Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

Absence does not make the heart grow fonder, but it sure heats up the blood.

Love without sex is still the most efficient form of hell known to man.

At the heart of all romanticism is suffering.

Don't you see what's happened? You wanted to be in love again. To feel that feeling where a man you hardly know gazes into your eyes and seems to be the only human being who ever understood the real you.

Were all first loves like that? Somehow she doubted it; even now it struck her as being more real than anything she'd ever known. Sometimes it saddened her to think that she'd never experience that kind of feeling again, but then life had a way of stamping out that intensity of passion; she'd learned all too well that love wasn't always enough.

There is not a single heart but has its moments of longing.

To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

She thought it was part of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of larger wants than others seemed to feel – that she had to endure this wide hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth.

No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.

Oh, Claire, ye do break my heart wi' loving you.

Just to make your eyes sparkle, I'd do anything. I could give it all up to know you were my girl. Just being with you and listening to your laugh is what makes up my other half. I was lost and cold inside when your heart called out to mine. Now I know you're the only thing that keeps me hanging on, when the rest of the world seems to come crashing down." -Jax Stone

For did my dreams come true when I looked at you. And maybe too, if you would believe, you too might be overjoyed, over loved, over me.

I don't seem to have any real strategy or pattern when it comes to love... At times I've been really guarded and careful and afraid to trust someone. But other times, you want to jump in headfirst. I've had moments of thinking, this is who I love and I don't care what anyone says. Those moments are beautiful and wild and exciting, but I've learned that those moments can end up hurting you in the end. I've been careful in love. I've been careless in love. And I've had adventures I wouldn't trade for anything.

You know what makes your heart swift, you know what makes your breath catch your throat, you know what makes your chest tight with anticipation. Go get that!

To an untrained eye, need and love were as easily mistaken for each other as the real master's painting and a forgery.

Well, at first, I was sure that he would feel the cosmic forces pulling us together. I wanted him so badly, I could feel my heart racing for him with every beat. It was destiny. "He was a magnet and I was steel.

Madam, you have bereft me of all words, Only my blood speaks to you in my veins.

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.

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.

Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.

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.

Your hair is winter fire January embers My heart burns there, too.

Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. Audacious longing, burning songs, daring thoughts, an impulse overwhelming the heart, usurping the mind--these are all a drive towards serving Him who rings our hearts like a bell. It is as if He were waiting to enter our empty, perishing lives.

You always want what you can’t have.

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