Love at first sight

“ Have you, gentle reader, ever loved at first sight? When you fell in love at first sight, how long, let me ask, did it take you to become ready to fling every other consideration to the winds except that of obtaining possession of the loved one? ”

“ To fall in love at first sight is a great proof of weakness of mind, of utter absence of self-control, and of wretched unmanliness. I believe I may affirm, without the fear of contradiction, that love at first sight has never proved to be love of long duration. ”

“ Perhaps the largest number of cases of Love at First Sight, so called, are inspired by mere beauté du diable—a female “bud” whose sole charm apparent is sparkling health and fragrant, dew-bejewelled freshness. That this kind of Love at sight, which consists in being dazzled for the moment by a set of regular features and a pair of bright eyes, is often of brief duration, does not militate against the statement that the deepest Love is also born of such a flash of æsthetic admiration. ”

“ We can still love at first sight, I assure you, even after we have seen a good deal of the world. It depends on meeting the right woman, and on nothing else. Do you suppose that if the Naples Psyche, or the Syracuse Venus, or the Venus of Milo, or the Victory of Samothrace suddenly appeared in Paris or London, all the men would not lose their heads about her—at first sight? ”

“ And such a love may exist to the end of life, and may, if reciprocated, lead to supreme happiness, or if unreciprocated to the deepest unhappiness.
What it is that causes love at first sight is unknown. ”

“ No doubt experience may afterwards come in to modify or intensify the feelings, but it is not the originating cause. If you say it is, how are we to account for love at first sight? Beauty has nothing necessarily to do with it, for men fall in love at first sight with what the world calls plain women—happily! ”

“ I will not attempt to describe my sensations when I first distinctly saw the lineaments of my lover. Creation contained nothing so lovely to my sight. To see the soul, the thinking, feeling, immortal soul, flashing with enthusiasm, or darkening with tenderness, looking forth from his eyes, and feel my own mingling with his! No one but those who have once been blind, and now see, can imagine the intensity of my emotions. ”

“ Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight? ”

“ He will give us a rationalistic account of love at first sight by bringing on this young poet in a blind chaos of emotion owing to his rejection by a woman not otherwise connected with the story. It is perfectly true that this is the best and perhaps the only explanation of love at first sight. ”

“ Love - well, not love at first sight, but love at the end of the season, which is so much more satisfactory. ”

“ And what are the signs of true love? That is the next thing. What are the sure signs that true love may be known by, so that there can be no danger of making a mistake, no risk of taking one kind of love for another? That is the question. How do the signs of true love look? How do they feel, I wonder? Can it be one of the sure signs of true love to feel at the first sight of a face that it is the one you have most wanted to see all your life? ”

“ I accordingly succeed better in argument—than in love!—I do not think that what is called Love at first sight is so great an absurdity as it is sometimes imagined to be. We generally make up our minds beforehand to the sort of person we should like,—grave or gay, black, brown, or fair; with golden tresses or with raven locks;—and when we meet with a complete example of the qualities we admire, the bargain is soon struck. ”

“ But the first glad moment in our first love is a vision which returns to us to the last, and brings with it a thrill of feeling intense and special as the recurrent sensation of a sweet odor breathed in a far-off hour of happiness. ”

“ The kind old eyes would follow her with pathetic eagerness, not reproaching or reproving, only always questioning: “Is this to be the man who shall open the new world’s doors for her; who shall give her the first glimpse of that wonderful joy called love?” ”

“ Never in after life has the world such a marvellous glamour as when the first dream of love has swathed all contours in its opalescent mists of sunrise, but—never do we so easily go astray. It may happen that the lifting of the mists will disclose the most beautiful landscape. ”

“ It takes a great deal of Christianity to wipe out uncivilized Eastern instincts, such as falling in love at first sight. ”

“ We do love beauty at first sight; and we do cease to love it, if it be not accompanied by amiable qualities. ”

“ Later life has its perfections as well as that bough-bending time of the mind’s florescence with which I am so discursively taken.
I have discovered that the thrill of first love passes! It even becomes the backbone of a sordid sort of religion if not assisted in passing. I knew a man who kept a candle burning before a girl’s portrait day and night for a year—then jilted her, pawned her off on a friend. ”

“ She may be only a country surgeon's daughter—a rosebud on a hedgerow bush—but she has the soul and the eye of a queen among women for all that. Every lover has deceived himself with the same sweet dream, to be sure—how over-analytic we have become nowadays, when I must needs half argue myself out of the sweets of first love!—but then they hadn't so much to go upon as I have. ”

“ Actors and directors--those were the only men she had ever known, those and the heterogeneous, indistinguishable mass of college boys, interested only in love at first sight, whom she had met at the Yale prom last fall. ”

“ The lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards. When alone, they solace themselves with the remembered image of the other. Does that other see the same star, the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the same emotion, that now delight me? ”

“ Those who in the dazzled vision of youth see only the beauty and splendour of love—first love, who deem it comprises the whole of life, beginning, aim, and end—may marvel that I, who have been young and now am old, see as I saw that night, not only the lover's but the parents' side of the question. I felt overwhelmed with sadness, as, viewing the three, I counted up in all its bearings and consequences, near and remote, this attachment of poor Guy's. ”

“ His close watch of the blameless girl's whole life confirmed the warm and romantic wishes of his soul, which her beauty inspired—that beauty as fully confirming the vision of his love-dream when far and long away. ”

“ First-love may be indeed unique, unapproachable, but that which is born later in life—the emotion springing from the rich, ripe heart and brain, the ardent affection of the human being in the fullest physical and mental perfection—is every whit as dominating, and it is more inspiring, ample and satisfying than that which came when the heart was young and life a fairy-tale. ”

