There is no word in our language which has been so much misused and prostituted as the word <i>love</i>. It has been preached by those who were ready to condone every cruelty if it served their purpose; it has been used as a disguise under which to force people into sacrificing their own happiness, into submitting their whole self to those who profited from this surrender. [...] It has been made so empty that for many people love may mean no more than that two people have lived together for twenty years just without fighting more often than once a week.

Next to ‘God’, ‘love’ is the word most mangled in every language.

Of all the bright cruel lies they tell you, the cruelest is the one called love.

Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing

"Ah!" he said. "Love, that terrible thing!"

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

love is profane, since it mortally reaches toward the heaven in ye!

Love is reverence, worship, glory, and the upward glance. But they don’t know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who’ve never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you’ve felt what it means to love–the total passion for the total height–you’re incapable of anything less..

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.

We use the word love in such a sloppy way that it can mean almost nothing or absolutely everything.

What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.

they blasphemed God, their parents, their time on earth,
the race of Adam, and the day and the hour
and the place and the seed and the womb that gave them birth.

"Every kind of contempt for sex, every impurification of it by means of the concept "impure", is the crime par excellence against life — is the real sin against the holy spirit of life"

Love, love, love – all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.