Abraham Cowley Quotes

I think Helen of Troy must have been pretty hot. She got two countries going crazy for 10 years over her.

Fortune has something of the nature of a woman. If she is too intensely wooed, she commonly goes the further away.

Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.

That's what love does - it pursues blindly, unflinchingly, and without end. When you go after something you love, you'll do anything it takes to get it, even if it costs everything.

I have pursued her, as love hath pursued me

The essence of romantic love is not the company of a lover but the pursuit.

Opposition to a man in love is like oil to fire.

Love clamors far more incessantly and passionately at a closed gate than an open one!

I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.

I love you, I know this must come as something of a surprise, since all I’ve ever done is scorn you and degrade you and taunt you, but I have loved you for several hours now, and every second, more. I thought an hour ago that I loved you more than any woman has ever loved a man, but a half hour after that I knew that what I felt before was nothing compared to what I felt then. But ten minutes after that, I understood that my previous love was a puddle compared to the high seas before a storm.

O sacred hunger of ambitious minds.

Love's like a junkie, addiction's a fact. Passion's a monkey, you can't keep off your back.

What a mystery this is, desire. The love sickness, the sensitivity, the obsession, the flutter of the heart, the ebb and flow of the blood. There is no drug and no alcohol to equal it.

Jealousy is the forerunner of love, and often its awakener.

In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs. And in the morning, long before she was fully awake, she felt a longing so bitter and tight it yanked her out of a sleep swept clean of dreams.

The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

My waking thoughts are all of thee. Your portrait and the remembrance of last night's delirium have robbed my senses of repose. Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what an extraordinary influence you have over my heart. Are you vexed? Do I see you sad? Are you ill at ease? My soul is broken with grief, and there is no rest for your lover.

You said, 'I'm going to leave him because my love for you makes any other life a lie.' I've hidden these words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one's watching. They haven't faded. Nothing about you has faded. You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?

In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one's will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another's passion; of seeing another human being seared by the flame of her desire and of having to look impotently, lacking the power, the capacity, the strength to pluck her from the flames.

He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.

Obsession is love in an extreme shape.

One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.

The pleasures of love are for those who are hopelessly addicted to another living creature.

I don't want to be loved. I want to be desired. Love is safety, but desire is foul.

O love, when thou gettest dominion over us, we may bid good-by to prudence.