Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish writer and playwright, author of The Picture of Dorian Gray and the comedy The Importance of Being Earnest. He was as known for his wit in conversation as for his work. In 1895 he was sentenced to two years' hard labour for homosexuality, which broke him; he died in Paris three years after his release.
About this theme: Love
The Greeks had several words for what we cover with one: eros for desire, philia for the affection between friends, storge for family attachment, agape for the kind that asks nothing back. Translate all of that into a single word and the distinctions vanish — yet the distinctions are what most quotes about love are actually about.
More by Oscar Wilde
- To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
- We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
- Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
- The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
- Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.
More on Love
- No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.— Charles Dickens
- A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.— Elbert Hubbard
- The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched — they must be felt with the heart.— Helen Keller
- One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love.— Sophocles
- Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.— Mother Teresa