Love Quotes
665 quotes
Love
Timeless insights about relationships, compassion, and human connection
665 Quotes
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
The trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky; we cut them down and turn them into paper, that we may record our emptiness
— Sand and Foam (1926)
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul
— Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, XVII
Each time you happen to me all over again
— The Age of Innocence (1920)
It is astonishing how little one feels alone when one loves
— Anthropometamorphosis (1653)
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage
— Letters to a Young Poet
To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour
— Auguries of Innocence (poem)
There is something in the way one walks down a street after a rain, half hoping to be recognized as the secret bearer of invisible joy
— Personal letter, collected correspondence
We are like books in a library, taken down, read closely, and remembered only when someone cares to search among the shelves
— The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1
I have spread my dreams beneath your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams
— Poem: Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, 1899
Love is a smoke and is made with the fume of sighs
— Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1
The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of
— Pensées, no. 277
The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite
— Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II
Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy
— Volume Three of The Diary of Anaïs Nin
My solitude is not my own, for I see now how much it belongs to them—and that I must change in their sight, as I do not change for myself
— Giovanni’s Room (1956)
Hearts, like grapes, grow soft and sweet with the warmth of the sun
— Letters to Lucilius
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman
— The Second Sex (1949), Part II, Book I, Chapter 1
The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts
— Meditations, Book V
You are, of all the unlived things, the only longing I chose to remember
— On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (novel)
To be your friend was all I ever wanted; to be your lover was all I ever dreamed
— Unknown (commonly circulated in modern anthologies)
If you listen closely, you will hear the hush between our words is full of everything we dare not say
— Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
The heart is a thousand-stringed instrument that can only be tuned with love
— Divan of Hafiz (various translations)
The body remembers embraces the mind has already forgotten, trailing the memory of skin across the boundaries of time
— Written on the Body (1992)
There are things we cannot say, but the silence between us is full of words
— Moderato Cantabile (novel), 1958
You don’t measure love in time. You measure love in transformation
— An Uncommon Bond
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart
— The Story of My Life
What is to give light must endure burning
— Man’s Search for Meaning (book)
The sky changes as I speak, I breathe and nothing stays the same, and here we are—unwritten, within the untidy pages of one another’s days
— Life Sentence: Selected Poems (published 1990s)
Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, 'You owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole sky
— Translated by Daniel Ladinsky, The Gift (1999)
I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past
— Moment of Being (essay)
We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end
— Sybil, or The Two Nations
He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking
— Book: Anna Karenina (1877)
Love is the whole and more than all
— Collected Poems
Life is the flower for which love is the honey
— Les Contemplations (1856)
No one has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold
— Save Me the Waltz
To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world
— Midnight's Children (1981)
I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for their religion—I have shuddered at it—I shudder no more. I could be martyred for my religion. Love is my religion and I could die for that
— Letter to Fanny Brawne, October 13, 1819
In the sheltered shade of an ordinary afternoon, souls may touch without ever speaking, altering the course of their tomorrows
— The Waves
We do not remember days, we remember moments
— The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1950
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same
— Wuthering Heights (1847)
Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one’s side like a quiet old friend
— Anne of Avonlea (1909)
To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life
— Les Misérables, Part V, Book IV, Chapter 4
The smell of her always reminded him of a poem he could never quite remember
— Novel: Love in the Time of Cholera
He who wants to do good, knocks at the gate; he who loves finds the door open
— Stray Birds, aphorism 211
Your glance scattered seeds and my heart blossomed into a wilderness no map could contain
— The Sun Stone (Piedra de Sol)
Sometimes we are devoured by a single glance, sometimes we are saved by a word softly spoken at midnight
— The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 2 (1934–1939)
She was a voice out of a dream, and now that voice was a part of my reality, woven into the days and nights with all the grace of longing itself
— Tender Is the Night
What is essential is invisible to the eye
— The Little Prince (novel), Chapter 21
So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness
— Interview in The Observer, 2000
Among other wonders of our lives, we are alive with one another, we live here in this life, in this world, and so marvel at it, for which we should be – not only grateful, but astounded
— Upstream: Selected Essays
I would rather have had one breath of her hair, one kiss of her mouth, one touch of her hand, than eternity without it
— The Notebook (1996)
Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time
— Letter to My Daughter (2008)
The heart is an instrument whose strings only tremble to the sweetest touch
— Sand and Foam (1926)
You are the stillness between two heartbeats, the silent moment where longing recognizes itself
— On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
— Harlem (poem), Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)
You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star
— Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part One
Where there is great love, there are always miracles
— Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
Two souls with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one
— Ingomar the Barbarian (1842)
We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from others
— Maxims (1665), Maxim 119
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees
— Every Day You Play, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924)
Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost
— Sand and Foam
Suddenly a mist fell from my eyes and I knew the way I had to take
— Demian, Chapter 2
My heart was a river and her presence the mountain from which it sprang, ever flowing, sometimes calm, sometimes wild, always returning to its source
— River Flow (poetry collection)
Whatever we lose, like a you or a me, it’s always ourselves we find in the sea
— Poem: "maggie and milly and molly and may"
In dreams, we enter a world that is entirely our own
— Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough
— .
