“To a woman indifferent to love, every man is the same, and all are men; but to her whose heart is truly susceptible of that refined passion, there is no other man in the world but her lover.”

“Rome, thou art a whole world, it is true, and yet without love this World would not be the world, Rome would cease to be Rome.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe《Roman Elegies》

“Say thou dost love me, love me, love me—toll The silver iterance!—only minding, Dear, To love me also in silence with thy soul.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning《Sonnets from the Portuguese》

“I, unhappy that I am, these eight years have I loved thee more than my life, and thou, as I have felt, art all afire and all consumed with love of a strange woman, wicked and perverse man that thou art!”

— Giovanni Boccaccio《The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio》

“You wish me to love you: this is the man whom I love, and whom I have sworn to love during my whole life: make the comparison yourself.”

— Antoine François Prévost《Manon Lescaut》

“Even the wisest man in the world, though he dearly loved them, could never make women out; and I fear, Harry, that you and I are not even the wisest men in the Welsh Fusileers.”

— James Grant《Under the Red Dragon: A Novel》

“Sometimes love, for a woman, means only shelter; often, for a man, love means the blending of all knowledge, of all beauty, all ambition, of all that he has learned from books and from life.”

— E. Phillips Oppenheim《The Zeppelin's Passenger》

“Nowhere could he discern an opening through the formidable barrier; yet somewhere into this inhospitable world of stone the green warrior had borne the woman of the red man’s heart’s desire.”

— Edgar Rice Burroughs《Thuvia, Maid of Mars》

“Human love, the love of mother, husband, and friend rank above it, and first of all stands the love of God.”

— Clotilde Graves《That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day》

“If one should dream that such a world began In some slow devil's heart, that hated man, Who should deny him?--God, as thou art clean, Suffer not this, oh, suffer not this sin To be, that e'er I look on such a day!”

— Sophocles《Oedipus King of Thebes: Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes》

“The whole panorama of the world's life before the historic period, seemed to be born over again, and mine was the only human heart that beat in this unpeopled world!”

— Jules Verne《A Journey to the Centre of the Earth》

“The hatred of the "world," the curse on the affections, the fear of beauty and sensuality, another world, invented for the purpose of slandering this world the more, at bottom a longing for.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche《The Birth of Tragedy》

“The old man had loved Undine with exceeding tenderness, and it was doubtful to his mind that the mere disappearance of his beloved child could be properly viewed as her death.”

— Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué《Undine》