Valentines Day special

Valentine's Day or Saint Valentine's Day is a holiday celebrated on February 14 by many people throughout the world. In the West, it is the traditional day on which lovers express their love for each other by sending Valentine's cards, presenting flowers, or offering confectionery. The day was originally a pagan festival that was renamed after two Early Christian martyrs named Valentine. The day became associated with romantic love in the circle of Geoffrey Chaucer in the High Middle Ages, when the tradition of courtly love flourished.

The day is most closely associated with the mutual exchange of love notes in the form of "valentines." Modern Valentine symbols include the heart-shaped outline, doves, and the figure of the winged Cupid. Since the 19th century, handwritten notes have largely given way to mass-produced greeting cards.[1] The sending of Valentines was a fashion in nineteenth-century Great Britain, and, in 1847, Esther Howland developed a successful business in her Worcester, Massachusetts home with hand-made Valentine cards based on British models. The popularity of Valentine cards in 19th-century America was a harbinger of the future commercialization of holidays in the United States.[2]

The U.S. Greeting Card Association estimates that approximately one billion valentines are sent each year worldwide, making the day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year, behind Christmas. The association estimates that, in the US, men spend in average twice as much money as women

Valentine's Day: Quotations
Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.
- Aristotle
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
- Lao Tzu
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.
- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep-burning, unquenchable.
- Henry Ward Beecher
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
- Anais Nin
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward in the same direction.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Love has no desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires;
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.
-Helen Keller
Love does not dominate; it cultivates.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
- Zora Neale Hurston
Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love.
- Leo Tolstoy
Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away.
- Dorothy Parker
I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.
- Alice Walker
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
- Pablo Neruda, "Love Sonnet XVII"