Today is Valentine’s Day.
So I would like to share thoughts about Love from the people who have walked this earth before us (and from a few who are still here).
Timeless thoughts written down and spread throughout the decades, centuries and, yes, even millenniums.
Thoughts not only about happy, romantic love but also the love between friends and family. And about the love that is often neglected or pushed to the side: the love you have for yourself.
This is 78 of the most inspiring, touching, thought-provoking and helpful quotes on love.
- “Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
— James Baldwin - “Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.”
— Lucille Ball - “Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke - “The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.”
— Morrie Schwartz - “Love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey.”
— Lord Byron - “If I know what love is, it is because of you.”
— Herman Hesse - “I love you not because of who you are, but because of who I am when I am with you.”
— Roy Croft - “Love is a friendship set to music.”
— Joseph Campbell - “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - “When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.”
— Blaise Pascal - “Love in its essence is spiritual fire.”
— Seneca - “The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”
— Gilbert K. Chesterton - “It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt - “Don’t brood. Get on with living and loving. You don’t have forever.”
— Leo Buscaglia - “Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”
— Maya Angelou - “There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.”
— George Sand - “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
— Rumi - “Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.”
— Lao Tzu - “You know it’s love when all you want is that person to be happy, even if you’re not part of their happiness.”
— Julia Roberts - “At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”
— Plato - “If I had a flower for every time I thought of you… I could walk through my garden forever.”
— Alfred Tennyson - “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”
— Marcus Aurelius - “The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen or even heard, but must be felt with the heart.”
— Helen Keller - “Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.”
— Oscar Wilde - “The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love.”
— Henry Miller - “Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.”
— Oprah Winfrey - “You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
– Buddha - “You know you’re in love when you don’t want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
— Dr. Seuss - “Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.”
— Khalil Gibran - “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
— Alfred Lord Tennyson - “Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.”
— Vincent Van Gogh - “The art of love is largely the art of persistence.”
— Albert Ellis - “If you would be loved, love, and be loveable.”
— Benjamin Franklin - “When you adopt the viewpoint that there is nothing that exists that is not part of you, that there is no one who exists who is not part of you, that any judgment you make is self-judgment, that any criticism you level is self-criticism, you will wisely extend to yourself an unconditional love that will be the light of the world.”
– Harry Palmer - “Friends show their love in times of trouble, not in happiness.”
— Euripides - “Love does not dominate; it cultivates.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - “Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.”
— Paulo Coelho - “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr. - “A healthy self-love means we have no compulsion to justify to ourselves or others why we take vacations, why we sleep late, why we buy new shoes, why we spoil ourselves from time to time. We feel comfortable doing things which add quality and beauty to life.”
– Andrew Matthews - “We are most alive when we’re in love.”
— John Updike - “The love we give away is the only love we keep.”
— Elbert Hubbard - “The giving of love is an education in itself.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt - “The more one judges, the less one loves.”
— Honore de Balzac - “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
— Pablo Neruda - “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with compassions, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”
– Elizabeth Kubler-Ross - “A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.”
— Ingrid Bergman - “You’re always with yourself, so you might as well enjoy the company.” — Diane Von Furstenberg
- “Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says ‘I need you because I love you.’”
— Erich Fromm - “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
— Lao Tzu - “One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.”
— Sophocles - “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives? When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see in truth that you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”
— Kahlil Gibran - “Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.”
— Andre Breton - “Better to have lost and loved than never to have loved at all.”
— Ernest Hemingway - “A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
— Elbert Hubbard - “I found in my research that the biggest reason people aren’t more self-compassionate is that they are afraid they’ll become self-indulgent. They believe self-criticism is what keeps them in line. Most people have gotten it wrong because our culture says being hard on yourself is the way to be.”
— Kristen Neff - “Love is a better teacher than duty.”
— Albert Einstein - “True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked.”
— Erich Segal - “If you aren’t good at loving yourself, you will have a difficult time loving anyone, since you’ll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren’t even giving to yourself.”
– Barbara De Angelis - “The greatest healing therapy is friendship and love.”
— Hubert H. Humphrey - “Every person has to love at least one bad partner in their lives to be truly thankful for the right one.”
— Unknown - “There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
– Anaïs Nin - “Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.”
— James Thurber - “The best proof of love is trust.”
— Joyce Brothers - “A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.”
— Honore de Balzac - “When I loved myself enough, I began leaving whatever wasn’t healthy. This meant people, jobs, my own beliefs and habits – anything that kept me small. My judgment called it disloyal. Now I see it as self-loving.”
– Kim McMillen - “A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than you love yourself.”
— Josh Billings - “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
— Carl Sagan - “Fortune and love favor the brave.”
— Ovid - “To love is nothing. To be loved is something. But to love and be loved, that’s everything.”
— T. Tolis - “Love is not only something you feel, it is something you do.”
— David Wilkerson - “Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.”
— Wayne Dyer - “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 witherings, of tarnishings.”
— Anaïs Nin - “Where there is love there is life.”
— Mahatma Gandhi - “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
— Robert A. Heinlein - “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
— Martin Luther King Jr. - “And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.”
— Paul McCartney - “If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.”
— A. A. Milne - “All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.”
— Charles Schulz
What is your favorite quote on love? Feel free to share the best one(s) you have found in this article or in your own life in the comments section below.