The heart wears its scars as medals not awarded in public but inscribed in secret victories
— Written on the Body (1992)
When we have learnt how to listen to the silence of another, we risk hearing something of ourselves
— Written on the Body (novel)
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
— Poem: For the One Who Waits
To be poet is to be a lover of life
— Lectures and Essays
The heart has its own memory, and in the city of its recollections, each shadow cast is sweetened by the light it once knew
— Manuscript fragments, The Complete Poems: 1927-1979
Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it
— Stray Birds (poetry collection)
Sometimes the briefest touch carries the history of centuries, whispered in the skin
— 'Fugitive Pieces' (1996)
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same
— Wuthering Heights (1847)
I am yours, don’t give myself back to me
— Rumi's poetry, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi
At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet
— Symposium
To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved
— The Marquis of Lossie (1877)
Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the ploughshare of self-examination
— Amiel's Journal
We become our best selves in the warmth of another’s nearness
— Diary Entry, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. I, 1931–1934
To be wholly alive is to be vulnerable; to love is to risk pain in order to live
— The Irrational Season (1977)
She was a wild orchid of a girl, all rainwater and sunlight, and I wished only to be the earth that touched her roots
— The God of Small Things (novel)
The wound is the place where the Light enters you
— Various poems (popular attribution)
Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Part Four, Chapter 6
We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another
— Così parlò Bellavista (Thus Spoke Bellavista), 1977
The region where pain and delight are indistinguishable is where I desire always to dwell
— Poem: "The Greater Self" (from The Madman)
Some infinites are bigger than other infinites
— Novel: The Fault in Our Stars
The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love
— The Painted Veil (1925)
Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips
— Prometheus Unbound (1820)
To risk all for another is to discover the hidden geography of courage that lies beneath longing
— Written on the Body (novel)
To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind
— Mademoiselle de Maupin (Preface)
You are my sun, my moon, and all my stars
— Poem: #38 from Complete Poems 1904–1962
I have seen the brightness of the moon inside the sea's dark, and understood only then how radiance needs depth to be whole
— The Bow and the Lyre (poetic essays)
Love does not dominate; it cultivates
— From Goethe's conversations, as recorded by Johann Peter Eckermann
When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew
— Libretto for Verdi's opera Falstaff (1893)
To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides
— Finding Your Strength in Difficult Times
To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow—this is a human offering that can border on miraculous
— Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
No mortal object of delightful sense, / But only what does really and eternally exist, / A peace where passion is not, nor desire, / Nor even a wish, but only the light and sound of a dream
— Endymion (poem, Book IV)
And when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy
— Symposium
Hearts are wild creatures, that’s why our ribs are cages
— Popularized online, original print context unclear
I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat
— Personal correspondence
A single sunbeam is enough to drive away many shadows
— Attributed; The Little Flowers of St. Francis
Love is not consolation, it is light
— Human, All Too Human, Aphorism 462
Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear
— Jane Eyre
The heart itself is but a small vessel, yet full of immense treasure
— A Writer’s Diary (1873)
All things are created twice; first in the mind, then in the heart
— The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989)
Now that she had nothing to lose, she was free
— Brida (novel)
Whatever our souls are made of, mine and his are the same
— Wuthering Heights (1847)
People are rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another, always ready to die and be reborn
— Parable of the Sower (1993)
The only journey is the one within
— Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
I have learned that a single moment of tenderness outweighs a library of ambition
— Near to the Wild Heart (1943)
Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost
— Sand and Foam
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it
— Man and Superman (Play)
The heart was made to be broken
— De Profundis (1905)
I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me
— The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (various stories)
We loved with a love that made the world seem less real and dreams more possible
— The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol. 1)
Some things are more precious because they don’t last long
— The Picture of Dorian Gray
Perhaps all the beauty yet to be discovered is simply a new way of seeing those we already hold close
— Letters to a Young Poet (1903-1908)
Love is an attempt to penetrate another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual
— The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism (1993)
You are my poem, and I am your rhyme, wandering the line between dream and remembrance
— Love Her Wild (2017)
Sometimes a light glimmers behind the eyelids, and it is sweeter than all the day has given
— The Book of Hours (1905)
I would love you in any shape, in any world, with any past. Never doubt that
— Novel, Imajica
We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become
— Letter to Agnes of Prague, c. 1234
Whatever souls are made of, yours and mine are the same substance that recognizes itself in a glance across a crowded world
— Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969)
On the day the world ends, a bee circles a clover, a fisherman mends a glimmering net
— Poem 'A Song on the End of the World', published in 'Rescue', 1945
Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it
— Stray Birds (poetry collection)
Across the margin of the day, the unseen hands of longing shape destinies more surely than reason ever might
— Letters to a Young Poet (early 20th century correspondence)
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet
— Letter to Anna Strunsky, December 26, 1903
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are akin to the secret music carried by the wind, felt but never seen
— Wuthering Heights (1847)
Only from the heart can you touch the sky
— Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi
Whatever our struggles, our griefs, our losses, we are creatures woven together by invisible threads of compassion and memory
— Upstream: Selected Essays
All happiness depends on courage and work
— Letter to Madame Hanska, June 1837
The only journey is the one within
— Letters to a Young Poet (1903-1908)
He was my North, my South, my East and West, my working week and my Sunday rest
— Funeral Blues
Even the memory of her needed less space than other memories; it was outside the borders of my mind, in the wings of things.
— Memories of My Melancholy Whores (novel)
Give all to love; obey thy heart
— Poem: Give All to Love (1847)
Perhaps all our loves are rehearsals for that one performance we are destined never to forget
— Written on the Body (novel)
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious
— Alchemical Studies (Collected Works Vol. 13)
My wish is to stay always like this, living quietly in a corner of nature
— Letter to Gustave Geffroy, 1920
Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back
— Attributed, commonly cited in works referencing The Symposium
Every language has its silence and every silence its word, but only together do they make a conversation worth treasuring
— On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)
To live without hope is to cease to live, and what is not hope if not the faith that we will love and be loved again?
— The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil
— Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 153
Who can tell the moments, in the clamor of ordinary days, when the soul chooses its companion for a lifetime?
