Words I Wish I Wrote: 75 Love Quotes

Okay, okay, so I didn't write anything original today (except for this paragraph), but I think you'll still find the following quotes to be inspiring, amusing, sentimental, romantic...take your pick. In most bookstores or gift shops, you'd have to pay $5.95 or maybe even $9.99 for a collection of quotes all in one place like this. But this is free (you're welcome). Feel free to reuse them however you wish. They aren't mine anyway. Happy Valentine's Day!


1)  "A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous." – Ingrid Bergman, actress

2)  "A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy." – George Jean Nathan, drama critic

3)  "Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires." – Francois de La Rochefoucauld, writer

4)  "Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives." – C. S. Lewis, writer

5)  "All love shifts and changes. I don't know if you can be wholeheartedly in love all the time." – Julie Andrews, actress

6)  "Come live in my heart, and pay no rent." – Samuel Lover, songwriter

7)  "Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage." – Lao Tzu, philosopher

8)  "Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship – never." – Charles Caleb Colton, cleric

9)  "Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love." – Albert Einstein, physicist

10)  "I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence." – Theodore Dreiser, novelist

11)  "I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved." – George Eliot, novelist

12)  "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, writer

13)  "If you want to be loved, be lovable." – Ovid, poet

14)  "Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'" – Erich Fromm, psychologist

15)  "It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun." – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet

16)  "Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love." – Mother Teresa, nun and all-around awesome human being

17)  "Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit." – Khalil Gibran, poet

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

19)  "Love conquers all." – Virgil, poet

20)  "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, writer

21)  "Love does not dominate; it cultivates." – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet

22)  "Love is a game that two can play and both win." – Eva Gabor, actress

23)  "Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs." – William Shakespeare, playwright

24)  "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, writer

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

26)  "Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired." – Robert Frost, poet

27)  "Love is being stupid together." – Paul Valery, poet

28)  "Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies." – Aristotle, philosopher

29)  "Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop." – H.L. Mencken, writer

30)  "Love is the beauty of the soul." – Saint Augustine, theologian

31)  "Love is the poetry of the senses." – Honore de Balzac, novelist

32)  "Love is what you've been through with somebody." – James Thurber, humorist

33)  "Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself." – Andre Breton, poet

34)  "Love isn't something you find. Love is something that finds you." – Loretta Young, actress

35)  "Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place." – Zora Neale Hurston, dramatist

36)  "Love that is not madness is not love." – Pedro Calderon de la Barca, dramatist

37)  "Loving is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction." – Antoine de Saint-Exupery, novelist

38)  "One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving." – Paulo Coelho,  novelist

39)  "People need loving the most when they deserve it the least." – John Harrigan, writer

40)  "Take away love and our earth is a tomb." – Robert Browning, poet

41)  "The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves." – Victor Hugo, novelist

42)  "The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed." – Jiddu Krishnamurti, philosopher

43)  "The only abnormality is the incapacity to love." – Anais Nin, writer

44)  "The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost." – G.K. Chesterton, writer

45)  "There is only one terminal dignity - love." – Helen Hayes, actress

46)  "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, poet

47)  "'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." – Alfred Lord Tennyson, poet

48)  "We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love." – Tom Robbins, writer

49)  "What the world really needs is more love and less paper work." – Pearl Bailey, actress

50)  "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." – Emily Bronte, novelist

51)  "Who, being loved, is poor?" – Oscar Wilde, dramatist

52)  "It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them." – Agatha Christie, novelist

53)  "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails." – The Bible (I Corinthians 13: 4 - 8, NIV)

54)  "Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." – Robert A. Heinlein, novelist

55)  "If you have love, you don't need to have anything else. If you don't have it, it does not much matter what else you have." – J.M. Barrie, dramatist

56)  "You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly." – Sam Keen, writer

57)  "Absence sharpens love, presence strengthens it." – Benjamin Franklin, writer/Founding Father

58)  "Love doesn't make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile." – Franklin P. Jones, businessman

59)  "There is no remedy for love but to love more." – Henry David Thoreau, writer

60)  "Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get – only with what you are expecting to give – which is everything." – Katharine Hepburn, actress

61)  "You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving." – Robert Louis Stevenson

62)  "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, poet

63)  "Never let a problem to be solved become more important than the person to be loved." – Barbara Johnson, writer

64)  "The first duty of love is to listen." – Paul Tillich, theologian

65)  "The selfless love that we give to others, to the point of being willing to sacrifice our lives for them, is all the proof I need that human beings are not mere animals of self-interest. We carry within us a divine spark, and if we chose to recognize it, our lives have dignity, meaning, hope." – Dean Koontz, novelist

66)  "You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.” – Dr. Seuss, writer

67)  "It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.” – André Gide, writer

68)  “I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.” – Pablo Neruda, poet

69)  "I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough..." – Nicholas Sparks, novelist

70)  "We’re all a little weird. And life is weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.” – Robert Fulghum, writer

71)  "Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.” – Joan Crawford, actress

72)  “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, poet

73)  "Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.” – Louis de Bernières, novelist

74)  “Look after my heart - I've left it with you.” – Stephenie Meyer

75)  “Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.” – Ursula K. Le Guin, novelist