Redefining Love Quotes and Valentines Day Sayings

Love has inspired many a novel, film, speech and other art forms. Quotations and sayings about love can be inspirational, humorous or even sad.

Valentines Day, wedding anniversaries, birthdays and the holidays are occasions when a funny or inspiring quotations about love may come in handy. In fact, there's lots of quotes about Valentines Day in particular - a holiday that inspires cynicism among both single and married people alike.

The following love quotes, Valentines Day sayings and quotations on affection will make the perfect addition to a holiday greeting card or scrapbook, among many other things.

  • "Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired." ~ Robert Frost
  • "Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." ~ Robert Heinlin
  • "If you ever think of me out of the blue, just remember it's all the kisses I've blown in the air finally catching up with you." ~ Unknown
  • "At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet." ~ Plato
  • "Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved." ~ Victor Hugo
  • "Love is grand. Divorce is a hundred grand." ~ Unknown
  • "I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love." ~ Mother Teresa
  • "Love doesn't make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile." ~ Franklin P. Jones
  • "Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love." ~ Albert Einstein
  • "Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life." ~ Lord Byron
  • "When you're in love with someone, it inspires you and gives you hope. You have faith that even if you can't be with them on earth, that if God wills, you will be with them one day in heaven." ~ Unknown
  • "Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence." ~ Henry Louis Mencken
  • "The hottest love has the coldest end." ~ Socrates
  • "Immature love says, ' love you because I need you.' Mature love says, 'I need you because I love you.'" ~ Erich Fromm
  • "Lord, grant that I might not so much seek to be loved as to love." ~ St. Francis of Assisi
  • "You can't buy love, but you can pay heavily for it." ~ Henny Youngman
  • "Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing." ~ Anais Nin
  • "A life without love is like a year without summer." ~ Swedish Proverb
  • "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart." ~ Helen Keller

The Origin of the Word Sweet

The word sweet can be traced back to the Old English swete, an adjective that meant, "pleasing to the senses, mind or feelings". The word can be traced back to its Proto Indo European origins by *swad (Sanskrit svadu) which makes the word over five thousand years old.

Sweet as Taste

For over 1500 years the word sweet has been used to describe the sense of taste in the English language. For a taste to be sweet, it is in direct opposition to bitter and sour tastes, "having or designating the pleasant flavor characteristic of sugar, honey, and many ripe fruits". Sweet food also meant any fresh food that wasn’t acidic through fermentation. Some foods that have incorporated sweet as their name include sweetbread (1565- the bread suffix coming from the Old English bræd meaning flesh), sweet and sour cooking (1723- which did not originally describe oriental food), and sweet or candy drop (1851-which was originally termed ‘sweetie’).

Sweet and Other Senses

Sweet has been used to describe all the other human senses also. A pleasant smell such as roses or perfume from Old English could be termed as sweet, and by the late 18th century for someone to smell sweet meant that they were perfumed or scented. Sweet could also describe melodious and harmonious sound and by the early 20th century, a sweet sound (especially in jazz) meant playing at a steady tempo without improvisation. By late Middle English the weather could be described as sweet if it was considered warm or mild. And finally, sweet was adopted in the middle of the 17th century by artists to describe delicate and soft brush strokes.

Sweet's Positive Connotations

The adjective sweet has always had the added connotations of being, "pleasing, gratifying, agreeable, and delightful". Sweet was used as a noun to mean beloved one from 1300, as something dearly loved or prized, "Thy life to me is sweet" (1590), and from the early 19th century to describe one’s own, "sweet self, sweet time". From the late 19th century sweet could be used to describe something that was easily managed or dealt with, "the engine is more responsive and sweet than its predecessor". Sweet has been adopted in Australian and New Zealand slang from the late 19th century to mean that everything is fine and in order, "She’s sweet". In the early 20th century sweet was adopted as an intensive in phrases meaning nothing at all, "sweet nothing", as well as a parting in the late evening, "sweet dreams".

Conclusion

The word ‘sweet’ has therefore traveled through a semantic journey of meaning – from an adjective to describe a number of the human senses, as an intensifier, and as a general word to add positive connotation



© Sohrab Rezvan-Mojarrad 1999 - 2002
I have not created any of the Superheroes listed on this web site; all Superheroes are property of their respective companies. All of the Superhero descriptions used on this site were obtained from various sources (including trading cards and comic books), and are therefore also property of their respective companies. The definitions were obtained from dictionaries and all images are property of the company printed on the images.
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