Roy Exum
Love is a serious business and, if you find yourself without a Valentine on this day of love, look at it like you are saving money. According to the economists, Americans will – or already have – spent a staggering $19 billion (with a ‘b’) on Valentine’s Day 2015. The average person will spend $142.31 on gifts – that includes $4.8 billion in jewelry, $3.6 billion on “date nights,” and $2.1 billion in flowers. According to Forbes magazine, over 20 percent of us will even spent $703 million on our pets.
As I did my morning readings yesterday, I found out what is believed to be the greatest love letter of all time was written by a guy I had lunch with one time. Johnny Cash, the famed country singer, was married to June Carter Cash (they famously sang a duet together, “Jackson”) and in 1995, Johnny was on tour in Denmark – of all places – when he sent this wonderful letter to June on her 65th birthday:
"We get old and get used to each other. We think alike. We read each other’s minds. We know what the other wants without asking. Sometimes we irritate each other a little bit. Maybe sometimes take each other for granted. But once in awhile, like today, I meditate on it and realize how lucky I am to share my life with the greatest woman I ever met. You still fascinate and inspire me. You influence me for the better. You’re the object of my desire, the #1 earthly reason for my existence. I love you very much."
For the record, I’m lousy at love. I admit it. But in honor of those who have it, I have searched out my top 50 quotes from noted experts this Valentine’s Day in hopes you might spring one on your “main squeeze” instead of telling them, “I love you like a fat kid loves cake.”
Here we go, in no certain order:
"Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies." – Aristotle
"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart." - Helen Keller
"I am weird, you are weird. Everyone in this world is weird. One day, two people come together in mutual weirdness and fall in love." - Dr. Seuss
"I want to be one of those old couples you see still holding hands and laughing after fifty years of marriage. That's what I want. I want to be someone's forever." - Rachel Gibson
"Love is missing someone whenever you're apart, but somehow feeling warm inside because you're close in heart." - Kay Knudsen
"Love is not finding someone to live with; it's finding someone you can't live without." - Rafael Ortiz
"It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight." - Vladimir Nabokov
"All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt." – Charles Schulz
"If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more." - Emma, Jane Austen.
"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." - Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
"Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom." – Shakespeare
"I believe love is always eternal. Even if eternity is only five minutes." - Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, Sandra Cisneros
"Love is not about staring at each other, but staring off in the same direction." - Antoine de Saint Exupery
"Were not there you, I'd be not too." - Karen Marie Moning
"I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love." - Francois Sagon
"You are every reason, every hope and every dream I've ever had." - The Notebook, Nicholas Sparks
"Of all the things my eyes have seen, the best by far is you." - Cecilia and the Satellite
"I could stay with you forever and never realize the time." - "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go," Bob Dylan
"My god, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches!" - The Princess Bride
"For you, a thousand times over." - The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
"Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope." - Maya Angelou
"Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you." - Selected Diaries, Virginia Woolf
"I didn't fall in love with you. I walked into love with you, with my eyes wide open, choosing to take every step along the way. I do believe in fate and destiny, but I also believe we are only fated to do the things that we'd choose anyway. And I'd choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I'd find you and I'd choose you." - The Chaos of Stars, Kiersten White
"Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic." - Frida Kahlo
"If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you." - Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne
"The greatest thing you'll ever know is to just love and be loved in return." – from the song "Nature Boy" by Nat King Cole
"And think not that you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course." - The Prophet, Kahil Gibran
"I love her and that is the beginning and end of everything." - Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, F.Scott Fitzgerald
"The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of." – Pascal
"To love another person is to see the face of God." - Victor Hugo
"Your wide eyes are the only light I know from extinguished constellations." - Pablo Neruda
"I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight." - Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I love you and it’s getting worse.” - Joseph E. Morris
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” - Oscar Wilde
“Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.” - Jules Renard
“Love is a lot like a backache, it doesn’t show up on X-rays, but you know it’s there.” - George Burns
“Love means nothing in tennis, but it’s everything in life.” - Author unknown
“Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not. So each is inevitably disappointed.” - Albert Einstein
“Love is being stupid together.” - Paul Valery
“Love is like war, easy to begin but hard to end.” - Leo Buscaglia
“I'll love you till the bluebells forget to bloom; I'll love you till the clover has lost its perfume. I'll love you till the poets run out of rhyme, until the ‘Twelfth of Never’ and that's a long, long time.” – Johnny Mathis.
“Love is the thing that enables a woman to sing while she mops up the floor after her husband has walked across it in his barn boots.” – Unkown
“Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.” - Charlie Brown
“Love doesn’t make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile.” - Franklin P. Jones
“People who throw kisses are hopelessly lazy.” - Bob Hope
"Love is friendship set on fire." - Jeremy Taylor
“You're the better half of me, you're the only half I need." - "Wild Ones," You Me At Six
“Only time can heal your broken heart, just as only time can heal his broken arms and legs.” - Miss Piggy
"My love for you is a puzzle, for which I have no answers. I can't control it, and now I don't care. I truly, deeply love you." - Padme Amidala
“Love, I’ve come to understand is more than three words mumbled before bedtime.” - Nicholas Sparks
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