“ There is a deep beauty—more so than the world will acknowledge—in this impassioned first friendship, most resembling first love, the fore-shadowing of which it truly is. Who does not, even while smiling at its apparent folly, remember the sweetness of such a dream? Many a mother with her children at her knee, may now and then call to mind some old playmate, for whom, when they were girls together, she felt such an intense love. How they used to pine for the daily greeting—the long walk, fraught with all sorts of innocent secrets. ”

“ And first love is so strong—because one has dreamed of it and waited for it so long, till like a burning glass it draws together all the rays of one's being, and burns its traces ineffaceably upon the soul.... ”

“ But it has not yet found leisure to discourse much to us about first love,—although first love, in its relation to the world invisible, is the very weirdest of all human feelings, and the most mysterious. ”

“ Oh, the long hours that pass like a flash in delightful talk, the secrets that the soul first reveals to itself in revealing them to the beloved, the caresses longed for and yet half feared, the lovers' quarrels, the tears that are kissed away, the shynesses, the simplicity, the abandonment of a pure and passionate love—who may hope to know you twice in a lifetime? ”

“ When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person. The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair. ”

“ FIRST LOVE.—This is the most important direction of all. The first love experiences a tenderness, a purity and unreservedness, an exquisiteness, a devotedness, and a poetry belonging to no subsequent attachment. "Love, like life, has no second spring." Though a second attachment may be accompanied by high moral feeling, and to a devotedness to the object loved; yet, let love be checked or blighted in its first pure emotion, and the beauty of its spring is irrecoverably withered and lost. ”

“ For half an hour more they sat together, in that first intimacy of love, which transfigures men and women, so that when they pass back from it into ordinary life they scarcely recognize life or themselves again. ”

“ At this moment, looking up, I chanced to see a man such as I had never before beheld, standing by my side and gazing at me. Stories are told of how men and women, looking on each other for the first time, in certain cases are filled with a strange passion of love, of which, come what may, they can not again be rid. ”

“ The complete bliss, the enchantment of such moments, is certainly the most exquisite thing I have experienced. First the timid blushes, then the growing boldness and the fresh impression of first sensations—all this and more, mingled with the contentment of entire possession. One gives oneself up entirely; all barriers are broken down by love—participation in one tender secret has already united the lovers' souls, which seek each other and mingle together in a common existence. ”

“ Perhaps, indeed, on the girl’s side, love sprung rather from those affections which the spring of life throws upward to the surface, as the spring of earth does its flowers, than from that concentrated and deep absorption of self in self, which alone promises endurance and devotion, and of which first love, or rather the first fancy, is often less susceptible than that which grows out of the more thoughtful fondness of maturer years. ”

“ Yet I feel it is a sort of blasphemy to say the first time—for no true girl is ever really in love but once; born, loved, died, thus stand the mountain peaks of life, and each can rise but once. So I must amend by saying that the first time I tried to be in love, and everybody else thought I really was, I got there by the pedestrian route. ”

“ The truth of all this must appear sufficiently obvious to one who contemplates the effects of the love mutually felt by a young man and maiden in the warmth and glow of its first summer; for in their innocent young love there is something which allies it to the loves of the angels. And when their love is reciprocated, what a new world seems suddenly opened before them! What fountains of new feeling are straightway unlocked! What new and strange delights are kindled in their bosoms! ”

“ In the shadow, Desire Michell and I drew closer to one another.
How can I tell of a love that grew without sight? So much of the love of romance and history is a matter of flower-petal complexions, heart-consuming eyes, satin lips, and all the form and color that make beauty. How can I make clear a love that grew strong and passionately demanding, knew delicate coquetries of advance and evasion, intimacy of minds like the meeting of eyes in understanding—all in the dark? The blind might comprehend. But the blind have a physical communication we had not; touch has enchantments of its own. ”

“ Then the imagination sets to work to transform the reality in accordance with the ideal we have formed for ourselves—and even this is often the result of accidental influence. It is therefore not surprising that most people, when after ten years or so they meet again the object of their first love, give a sigh of gratitude to the fate which made that love “unhappy.” ”

“ My lover has handsome, intelligent blue eyes—my ideal's eyes are black, full of sadness and fire, not the soft, troubadour eye with long drooping lids—no! My ideal's glance has none of the languishing tenderness of romance, but is proud, powerful, penetrating, the look of a thinker, of a great mind yielding to the influence of love, the gaze of a hero disarmed by passion! ”

“ So we met and dreamed on day by day, and she was so brilliantly happy that her soft face at times seemed to be singularly brightened by the very gladness of her heart; for it seems so natural for a young girl to mingle something of idolatry with her first love. ”

“ If for a moment she looked back her life appeared to her as a fruitless quest for something—who knows what?—for beauty, for happiness, for an absolute and harmonious intimacy, for everlasting fulfilment in a love that is the answer to all questions. ”

“ Love should run out to meet love with open arms. Indeed, the ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room. From the first moment when they see each other, with a pang of curiosity, through stage after stage of growing pleasure and embarrassment, they can read the expression of their own trouble in each other’s eyes. ”

“ Oh, where is there the heart but knows
Love's first steps are upon the rose! ”

“ Nightly her limbs, unconscious in her dreaming,
⁠Still took the tender attitudes of love.
For twenty years hope lingered, unabated,
⁠Though beauty lost its bloom and youth its fire,
Never there came the step for which she waited,
⁠Never the lover of her heart's desire. ”