— The Ballad of the Sad Café
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there
— Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi
The longing for paradise is paradise itself
— The Garden of the Prophet
We loved with innocence, believing the world would be remade in the shape of our joined hands
— Written on the Body (1992)
To find oneself mirrored in another’s eyes is to realize, perhaps for the first time, the possibility of being truly seen
— Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (2014)
In every outstretched hand there is an unknown story eager to be trusted with
— Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016)
Life is the flower for which love is the honey
— Les Contemplations (1856)
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons
— The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of
— Pensées, Section IV, 277
There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct
— Illuminations
If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me
— The More Loving One (1957)
I am yours, and the understanding of that is sunlight pouring through the leaves, finding me whole for perhaps the first time
— Everything is Waiting for You (poetry collection)
Only in the mysterious equations of love can any logic be found
— A Beautiful Mind (1998)
In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans; in one aspect of You are found all the aspects of existence
— The Prophet (book, 'On Love' chapter)
There are as many forms of love as there are moments in time
— Mansfield Park (narrative reflection)
I would that my mind could let fall its dead leaves like the tree, but only by loving do we come to discern what our roots hold
— Collected Poems (early 20th century)
Whatever our fate is, or may be, we have made it and do not complain; we are all three lost in the valley of love
— Women in Love (novel)
Whatever we lose, like a you or a me, it’s always ourselves we find in the sea
— Poem: 'Maggie and Milly and Molly and May', 1956
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind
— A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 1, Scene 1
For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through each other
— Cosmos (1980), Episode 8: Journeys in Space and Time
If only our eyes saw souls instead of bodies, how very different our ideals of beauty would be
— /
We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep
— The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
To love is to recognize yourself in another
— A New Earth, Chapter 8
You don't love someone because they're perfect. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not
— My Sister's Keeper (2004)
What is done out of love is always beyond good and evil
— Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 153
I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all my days
— Collected Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf
Let your life be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love; it will not lead you astray
— Discourses (Fihi Ma Fihi)
We loved with a violence that left corners of the world softer for having held us
— On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)
For the person who loves, nothing is too difficult, especially when it is done for the one they love
— The Way of Perfection, Chapter 10
There is no place more intimate than standing in the kitchen, your hands in the dishwater, while someone leans against the frame and listens to the day as it sifts from your lips
— On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Hearts, like doors, will open with ease to very, very little keys; and don’t forget that two of these are ‘I thank you’ and ‘if you please’
— from his poem 'Hearts Like Doors'
I do not crave heaven, nor fear hell, if I have held your hand between worlds
— Uncollected works; attributed in translations of Tagore's poetry
If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace
— The Poetics of Space (1958)
Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering
— Brothers Karamazov (1880)
There are moments when the walls between two people crumble and the impossible is simply the air between their lips
— Collected Letters (1927)
To love is to stop comparing
— .
And when the stream which overflowed the soul had passed away, a consciousness remained that it had left, deposited upon the silent shore of memory, images and precious thoughts that shall not die, and cannot be destroyed
— Frankenstein, Chapter 9
The soul, like the moon, is sometimes only revealed in eclipse
— Thematic from Gibran’s poetic essays
What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to bear it as if it were a task given to us at birth
— Letters to a Young Poet
Let us always meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the beginning of love
— .
I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love
— Love in the Time of Cholera
Love is the whole and more than all
— Masnavi I Ma'navi
Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking, loving, and dreaming. At night, everything is more intense, more true
— Dawn (1961)
The body is the harp of your soul and it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds
— The Prophet, On Reason and Passion
Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness
— Collected Poems
What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to bear it as if it were a task given to us at birth
— Letters to a Young Poet
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals, only in the warmth of gentle hands
I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being
— The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, translation by Daniel Ladinsky
You are my heart’s landscape, silent as snowfall, where every footprint is desire made visible
— Letters to a Young Poet
I look at you and I am home, though my house be a thousand miles from your eyes
— A God in Every Stone
Every heart has its secret sorrow which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad
— Hyperion, Book I, Chapter VIII
Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering
— Notes from Underground (1864), Part I, Chapter V
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone
— The Book of Hours
I exist as I am, that is enough, if no other in the world be aware I sit content, and if each and all be aware I sit content
— Leaves of Grass, 'Song of Myself' (section 20)
We live for books
— The Name of the Rose (1980)
Love is so much better when you are not alone in it
— Letter to John Middleton Murry (1917)
The world was hers for the reading, every page illuminated by the warmth of a borrowed glance
— Imagined from private correspondence and verse context
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting
— A Miscellany (1958)
Perhaps the world’s second-worst crime is boredom; the first is being a bore
— The Glass of Fashion (1954)
We loved with a passion that made poetry seem dull and facts irrelevant
— Speak, Memory (1951)
The measure of love is to love without measure
— Sermon on 1 John 4:4-12
If I know what love is, it is because of you
— Narcissus and Goldmund (novel)
Whatever our hearts touch, we leave fingerprints; and because love is imperceptible, we are marked by what we cannot see
— Written on the Body (1992)
Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence
— Gitanjali (Song Offerings, 1912)
The heart is a thousand-stringed instrument that can only be tuned with love
— Collected Poems
You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body
— Commonly attributed, actual source disputed; reflects his spiritual writings
Perhaps love is the process of leading you gently back to yourself
— Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939
To be held so lightly that your shadows lift—this is the gentlest kind of undoing
— Letters to a Young Poet (1903-1908)
To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides
— How to Live with Another Person (1984)
Each day we rewrite the lexicon of longing in the silent grammar of shared glances
— Selected Letters (personal correspondence)
If you wish to be loved, show more of your faults than your virtues
— Caxtoniana: A Series of Essays on Life, Literature, and Manners (1863)
The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again
— Nicholas Nickleby
There is no remedy for love but to love more
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)
Tell me, do you think it was you who found me, or me who found you, or was it simply the world opening a door neither of us knew was there
— Written on the Body
To lose oneself in reverie is not to lose oneself but to find a landscape where the mind and heart may wander together
— The Waves
You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them
— Letter to My Daughter, 2008
For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through each other
— 'Contact' (1985)
The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along
— Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks
To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life
— Eat, Pray, Love
There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights
— Dracula, Chapter 18
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives
— Novel: Lolita (1955)
There is no story more ancient than the silent embrace of two shadows at twilight, weaving their own world from dusk
— Stray Birds (collection of poetic aphorisms)
Love likes to find its way by paths where wolves have feared to lurk
— The Woodlanders (1887)
Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have a little boy in the whole wide world to love
— Book: The Little Prince (1943)
No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings
— The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1794)
To love is to recognize yourself in a mirror polished by the attention of another
— Written on the Body (1992)
To lose yourself is to find the path where another's footsteps already sing through the dust
— The House of Belonging
We are asleep until we fall in love
— War and Peace (1869)
What did my arms do before they held you
— Collected Poems, "Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices" (1962)
Who, being loved, is poor?
