John Lennon on love

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right, and I will be proved right. We are more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first⁠—rock’n’roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.

Love means having to say you’re sorry every fifteen minutes.

‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson1809–1892In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850)In contextOften credited to Augustine of Hippo

If music be the food of love, play on.

William Shakespeare1564–1616Twelfth Night (1601), Act I, scene i.In context

• Music

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

C. S. Lewis1898–1963The Four Loves (1960), Ch. VI: “Charity”