Things base and vile, folding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity:
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind:
Nor hath Love's mind of any judgement taste;
Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste:
And therefore is Love said to be a child,
Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.
(A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.1)
As love is full of unbefitting strains,
All wanton as a child, skipping and vain,
Form'd by the eye and therefore, like the eye,
Full of strange shapes, of habits and of forms,
Varying in subjects as the eye doth roll
To every varied object in his glance
(Love's Labour's Lost, 5.2)
So loving to my mother,
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven,
Visit her face' too roughly.
(Hamlet, 1.2)
If thou remember'st not the slightest folly
That ever love did make thee run into,
Thou hast not loved.
(As You Like It, 2.4)
Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
(As You Like It, 3.5)
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
(Sonnet 116)
Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows' bent; none our parts so poor
But was a race of heaven.
(Antony and Cleopatra, 1.3)
Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.
(Hamlet, 2.2)
When Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.
(Love's Labour's Lost, 4.3)
Have I caught thee, my heavenly jewel? Why, now let
me die, for I have lived long enough.
(The Merry Wives of Windsor, 3.3)
Such is my love, to thee I so belong,
That for thy right myself will bear all wrong.
(Sonnet 88)
But love, first learned in a lady's eyes,
Lives not alone immured in the brain;
But, with the motion of all elements,
Courses as swift as thought in every power,
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.
(Love's Labours Lost, 4.3)
See how she leans her cheek upon her hand.
O that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek.
(Romeo and Juliet, 2.2)
One half of me is yours, the other half yours
Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours,
And so all yours.
(The Merchant of Venice, 3.2)
The sight of lovers feedeth those in love.
(As You Like It, 3.4)
I love thee so, that, maugre all thy pride,
Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide.
Do not extort thy reasons from this clause,
For that I woo, thou therefore hast no cause
But rather reason thus with reason fetter,
Love sought is good, but given unsought better.
(Twelfth Night, 3.1)
But love is blind, and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit;
For, if they could, Cupid himself would blush.
(The Merchant of Venice, 2.6)
Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink were temper'd with Love's sighs;
(Twelfth Night, 4.3)
This is the very ecstacy of love:
Whose violent property fore does itself,
And leads the will to desperate undertakings,
As oft as any passion under heaven,
That does afflict our natures.
(Hamlet, 2.1)
The prize of all too precious you.
(Sonnet 86)
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
(Sonnet 18)
What made me love thee? let that persuade thee
there's something extraordinary in thee. I cannot: but I love thee; none
but thee; and thou deservest it.
(The Merry Wives of Windsor, 3.3)
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
(Sonnet 29)
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.
(Sonnet 43)
A lean cheek, -- a blue eye, and sunken, -- an unquestionable spirit, -- a beard neglected:-- Then your hose should be ungartered, your bonnet unhanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and every thing about you demonstrating a careless desolation.
(As You Like It, 3.2)
But, mistress, know yourself: down on your knees,
And thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love.
(As You Like It, 3.5)
Love is a spirit all compact of fire.
(Venus and Adonis, 151)
She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i'th' bud,
Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
(Twelfth Night, 2.4)
He says, he loves my daughter;
I think so too; for never gaz'd the moon
Upon the water, as he'll stand and read,
As 'twere, my daughter's eyes: and, to be plain,
I think, there is not half a kiss to choose,
Who loves another best.
(The Winter's Tale, 4.3)
Love is merely a madness: and, I tell you, deserves as
as well a dark house and a whip, as madmen do: and the
reason why they are not so punished and cured, is, that
the lunacy is so ordinary, that the whippers are in love too.
(As You Like It, 3.2)