David Rodeback's Blog

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Early Help for Next Valentine's Day

I sent my wife several e-mails yesterday with good and/or fun quotes about love. Here are most of them, in case you need them next year. My favorite, at least for yesterday's purposes? This one: Nunc scio quit sit amor. (If your Latin's rusty, google it.)

I sent my wife several e-mails yesterday with good and/or fun quotations about love. Here are most of the quotations, in case you need them next year. They are from The Quotable Lover, edited by Nancy Butler, which I picked up on remainder at Border's several months ago, precisely for yesterday's purpose.

I didn't post these yesterday because I wanted to give my own valentine first crack at them. How did she like them, you wonder? Alas, she was too busy being a city councilor to read personal e-mail. I'm hoping she'll read them today. They don't all apply to her -- for example, she does not resemble a cockroach -- and not all of them reflect the views of your blogger, but humor is a worthy pursuit in itself, is it not?

"Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love." -- Albert Einstein

"Where there is love there is life." -- Mohandas Gandhi

"Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly." -- Rose Franken

"If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends." -- Orson Welles

"Ah, if we could find a little bungalow. Of course, I know we could find one, but the people might not move out." -- Groucho Marx

"Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem." -- G. K. Chesterton

"Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it." -- Boris Pasternak

"Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired." -- Robert Frost

"Is there anything better than to be longing for something, when you know it is within reach?" -- Greta Garbo

"It's okay to laugh in the bedroom, as long as you don't point." -- Will Durst

"There's not much meat on her, but what there is, is choice." -- Spencer Tracy

"Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it." -- Maurice Chevalier

"Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage." -- Gloria Steinem

"Perfection is what American women expect to find in their husbands . . . but English women only hope to find it in their butlers." -- W. Somerset Maugham

"By all means marry. If you get a good wife you will become happy, and if you get a bad one you will become a philosopher." -- Socrates (right before Mrs. Socrates smacked him with an ancient Greek frying pan)

"Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity." -- George Bernard Shaw

"A good marriage is like a casserole, only those responsible for it really know what goes in it." -- Anonymous

"For how many people are there who have the memory of a whole long day and a whole long night, shining and sweet, to carry with them in their hearts until they die?" -- Dorothy Parker

"To be able to say how much you love is to love but little." -- Petrarch

"I embrace my little cockroach and send her a million kisses." -- Anton Chekhov (note to self: must check translation)

"When I died, I wanted Sallie to say when she kissed me for the last time, 'I chose the right man.'" -- Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

"The lover knows much more about the absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise." -- George Santayana

"The lover is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods but cannot himself imagine that there could ever be other gods." -- Theodor Reik

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come." -- Matt Groening (oops, how did this get in here?)

"Ah, when will this long weary day have end,
And lend me leave to come unto my love?" -- Edmund Spenser

"Nunc scio quit sit amor." -- Virgil (I doubt it was italicized when he said it.)

Comment on this entry
(Readable, relevant, civilized, substantive responses will be posted, regardless of position.)

Copyright 2006 by David Rodeback.
All rights reserved.
Permission is given to publish this article elsewhere on the Web or via e-mail only under these conditions: The article is published intact and unchanged, and is properly credited to the author; and a visible link is included to the article's page at LocalCommentary.com.