Quotes about love
Here are 40 passages (out of 53) from classic authors that speak of love, for example by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo and Friedrich Nietzsche.
We kept the passages whose text touches on the theme, starting with those where it comes up most. Each is given word for word, with its author, its work and the reference of the passage. To browse an author’s quotes, follow the name.
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“Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything.”
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“I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why.”
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“The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one’s own sake—let us say rather, loved in spite of one’s self.”
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“It is true we love life; not because we are wont to live, but because we are wont to love. There is always some madness in love. But there is always, also, some method in madness.”
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“If I ask myself why I love him, I find I do not know, and do not really much care to know; so I suppose that this kind of love is not a product of reasoning and statistics, like one’s love for other reptiles and animals.”
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“The quarrels of lovers are the renewal of love.”
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“What an immense happiness it is to love and be loved.”
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“A man whom grown-up people love, children love still more.”
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“If thou must love me, let it be for nought / Except for love’s sake only.”
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“Love is silent; poesy alone can speak for it. Or rather love itself is nothing but the highest poetry of nature.”
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“Love, I thought, is stronger than death or the fear of death. Only by it, by love, life holds together and advances.”
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“Light intellectual replete with love, Love of true good replete with ecstasy, Ecstasy that transcendeth every sweetness.”
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““That I am born to fade grieves not my heart; / But never was it a true lover’s part / To vex with bitter words his love’s repose.””
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“I hold it true, whate’er befall; / I feel it, when I sorrow most; / 'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.”
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“Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove. / O no, it is an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken.”
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“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. / I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight / For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.”
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“Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.”
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“Love and the gentle heart are one same thing.”
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“The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost.”
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“What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.”
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“I think every one should love life above everything in the world.”
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“Mothers often love best that child which has caused them the most suffering.”
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“I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
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“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.”
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“God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give them endless duration.”
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“Love of truth shows itself in this, that a man knows how to find and value the good in everything.”
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“That best portion of a good man’s life; / His little, nameless, unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love.”
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“But, dost thou love life? then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of, as Poor Richard says.”
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“Living, Lesbia, we should e’en be loving. Sour severity, tongue of eld maligning, All be to us a penny’s estimation.”
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“Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.”
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“There is a politeness of the heart, and it is allied to love. It produces the most agreeable politeness of outward demeanour.”
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“But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved, The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.”
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“We love much more warmly when we are looking forward to making somebody happy than we do half an hour after, when we have done it.”
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“Only words winged by virtue and sensibility are the bees which, in such cases, carry the pollen of love from one soul into another.”
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“'Twas in the beauteous month of May, / When all the flowers were springing, / That first within my bosom / I heard love’s echo ringing.”
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“My heart is like a rainbow shell / That paddles in a halcyon sea; / My heart is gladder than all these, / Because my love is come to me.”
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“Such was my innate longing for liberty, that I studiously avoided those whose very name seemed incompatible with the freedom that I loved.”
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“Brothers, love is a teacher; but one must know how to acquire it, for it is hard to acquire, it is dearly bought, it is won slowly by long labor.”
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“It all lies in the fact that men think there are circumstances in which one may deal with human beings without love; and there are no such circumstances.”
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“All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.”