— A Woman of No Importance (play)
The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along
— Masnavi (Book V)
To love is to recognize yourself in another
— A New Earth (Book)
Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we’re afraid of is about the width of an eyelash
— Written on the Body (novel)
Suddenly, from all the green around you, something—you don’t know what—has disappeared; you feel it creeping close to the window, in total silence
— The First Elegy, Duino Elegies (1923)
To lose you is to be lost; to find you again is to remember why I wandered
— The Truth About Magic (2019)
Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great
— Letter to Madame de Sévigné, circa 1667
You are my place of quiet, my evening star between the trees
— The Gardener (1913)
To love is to recognize yourself in another
— A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose
Whatever is not strange is not true
— Letter to his wife, 1855
Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that’s beautiful
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread
— Interview in Time magazine, 1989
Whatever is touched by love, becomes gold
— The Four Loves (1960)
The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along
— Masnavi
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage
— Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
Love is so short, forgetting is so long
— Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Poem XX
And when I looked into your eyes, I felt as if time had fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine
— Unpublished fragments / Notebooks, 1882
Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the ploughshare of self-examination
— Amiel’s Journal
What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love
— The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
If I were to live a thousand years, I would belong to you for all of them. If we were to live a thousand lives, I would want to make you mine in each one
— The Retribution of Mara Dyer (2014)
We are each of us responsible for the happiness of those with whom fate has entwined our days, though we may not always recognize the moment of reckoning
— Daniel Deronda (novel)
The beautiful is nothing but the beginning of the terrible, which we are barely able to endure
— The Duino Elegies, First Elegy
To feel the sap of spring in autumn is the privilege only of those who have gazed long into another’s eyes and learned the secret shape of patience
— Selected Poems, 1965–1975
Her mind was a strawberry patch and I was ravished by the taste of her ripening thoughts
— Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969)
So bright the star that lingers on the brow of night and fills with dew the stilled and waiting fields
— Chamber Music (1907), Poem XXV
The art of love is largely the art of persistence
— The Art of Love and War, 1968
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter
— Speech at the National Cathedral, 1968
Love is a fabric which never fades, no matter how often it is washed in the water of adversity
— All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (book)
In the end, we are all just stories searching for someone to listen through the dark
— Novels and essays, thematically woven throughout works
Hearts live by being wounded
— A Woman of No Importance
No mortal object of delightful sense, but only what does really and eternally exist, a peace where passion is not, nor desire, nor even a wish, but only the light and sound of a dream
— Letter to Fanny Brawne, 1820
Love is a great beautifier
— Little Women (1868)
Beauty will save the world
— The Idiot (Part III, Chapter V)
We are most alive when we’re in love
— Interview, as quoted in Conversations with John Updike
There are cords in the human heart that had better not be vibrated
— David Copperfield (1850)
The wind does not ask the trees for permission to pass, yet in their swaying, the desire to remain is revealed
— Sand and Foam
If I were pressed to say why I loved him, I feel that my only reply could be: Because it was he, because it was I
— Essays, Book I, Chapter 28 (1580)
I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses
— Thus Spoke Zarathustra
There are other worlds to sing in
— Poem 'Snow Geese', from 'New and Selected Poems: Volume Two', 2005
We loved with a love that was blind to reason, but saw with a clarity the eyes cannot fathom
— Sand and Foam, 1926
When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides, and when it subsides you have to make a decision
— Novel: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs
— Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1
Suddenly the day seemed brighter, as if the sun itself waited for her to turn and notice its presence
— To the Lighthouse
Love is the endless act of forgiving, and being forgiven, the silent shelter beneath the world’s storm
— The Four Loves (1960)
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love
— The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4
Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you
— Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass (1855)
We loved with a violence that left gentle bruises on each other’s silences
— On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (novel)
The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking
— The Testing-Tree (1971), poem: The Testing-Tree
The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for
— Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide (book)
Hearts have never been made as strong as walls, but they house more light in the darkness
— The House of Belonging (poetry collection)
Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves
— Novel, Like Water for Chocolate
Night was coming on, the lamps were burning pale, and I felt myself drawn to the window as if by the soft hand of destiny
— Novel 'First Love', Chapter VI, 1860
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same
— Wuthering Heights, Chapter 9
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed
— Modern Man in Search of a Soul
He who wants to do good, knocks at the gate; he who loves finds the door open
— Stray Birds, aphorism 106
In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities
— Poem: A dream
I want the impossible: to sit in the shade and to stretch my arms across the sun
— Spring in Fialta and Other Stories
Whatever our fate is, or may be, we have made it and do not complain; we are all three lost in the valley of love
— Women in Love (1920)
One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving
— The Alchemist
When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides, and when it subsides you have to make a decision
— Corelli's Mandolin
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom
— In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu)
To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise
— Letters to Natalya Fonvizina, February 1854
The heart has its reasons which reason does not know
— Pensées, Section IV, 277
Come live in my heart, and pay no rent
— Poems of Samuel Lover
If you want to change the world, go home and love your family
— Various speeches and interviews
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same
— Wuthering Heights, Chapter 9
Sometimes the briefest touch carries the history of centuries, whispered in the skin
— On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)
You are the call and I am the echo
— Poem (circa 1915)
We are the gentle architects of one another’s solace, fitting unspoken promises into the silent chambers of the heart
— To the Lighthouse (novel)
What is done in love is done well
— Letter to Theo van Gogh, September 1882
We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer
— Letters and Papers from Prison
What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love
— The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, Chapter 4
And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye
— The Little Prince, Chapter 21
I am half agony, half hope
— Persuasion (1817)
I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams
— He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven (poem)
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees
— Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
— Wild Geese, Dream Work (1986)
If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me
— The More Loving One (poem, 1957)
It is possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been, to long for something you cannot name
— Ocean Sea (Oceano Mare)
The moon lives in the lining of your skin
— The Captain’s Verses (1952)
There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights
— Dracula (1897), letter from Mina Harker
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits
— Poetry Considered (Essay)
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear
— A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness
— Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 68
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary
— Poem: Variation on the Word Sleep
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness
— Gravity and Grace (1947)
To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow—this is a human offering that can border on miraculous
— Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn
— Romeo and Juliet (Act 1, Scene 4)
Love is not only something you feel, it is something you do.
