Love, as Pat Benatar often reminds us, is a battlefield. So, best be prepared with a suit of armour and some heavy artillery.
Or, if you’re of a slightly more sensitive disposition, why not try a different tack – delve into the many revelatory words and bon mots of one William Shakespeare. As the great man himself said: If you love and get hurt, love more. If you love more and hurt more, love even more. If you love even more and get hurt even more, love some more until it hurts no more.
So, if it’s 25 pieces of sage Shakespearean dating advice you’re after, you’ve come to the right place.
(Image: Rex)
As You Like It
It is as easy to count atomies as to resolve the propositions of a lover.
Twelfth Night
Love sought is good, but giv'n unsought is better.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Ay me! for aught that I ever could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth.
Much Ado About Nothing
Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore, all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent.
Romeo and Juliet
Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake. It’s everything except what it is.
Merry Wives of Windsor
Love like a shadow flies when substance love pursues;
Pursuing that that flies, and flying what pursues
As You Like It
Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are no so punish’d and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays.
Romeo and Juliet
A lover goes toward his beloved as enthusiastically as a schoolboy leaving his books, but when he leaves his girlfriend, he feels as miserable as the schoolboy on his way to school.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
All’s Well That Ends Well
Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none
As You Like It
If thou remember'st not the slightest folly
That ever love did make thee run into,
Thou hast not lov'd
Romeo and Juliet
Love is a smoke rais'd with the fume of sighs;
Being purg'd, a fire sparkling in a lover's eyes;
Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears:
What is it else? a madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.
Hamlet
Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear;
When little fears grow great, great love grows there.
Love’s Labour Lost
A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind.
A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound.
Troilus and Cressida
They say all lovers swear more performance than they are able, and yet reserve an ability that they never perform.
Romeo and Juliet
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.
The Merchant of Venice
But love is blind, and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit.
Venus and Adonis
Love comforteth like sunshine after rain
Antony and Cleopatra
There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned.
Romeo and Juliet
If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
Sonnet CXVI
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration find,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
Much Ado About Nothing
Speak low if you speak love.
Hamlet
Love is begun by time, And time qualifies the spark and fire of it.
Romeo and Juliet
Love is a smoke and is made with the fume of sighs.
