100 Famous Quotes About Love

Love is always bestowed as a gift – freely, willingly and without expectation. We don’t love to be loved; we love to love. –Leo Buscaglia

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up. –James A. Baldwin

He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began. –Leo Tolstoy

Love doesn’t sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all of the time, made new.  –Ursula K. Le Guin

Love is the only satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. –Erich Fromm

Love is hard to get into, but even harder to get out of. –Unknown

There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved.  It is God’s finger on man’s shoulder.  –Charles Morgan

When love is not madness, it is not love. –Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Do I love you because you’re beautiful, or are you beautiful because I love you? — Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Cinderella

Love is much like a wild rose, beautiful and calm, but willing to draw blood in its defense.  –Mark Overby

Love is a sweet tyranny, because the lover endureth his torments willingly. –Proverb

The lover is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods.  –Theodor Reik, Of Love and Lust, 1957

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit. –Peter Ustinov

Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones. –Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966

The art of love… is largely the art of persistence. –Albert Ellis

Love one another and you will be happy.  It’s as simple and as difficult as that. –Michael Leunig

Who would give a law to lovers?  Love is unto itself a higher law. –Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, A.D. 524

Who, being loved, is poor? –Oscar Wilde

To find someone who will love you for no reason, and to shower that person with reasons, that is the ultimate happiness. –Robert Brault

Without love, what are we worth?  Eighty-nine cents!  Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely. –Laurence Marks

A baby is born with a need to be loved – and never outgrows it. –Frank A. Clark

We loved with a love that was more than love. –Edgar Allan Poe

The hardest-learned lesson:  that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind. –Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire. –François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

We choose those we like; with those we love, we have no say in the matter. –Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

When a man is in love or in debt, someone else has the advantage. –Bill Balance

Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly. –Rose Franken

Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat. –Ben Hecht

Love is like dew that falls on both nettles and lilies. –Swedish Proverb

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity. –Henry Van Dyke

Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.  –Judith Viorst

Passion makes the world go round.  Love just makes it a safer place. –Ice T

When you’re in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks.  –Natalie Clifford Barney

It is astonishing how little one feels alone when one loves. –John Bulwer

Love is the thing that enables a woman to sing while she mops up the floor after her husband has walked across it in his barn boots. –Author unknown, as printed in The Hoosier Farmer

Love is not singular except in syllable. –Marvin Taylor

Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old. –John Ciardi

People who are sensible about love are incapable of it. –Douglas Yates

Love never reasons but profusely gives; gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all, and trembles lest it has done too little. –Hannah More

The past is behind us, love is in front and all around us. –Terri Guillemets

Take away love and our earth is a tomb. –Robert Browning

It is the same in love as in war; a fortress that parleys is half taken. –Marguerite de Valois

You don’t have to go looking for love when it’s where you come from. –Werner Erhard

No one can understand love who has not experienced infatuation.  And no one can understand infatuation, no matter how many times he has experienced it. –Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

Love me and the world is mine. –David Reed

It would be impossible to “love” anyone or anything one knew completely.  Love is directed towards what lies hidden in its object. –Paul Valéry, Tel quel, 1943

The love game is never called off on account of darkness. –Tom Masson

Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence. –David Byrne

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. –Robert Frost

You know you’re in love when you don’t want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.  -Dr. Seuss

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place. –Zora Neale Hurston

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. –Emily Brontë

An old man in love is like a flower in winter. –Portuguese Proverb

Love unlocks doors and opens windows that weren’t even there before. –Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane. –Honoré de Balzac

Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its votaries live in confidence, equality and unreserve. –Percy Bysshe Shelley

Love is the poetry of the senses. –Honoré de Balzac

Love is a game that two can play and both win. –Eva Gabor

Without love, the rich and poor live in the same house. –Author Unknown

We picture love as heart-shaped because we do not know the shape of the soul. –Robert Brault

Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow. –John Lennon

Love is the foundation from which your decisions about your life should be made.  — Darren L. Johnson

Love, and a cough, cannot be hid. –George Herbert

Desire creates havoc when it is the only thing between two people, or when it is what’s missing. –Mignon McLaughlin

Poetry spills from the cracks of a broken heart, but flows from one which is loved. –Christopher Paul Rubero

A man is not where he lives, but where he loves. –Latin Proverb

Love is not consolation.  It is light. –Friedrich Nietzsche

True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights.  If you hear bells, get your ears checked. –Erich Segal

Love is the greatest touch-up artist of all. –Robert Brault

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.  –Author Unknown

Love is what you’ve been through with somebody. –James Thurber

Love is being stupid together. –Paul Valery

In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love. –Charles Baudelaire

Love does not care to define and is never in a hurry to do so. –Charles du Bos

What “love” is I don’t know if it’s not the response of our deepest natures to one another. — William Carlos Williams

I learned the real meaning of love.  Love is absolute loyalty.  People fade, looks fade, but loyalty never fades.  You can depend so much on certain people, you can set your watch by them.  And that’s love, even if it doesn’t seem very exciting.  –Sylvester Stallone

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of. –Blaise Pascal, Pensées

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet. –Plato

As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words. –William Shakespeare

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity. –George Bernard Shaw

For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul.  –Judy Garland

Fortune and love favor the brave. –Ovid

It’s useless to hold a person to anything he says while he’s in love, drunk, or running for office.  –Shirley MacLaine

Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love. –Mother Teresa

Life is the flower for which love is the honey. –Victor Hugo

Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit. –Khalil Gibran

Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so.  –David Grayson

Love conquers all.  –Virgil

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.  –Rainer Maria Rilke

Love does not dominate; it cultivates.  –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination. –Voltaire

Love is a force more formidable than any other. It is invisible – it cannot be seen or measured, yet it is powerful enough to transform you in a moment, and offer you more joy than any material possession could. –Barbara de Angelis

Love is all we have, the only way that each can help the other. –Euripides

Love is always bestowed as a gift – freely, willingly and without expectation. We don’t love to be loved; we love to love. –Leo Buscaglia

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit. –Peter Ustinov

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. –Robert Frost

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. –Aristotle

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop. –H. L. Mencken

Love is love’s reward. –John Dryden

Love is life. And if you miss love, you miss life. –Leo Buscaglia

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