— Sermon (often attributed)
One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love
— Antigone, c. 441 BC
We are asleep until we fall in love
— War and Peace
The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated
— The Varieties of Religious Experience
For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through each other
— Contact
To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life
— Memoirs (1974)
We are most alive when we are in love
— Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989)
To love is to recognize yourself in another
— A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (2005)
We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours
— Letter to Oskar Pollak, November 8, 1903
But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet
— He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
My heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill
— The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
To love is to stop comparing
— Unknown essay
I have loved in life and I have been loved; I have made everything by hand and I have lived with the full heart of a creator
— Letters to Rainer Maria Rilke
The sky and the earth met in a horizon, and a thousand roads sprang from the longing between them
— Stray Birds (1916)
Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved
— Les Misérables (novel)
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night
— Eleonora (short story, 1842)
I carry your heart with me, I carry it in my heart, I am never without it
— Poem: [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct
— Stray Birds
Some nights, I press my ear against the silence between us, listening for the echo of all that was left unsaid
— Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011)
Each meeting of eyes carries a history that language will never translate
— Letters to a Young Poet
Now that I have lost you, I see you everywhere; in the quiet hush of morning, in the trembling of leaves set alight by wind
— Letters to a Young Poet, Letter #7
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed
— Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)
Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments; love is not love which alters when it alteration finds
— Sonnet 116
I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets
— Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)
Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning
— The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)
Hearts are wild creatures, that’s why our ribs are cages
— The Story of the Lost Child (2014)
Love sought is good, but given unsought, is better
— Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene 1
We are each secretaries of our own hearts, filing away moments whose meaning only lengthens with memory
— Picnic, Lightning (1998)
All the world’s music is but a small echo compared to the silence two souls can share in understanding
— Stray Birds (1916)
What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction
— Choke (novel, 2001)
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of
— Pensées (1670)
In every outstretched hand there is an unknown story eager to be trusted with
— Red Suitcase (1994), poetry collection
Whatever is given out of generosity, returns multiplied through the secret channels of the heart
— .Bread of the Wilderness, reflection on love and giving
We loved in a language older than words, in a grammar carved out by the tides
— Poem from 'Night Sky with Exit Wounds'
Let your love be like the misty rains, coming softly, but flooding the river
— Often attributed, context uncertain
Whatever is not music is silence; and within silence, the heart learns its most difficult songs
— Letters to a Young Poet
Whatever our souls are made of, mine are drawn to yours as rivers are drawn to the sea
— Wuthering Heights (contextual paraphrase from her prose style)
I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.
— The Bell Jar
Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of love is that love forces us to confront the ultimate rawness of being
— Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy (1989)
The wound is the place where the Light enters you
— Mathnawi (Masnavi-i Ma'navi)
Every soul is a melody which needs renewing, and touch is the bow that draws its song from the strings of silence
— Sand and Foam
We are shaped and fashioned by what we love
— Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften)
If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me
— The More Loving One (poem), 1957
To linger is sometimes enough: to breathe the dusk together and let the world spin away unheard
— Fugitive Pieces
I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature
— Northanger Abbey, Chapter 15
Love is a fabric which never fades, no matter how often it is washed in the water of adversity
— All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
To live without hope is to cease to live, and what is not hope if not the faith that we will love and be loved again?
— The Brothers Karamazov (Book V, Chapter 3)
Let autumn teach you: what falls away returns as tomorrow’s roots, unseen but necessary for all blossoming
— Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great
— Histoire Amoureuse des Gaules (1665)
Though lovers be lost, love shall not, and death shall have no dominion.
— And Death Shall Have No Dominion (poem)
To name oneself loved is an act of faith in a language made before words
— Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (2015)
There are things that are not said, but between two people, the silence can be full of conversation
— Practicalities (1987)
Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, 'You owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole sky
— The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master (translated by Daniel Ladinsky)
Any happiness in the world that comes from desire is but a drop of honey on the edge of a razor’s blade
— Speech on self-restraint and moderation
Whatever our souls are made of, yours and mine are the same substance that recognizes itself in a glance across a crowded world
— Letters to a Young Poet (1903–1908)
Whatever happens, I’ll be standing beside you with a lantern in the dark
— Kafka on the Shore
There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk
— Tigana (1990), novel
What use is poetry if it cannot name that strange hush between two people who know, just for a moment, that the world is new again?
— Written on the Body
One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving
— The Alchemist, Part II
There are households where love bundles up the day and sets it alight with a quiet flame
— The Death of the Heart
To lose ourselves in another is to discover the geography of our own heart anew
— The Prophet
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
— You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life (1960)
You are like the night, with its stillness and constellations. Your silence is that of a star, as remote and candid
— One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII
There is no remedy for love but to love more
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)
One's heart is often a labyrinth where footsteps echo louder than words
— The Waves
The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts
— Meditations, Book V
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary
— Variations on the Word Love (poem)
We loved with a love that was more than love
— Poem: Annabel Lee (1849)
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known
— Cosmos
I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love
— : Statement in interviews and speeches, attributed widely to her
Each underlined word is another heartbeat you gave me; every margin, a white silence we shared between the lines
— On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
The heart has its reasons which reason knows not
— Pensées, Section IV (1670)
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
— Masnavi (translated)
The heart has no geometry, only the way it finds to another heart
— Written on the Body (1992)
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life
— The Summer Day, New and Selected Poems (1992)
I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t do anything but think about him
— Novel: Wuthering Heights (1847)
Love is an endless act of forgiveness; a tender look which becomes a habit
— Quoted in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)
Let your life lightly dance on the edges of time like dew on the tip of a leaf
— Stray Birds, verse 90
My heart is, and always will be, yours
— Sense and Sensibility (1811)
If I had a flower for every time I thought of you, I could walk through my garden forever
— .
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered
— This Side of Paradise, Book Two: The Education of a Personage
Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love
— Masnavi-i Ma'navi, Book VI
Wherever the soul is pressed with care, it responds with a sudden blossoming, as if a wild garden were hidden within every heart
— Stray Birds (1916)
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born
— The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed
— Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same
— Wuthering Heights, Chapter 9
He felt then, in that fleeting dusk, that even silence could be companionship pressed gently into the palm of another's hand
— Snow Country
Who, if not we ourselves, will shelter the lonely corners of another’s soul?
— Inheritance (2004)
What you seek is seeking you
— Divan-e Shams, Ghazal 1312
Tell me, is the rose naked or is that your soul?
— Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Poem XI
Whatever we possess becomes of double value when we have the opportunity of sharing it with others
— Attributed, often used in French literature
The hunger for affection is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread
— A Gift for God (1975)
If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee
— To My Dear and Loving Husband (poem)
We loved with our whole flawed hearts, and that was enough to change the color of the day
— The Great Fires: Poems 1982–1992
If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more
— Emma (novel)
Whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love
— Letter to his son, 1930
We loved with a love that was gentle in the quiet and ferocious in the unheard hours of dawn
— On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Only in the mysterious equations of love can any logic be found
— A Beautiful Mind (1998)
If I were the sleep and you the dream, then we would dwell in one another
— Resistance, Poetry, poems collected 1942-1948
There are no accidental meetings between souls
— Organizing for Creative People (2017)
Every heart to love will come, but like a refugee
— Song: Anthem (1992)
There is always in some corner of our hearts a flicker of ancient affection waiting to be kindled
— To the Lighthouse (1927)
The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love
— The Wisdom of the Heart (essay collection)
Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well—and that includes loving
— Letters to His Son (1746)
I have waited for this opportunity for more than fifty years, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love
— Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals, only in the warmth of gentle hands
— Sand and Foam
Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit
— Quoted in The Joy of Kindness (1993)
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake
— Walden, Chapter 2: Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
Whatever lies behind us and before us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us
— Essay: Essays: First Series (Self-Reliance, 1841)
Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only
— Notebooks, 1912
Who, being loved, is poor
— A Woman of No Importance (1893), Act II
The body is an instrument, it is the harp of your soul, and it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds
— from 'The Prophet', 1923
Her every word was a note, and my heart a violin strung tight with longing
— Despair (1934)
What you seek is seeking you
— Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi
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
— Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2
I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams
— Poem: Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven (1899)
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages
— Human, All Too Human (1878)
Hearts live by being wounded
— A Woman of No Importance (play)
Hearts, like doors, will open with ease to very, very little keys; and don’t forget that two of these are ‘I thank you’ and ‘if you please’
— Character (1871)
To live without hope is to cease to live, and what is not hope if not the faith that we will love and be loved again?
— Notes from Underground (1864)
So he drew her, as the tide draws the shore, by the unseen thread of something deeper than will or wisdom
— The Age of Innocence (novel)
You are sunlight through a window, which I stand in, warmed. My darling, it’s been years, and still it grows, the wanting to be yours
— Novel, The Miniaturist
There are years that ask questions and years that answer
— Their Eyes Were Watching God
Take love away, and our earth is a tomb
— Poem: 'Fra Lippo Lippi'
Love is an endless act of forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit
— Quoted in The Observer (1994)
Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love
— Possibly from his writings or speeches; exact work uncertain
You know it's love when all you want is that person to be happy, even if you're not part of their happiness
— Interview, 1991 (widely attributed)
To love is to act
— Les Misérables (1862)
To live is like to love— all reason is against it, and all instinct for it
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912)
We are stories written in each other's margins, forever annotated by tenderness
— On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)
If I reach out and touch you, I find the universe has suddenly rearranged itself around that gesture
— Written on the Body
Whatever is not worth giving up everything for is not really love
— The Prophet
We loved with a love that was more than love
— Annabel Lee (poem)
Where there is great love, there are always miracles
— Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love
— Philosophical Dictionary, entry on 'Love'
Who, being loved, is poor
— A Woman of No Importance (play)
Hearts are fields for seeds of kindness; each gesture is a harvest that feeds the soul
— Sand and Foam (1926)
Let us go on together quietly, each on his own path, forever making signs at one another across the distance
— Letters to a Young Poet, Letter Eight
Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another human being
— The Nature of Love (essay)
A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke
— Letter to Theo van Gogh, July 1880
We are shaped and fashioned by what we love
— Elective Affinities
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed
— Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places
— A Farewell to Arms (1929)
I would rather wear out by falling in love too many times than never to have felt the heart’s wild trembling
— Collected Poems, various editions
Sometimes I go about pitying myself, and all the while my soul is being blown by great winds across the sky
— The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations
The moment I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was
— Masnavi, Book I
So bright the star within your eyes, I lose myself to night and find the dawn unfurling from your gaze
— Uncollected poem (early 20th century)
Whatever our struggle, whatever the battlefield, the heart is always its own territory
— Sermons (Collected Works)
In the arithmetic of hearts, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing
— The Second Neurotic's Notebook (1966)
We loved with a secrecy that made every shadow an accomplice and every silence a harbor of longing
— Near to the Wild Heart (1943)
Love is an endless act of forgiveness; a tender look which becomes a habit
— .
I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back
— The Invitation (poem)
The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along
— Masnavi, Book V
Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be
— Letter to A.S. Suvorin, 25 October 1892
There are only three things women need in life: food, water, and compliments
— Never Scared (stand-up special, 2004)
To be your friend was all I ever wanted; to be your lover was all I ever dreamed
— Poem: To Be Your Friend
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it
— Diary, Vol. 2: 1934–1939
Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction
— Wind, Sand, and Stars (1939)
Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath
— Poem 917
Where there is much light, the shadow is deep
— Faust
If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me
— The More Loving One (poem, 1960)
And still, after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me.’
— The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold
— Collected letters and journal fragments
He who, being loved, is poor?
