher in an amorous mood, with a willing and nubile young wife waiting at home. Who do you think should do the damned account books?" And, with a nonchalant wave, St. Vincent had left the office.

Lisa Kleypas

Book, Home, Men

Lisa Kleypas (2007). “Mine Till Midnight”, p.21, Macmillan

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