Love is an emotion of a strong affection and personal attachment. Love is also said to be a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection —"the unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another". Love may describe compassionate and affectionate actions towards other humans, one's self or animals.
In English, love refers to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from pleasure ("I loved that meal") to interpersonal attraction ("I love my partner"). "Love" may refer specifically to the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love, to the sexual love of eros, to the emotional closeness of familial love, to the platonic love that defines friendship, or to the profound oneness or devotion of religious love, or to a concept of love that encompasses all of those feelings. This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, compared to other emotional states.
Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts.
Love may be understood as part of the survival instinct, a function to keep human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species.
Read more about Love: Definitions, Impersonal Love, Interpersonal Love, Philosophical Views
Famous quotes containing the word love:
“Thy name is an ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.”
—Bible: Hebrew The Song of Solomon 1:3.
“I love snow, and all the forms
Of the radiant frost;
I love waves, and winds and storms,
Everything almost
Which is Nature’s, and may be
Untainted by man’s misery.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“I can love both fair and brown;
Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays;
Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays;
Her whom the country formed, and whom the town;
Her who believes, and her who tries;
Her who still weeps with spongy eyes;
And her who is dry cork, and never cries.
I can love her, and her, and you and you,
I can love any, so she be not true.”
—John Donne (1572–1631)