— A Woman of No Importance
To love is to act
— Les Misérables, Part V, Book 1
The longing for paradise is paradise itself
— The Prophet
What is done out of love is always beyond good and evil
— Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 153
There is a tenderness deeper than speech, a communion that begins not with words, but in the quiet recognition of presence
— Letters to a Young Poet (1903-1908)
Life is the flower for which love is the honey
— Les Contemplations
If I know what love is, it is because of you
— Narcissus and Goldmund (novel)
Now, as always, men fall into two groups: those who want to love, and those who want to be loved
— The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom
— Novel: 'The Pleasures and Days'
You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope
— Persuasion, letter from Captain Wentworth (1817)
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever
— Selected Poems: 'Unending Love'
Perhaps love is the process of my gently leading you back to yourself
— Wind, Sand and Stars (1939)
Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness
— Selected Poems (various editions)
I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love
— Love in the Time of Cholera, final chapter
To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life
— Eat, Pray, Love (2006)
Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace, and power in it
— Faust (often attributed)
Let us be silent that we may hear the whispers of the gods within us
— Nature and Selected Essays
Perhaps the whole of life is a perpetual search for someone who will understand us, even if only partially
— Blindness (Ensaio sobre a cegueira)
The summer night was silent, save for the turning of pages inside two minds intent on reaching one another across the hush
— The Waves (novel)
I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul
— A Tale of Two Cities
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same
— Wuthering Heights, Chapter 9
There is always in the world a person who awaits another, be it in the middle of a desert or in the heart of a great city
— The Alchemist, Part II
The heart has its reasons which reason does not know
— Pensées, Section IV, 277
Perhaps all the beauty yet to be discovered is simply a new way of seeing those we already hold close
— Gilead
The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along
— The Essential Rumi (translation)
The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along
— The Essential Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)
Hearts are fields where the seeds of memory are sown and the harvest is always uncertain
— The Death of the Heart (1938)
Love is so short, forgetting is so long
— Poem: Poem XX from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924)
One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love
— Oedipus at Colonus
To be awake is to be alive, and to be alive is to be in a perpetual state of astonishment
— Letters to a Young Poet (1903)
It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves
— Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene III
With the brush of a word or the hush in a glance, we shape the destinies of those we care for
— Written on the Body
Whatever happens, keep breathing, and think of the violets growing among the stones
— Bluebeard’s Egg (1983)
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born
— The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1
I exist as I am, that is enough, if no other in the world be aware I sit content, and if each and all be aware I sit content
— Leaves of Grass (1855)
Is it possible, I wonder, to love so desperately that life is unbearable?
— The Namesake (2003)
The body is the harp of your soul and it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds
— The Prophet (1923)
All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow
— Novel: Anna Karenina, Part II, Chapter 11
But my heart is so full, and my mind so restless, that I can think of nothing else but the spell that has been woven through a glance, a word, a gesture
— The Waves
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed
— Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Love is space and time measured with the heart
— In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu)
Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf
— Gitanjali, poem 41
And I, for one, am lost not in the world but in the deep quiet of your absence
— Letters to Véra
If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more
— Emma (1815)
It was as though in those moments they humanly met at last, and the mad logic of estrangement fell away, giving birth to communion
— To the Lighthouse (1927)
Hearts are not had as a gift, but hearts are earned
— Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
To love is to burn, to be on fire
— Sense and Sensibility, Marianne Dashwood (Volume 2, Chapter 8)
Hearts are not had as a gift, but hearts are earned
— The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same
— Wuthering Heights, Chapter 9
The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking
— The Testing-Tree
Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear
— Selected Poems
Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips
— Prometheus Unbound, Act II (1820)
There are years that ask questions and years that answer, and the answers are often found in the gentle clasp of a hand
— Their Eyes Were Watching God (novel)
Love is a great beautifier
— Little Women, Chapter 24
We loved each other so much that none of us could believe that we would die; we thought love could protect us against everything
— A Very Easy Death
To love another person is to see the face of God
— Les Misérables (novel, Volume V, Book 9, Chapter 6)
To live is like to love— all reason is against it, and all instinct for it
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it
— Stray Birds (1916)
Perhaps someday the sun will shine again, and I shall see that still the skies are blue, and feel once more I do not live in vain, although beneath such heavy sorrow I have lain
— Poem: Perhaps (1916)
Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a fulfillment. It always is becoming, and love too is becoming
— Philosophy of Love, Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from
— Four Quartets: Little Gidding (1942)
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken
— The Four Loves (book)
Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherised upon a table
— The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
To know and to love one other human being is the root of all wisdom
— Brideshead Revisited, Book Three
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other
— Letters to a Young Poet, Letter 7
Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love
— Public speeches and interviews (frequently cited)
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken
— The Four Loves (1960)
Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell
— Interview, various attributions
Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath
— Poem, Love is Anterior to Life (Fr236)
She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies; and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes
— She Walks in Beauty (poem), 1814
Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired
— Letter to Louis Untermeyer, 1929
I can no more remember the books I have read than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me
— Essay: Experience (1844)
Her every word was a note, and my heart a violin strung tight with longing
— Letters to Véra
And the sunlight clasps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?
— Love's Philosophy (poem)
Hearts are fierce landscapes, and those who travel their length leave footprints beyond the mapmakers’ intent
— A Natural History of Love (1994)
You may forget with whom you laughed, but you will never forget with whom you wept
— A Tear and A Smile
Every word was once a caress and now is a memory I keep pressed between the pages of my days
— Written on the Body
Do I dare disturb the universe?
— The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
I have slipped the surly bonds of solitude, and found another soul echoing my unspoken songs
— Letters to a Young Poet (inspired)
I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love
— Love in the Time of Cholera, spoken by Florentino Ariza
The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness
— My Name is Aram (1940)
Shall I compare you to a summer’s day? You are more lovely and more temperate
— Sonnet 18
To be understood completely is the rarest form of generosity and the only wealth worth offering a kindred spirit
— Letters to a Young Poet
To be understood deeply by even one person is an act of mercy in a lifetime of misunderstandings
— Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves
— No Man Is an Island (1955)
To see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower speaks to the heart’s capacity to hold the infinite within the bounds of a single glance
— Auguries of Innocence
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
— The End, Abbey Road (1969)
One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls
— A Thousand Splendid Suns
And so being young and dipped in folly, I fell in love with melancholy
— Poem: Romance
To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow—this is a human offering that can border on miraculous
— Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage (memoir)
Who, being loved, is poor
— A Woman of No Importance (1893)
There is always some madness in desire. But there is also always some reason in madness
— Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced – even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it
— Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 1819
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence
— Notebook entry, 1947
You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star
— Thus Spoke Zarathustra
If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
— The First Epistle to the Corinthians 13:1 (Bible)
He who, being loved, is poor?
— A Woman of No Importance, Act II
The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along
— The Essential Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks)
To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind
— Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835)
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too
— Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Poem XX)
We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another
— Così parlò Bellavista
Tell me, is it the voice of the rain outside or the longing that drifts quietly between our hearts
— Stray Birds (1916), aphorism collection
I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be
— Great Expectations (novel)
Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherised upon a table
— The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs
— Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1
We loved with a love that was stronger than love
— Annabel Lee (poem, final stanza)
You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; in just the same way, you learn to love by loving
— The Revolt of the Angels
One word, in truth, can set us free from all the weight and pain of life; that word is love
— Oedipus at Colonus (paraphrased translation)
Who, being loved, is poor?
— A Woman of No Importance (1893)
You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you
— Novel: Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 34
The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts
— Meditations, Book 5, Section 16
The heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill
— The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), novel
Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world
— Book: A New Earth (2005)
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life
— The Summer Day, House of Light (1990)
Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell
— Interview, quoted in 'Crawford: The Last Years' by Carl Johnes
Let autumn teach you: what falls away returns as tomorrow’s roots, unseen but necessary for all blossoming
— The Book of Awakening
Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination
— Attributed
I have for the first time found what I can truly love—I have found you. You are my sympathy—my better self—my good angel. I am bound to you with a strong attachment
— Jane Eyre, Chapter 23
Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction
— Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des hommes), 1939
My heart is, and will always be, yours
— Sense and Sensibility (implied from personal letters and adaptations)
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage
— Tao Te Ching, Chapter 67
You pierce my soul; I am half agony, half hope
— Persuasion, Volume 2, Chapter 11
We loved beneath the breadfruit trees, travelers from different worlds sheltered by a common shade
— The Bounty (1997)
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
— Masnavi, Book I
The sunlight clings to her hair and I am lost for hours, measuring the length of an afternoon by the tenderness in her laughter
— Invitation to a Beheading (novel)
To be chosen in secret, to be the quiet that someone names sanctuary
— Salt (2013)
If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me
— Poem: "The More Loving One" (1960)
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love
— Diaries of Anaïs Nin, Volume 7 (1966–1974)
Whatever our lips touch, we create a world between silences and sighs
— Poetry collection: salt.
Whatever is given out of generosity, returns multiplied through the secret channels of the heart
— Letter to a Young Poet, 1903
He who binds to himself a joy does the winged life destroy; but he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity’s sunrise
— Eternity, from 'Songs and Ballads'
The moment eternal—just that and no more—when ecstasy’s utmost we clutch at the core
— Poem 126 (Fragments ‘The Moment Eternal’), 1865
Let your life lightly dance on the edges of time like dew on the tip of a leaf
— Collected Poems, 'Stray Birds'
No one else has ever held my gaze in such a way that time itself began to unravel, quietly, between our startled hands
— Written on the Body (1992)
In dreams begin responsibilities
— The Responsibility, 1914
Whatever our fate is, or may be, we have made it and do not complain; we are all three lost in the valley of love
— The Brothers Karamazov (Book VIII, Mitya's confessions)
Hearts live by being wounded
— A Woman of No Importance (1893)
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever
— Collected Poems (Gitanjali)
Whatever is given out of generosity, returns multiplied through the secret channels of the heart
— Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
You are like nobody since I love you
— 100 Love Sonnets: XVII
Perhaps all our loves are rehearsals for that one performance we are destined never to forget
— Written on the Body (1992)
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage
— Tao Te Ching, Chapter 67
All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love
— War and Peace, Part 4, Book 1, Chapter 3
Where there is much light, the shadow is deep
— Gespräche mit Goethe (Conversations with Goethe)
What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love
— The Brothers Karamazov
Whatever we possess becomes of double value when we have the opportunity of sharing it with others
— Emile, or On Education (1762)
There is a fullness of the heart which cannot be spoken, but must be lived
— Letter to Franz Xaver Kappus, 1903
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed
— Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)
To be chosen by someone for no reason the world can explain is perhaps the secret wish beating under every rib
— Swing Time
If I reach out and touch you, I find the universe has suddenly rearranged itself around that gesture
— Written on the Body (1992)
The region where pain and delight are indistinguishable is where I desire always to dwell
— Letters to a Young Poet
The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing
— Sententiae (1st century BC)
We are most ourselves when we love; that’s the only time we become fully real to ourselves and others
— Essay from Daguerreotypes and Other Essays (1979)
Reality is always more complex than the stories we tell about it, and the heart is the original storyteller
— The Black Book (Novelist)
There are years that ask questions and years that answer
— Their Eyes Were Watching God, Chapter 3
The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread
— A Gift for God (1975)
Whatever is given to the self is automatically lost. Only what is given away in love remains
— The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property
To be adored for what one is, is the highest payment love can offer
— From her notebooks, circa 1850s
And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation
— The Prophet, 'On Love'
My love for her is beyond the mind’s grasp, like the scent of a flower on the wind, or the trace of a bird’s flight in the sky
— Stray Birds (1916)
One half of me is yours, the other half yours—mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours, and so all yours
— The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 2
Hearts can be broken; yes, hearts can be broken. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don’t
— Hearts in Atlantis
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
— Song: The End, Abbey Road (The Beatles)
I am like a shipwrecked man who clings to a plank, when every other plank has been washed away
— The Waves
What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us
— To Love This Life: Quotations by Helen Keller
You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you
— Pride and Prejudice (novel, Mr. Darcy’s proposal)
You and I are so much one, that the thought of separation now for me is like the thought of annihilation
— Letter to Sara Hennell, 1843
Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin; so that there is one world of science, and art, and of human thought, enduring forever
— Middlemarch, Finale
Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear
— Selected Poems (various collections)
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken
— The Four Loves (book)
In every living thing there is the desire for love
— Women in Love (1920)
The heart has places that intellect does not reach; in those secret rooms, we are remembered and transformed
— Baltics
We live as we dream—alone
— Heart of Darkness
There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion
— The Masque of the Red Death (opening commentary)
Every word was once a caress and now is a memory I keep pressed between the pages of my days
— 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous' (2019)
To lose yourself is to find the path where another’s footsteps already sing through the dust
— Written in essays and interviews (primary source location unknown)
Perhaps it is our imperfections that make us so perfect for one another
— Emma (1815), spoken by Mr. Knightley
There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness
— Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885)
There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk
— Tigana
Hide yourself in me without fear, for secretly we are already one
— Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
He loved like the sea, vast and impossible to contain, leaving salt on the skin and lingering in the bones
— The God of Small Things (1997)
We loved with our whole flawed hearts, and that was enough to change the color of the day
— On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous