Love Quotes
In this section you will find some inspirational words about love from some well-loved and respected individuals.
“The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty -- it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.”
Mother Teresa, A Simple Path: Mother Teresa
“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
Dr. Seuss
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
Lao Tzu
“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
“Love is like the wind, you can't see it but you can feel it.”
Nicholas Sparks, A Walk to Remember
“Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.”
Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam
“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“Where there is love there is life.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance.”
John Lennon
“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
Plato
“And, in the end
The love you take
is equal to the love you make.”
Paul McCartney, The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics
“I am not sure exactly what heaven will be like, but I know that when we die and it comes time for God to judge us, he will not ask, 'How many good things have you done in your life?' rather he will ask, 'How much love did you put into what you did?”
Mother Teresa
“I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches
“A woman's heart should be so hidden in God that a man has to seek Him just to find her.”
Max Lucado
“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”
Vincent Van Gogh
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”
Jimi Hendrix
“Hate the sin, love the sinner.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.”
Charles Dickens
“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
C.S. Lewis
“Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.”
Albert Einstein
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan
“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
“More smiling, less worrying. More compassion, less judgment. More blessed, less stressed. More love, less hate.”
Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
Mother Teresa
“People have forgotten this truth," the fox said. "But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.”
John Updike, My Father's Tears and Other Stories
“One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.”
Sophocles
“Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.”
E.E. Cummings
“The more one judges, the less one loves.”
Honoré de Balzac, Physiologie Du Mariage
“This is what we call love. When you are loved, you can do anything in creation. When you are loved, there's no need at all to understand what's happening, because everything happens within you.”
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.”
Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes
“We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. And love changes us. And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky.”
Walter Mosley, Blue Light
“The soul is healed by being with children.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone.”
Mitch Albom
“It's not how much we give but how much love we put into giving.”
Mother Theresa
“Let yourself be drawn by the stronger pull of that which you truly love.”
Rumi
“There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”
Vincent Van Gogh
“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, Me: Stories of My Life
“Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.”
Rumi
“If a thing loves, it is infinite.”
William Blake
“It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.”
Roald Dahl, The Witches
“We must love one another or die”
W.H. Auden
“Lovers alone wear sunlight.”
E.E. Cummings
“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”
Victor Hugo
“If someone thinks that peace and love are just a cliché that must have been left behind in the 60s, that's a problem. Peace and love are eternal.”
John Lennon
“Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.”
Martin Amis, The Second Plane: 14 Responses to September 11
“Unless you love someone, nothing else makes sense.”
E.E Cummings
“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.”
Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Happiness
“We are all worthy of one another.”
Edward P. Jones, The Known World
“Where there is great love, there are always miracles.”
Willa Cather
“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“Do what you love, love what you do, and with all your heart give yourself to it.”
Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”
Maya Angelou
“Whenever you are confronted with an opponent. Conquer him with love.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.”
Dali Lama
The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God's love for us does not.”
C.S. Lewis
“To love someone means to see them as God intended them.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I'm a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world.”
Mother Teresa
“Where there is great love, there are always miracles.”
Willa Cather
“When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines upon you.”
Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
“Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star...”
e.e cummings
“To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.”
G.K. Chesterton
“To love is to recognize yourself in another.”
Eckhart Tolle
“Limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns it calls me on and on across the universe.”
John Lennon
“True love begins when nothing is looked for in return.”
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
“To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement.”
St. Augustine of Hippo
“Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.”
Henri J.M. Nouwen
“I find the best way to love someone is not to change them, but instead, help them reveal the greatest version of themselves.”
Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
“Be the one who nurtures and builds. Be the one who has an understanding and a forgiving heart one who looks for the best in people. Leave people better than you found them.”
Marvin J. Ashton
And yet,to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays.”
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
“That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, He said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful.”
Rumi
“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring.”
Oscar Wilde
“Love wins, love always wins.”
Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
“A heart filled with anger has no room for love.”
Joan Lunden, Wake-Up Calls: Making The Most Out Of Every Day
“If you could only love enough, you could be the most powerful person in the world.”
Emmet Fox
“When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
“Work without love is slavery.”
Mother Teresa
“Love is the strongest force the world possesses and yet it is the humblest imaginable.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“The Simple Path
Silence is Prayer
Prayer is Faith
Faith is Love
Love is Service
The Fruit of Service is Peace”
Mother Teresa
“As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.”
Pythagoras
“Love consists of not looking each other in the eye, but of looking outwardly in the same direction.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey
“Freely we serve
Because we freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fall.”
John Milton
“Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.”
John Lennon
“Falling in love you remain a child; rising in love you mature. By and by love becomes not a relationship, it becomes a state of your being. Not that you are in love - now you are love.”
Osho
“The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks and feels with us, and who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.”
Goethe
“I have always found that actively loving
saves one from a morbid preoccupation
with the shortcomings of society.”
Alan Paton
“Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.”
Mother Teresa
“The opposite of love is not hate. Hate is just love gone bad. The actual opposite of love is apathy. When you don't care a damn as to what happens to the other person.”
Amish Tripathi, The Secret of the Nagas
“We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.”
Sam Keen, To Love and Be Loved
“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy to a friend.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
“You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.”
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
“Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
M. Scott Peck
“So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, Lay Morals
“Love God and He will enable you to love others even when they disappoint you.”
Francine Rivers, And the Shofar Blew
“So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, Lay Morals
“Looking at beauty in the world, is the first step of purifying the mind.”
Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations
“Love's gift cannot be given, it waits to be accepted.”
Rabindranath Tagore
“Conquer the angry one by not getting angry; conquer the wicked by goodness; conquer the stingy by generosity, and the liar by speaking the truth.[Verse 223]”
Siddhārtha Gautama, The Dhammapada
“Men are driven by two principal impulses, either by love or by fear.”
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses
“Wisdom is knowing I am nothing,
Love is knowing I am everything,
and between the two my life moves.”
Nisargadatta Maharaj
“Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.”
Bill Ayers
“Submission is not about authority and it is not obedience; it is all about relationships of love and respect.”
Wm. Paul Young, The Shack
“When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults.”
Hermann Hesse, Wer lieben kann, ist glücklich. Über die Liebe
“You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.”
William Faulkner
“Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is.”
Richard P. Feynman
“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
“No, this trick won't work... How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?”
Albert Einstein
“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.”
Anton Chekhov
“If you have it [love], you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have.”
J.M. Barrie
“Love is not patronizing and charity isn't about pity, it is about love. Charity and love are the same -- with charity you give love, so don't just give money but reach out your hand instead.”
Mother Teresa
“Love those you hate you.”
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
“Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
“I believe in the immeasurable power of love; that true love can endure any circumstance and reach across any distance.”
Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
“Perfect love is the most beautiful of all frustrations because it is more than one can express.”
Charlie Chaplin
“When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.”
Mark Twain, Notebook
“Is it really so that the one I love is everywhere?”
Rumi
“Living simply makes loving simple.”
Bell Hooks
“We are asleep until we fall in Love!”
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
“When you were in love, you were capable of learning everything and of knowing things you had never dared even to think, because love was the key to understanding all of the mysteries.”
Paulo Coelho, Brida
“Love is the most powerful force in the world. That love can do anything.”
Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels
“You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving.”
Amy Carmichael
“Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.”
Brennan Manning, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging
“Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.”
Sigmund Freud
“Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.”
Bell Hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love
“My point is that love is the most powerful motivator in the world. It spurs mortals to greatness. Their noblest, bravest acts are done for love.”
Rick Riordan, The Lost Hero
“Till I loved I never lived.”
Emily Dickinson
“In love, one and one are one.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
“It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love or how you love, it matters only that you love”
John Lennon
“The more you are motivated by Love,
The more Fearless & Free your action will be.”
Dalai Lama XIV
“Everything I know, I know because of love.”
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
“One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion”
Simone de Beauvoir
“Love is when the other person's happiness is more important than your own.”
H. Jackson Brown Jr.
“Love without sacrifice is like theft”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“True love is born from understanding.”
The Buddha
“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.”
Henry Van Dyke
“Love comforteth like sunshine after rain.”
William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems
“Gamble everything for love, if you're a true human being.”
Rumi
“Love didn't make you weak, it made you stronger.”
Cassandra Clare, City of Glass
“It is only with true love and compassion that we can begin to mend what is broken in the world. It is these two blessed things that can begin to heal all broken hearts.”
Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
“The reality of loving God is loving him like he's a Superhero who actually saved you from stuff rather than a Santa Claus who merely gave you some stuff.”
Criss Jami, Killosophy
“Love
Embracing Tao, you become embraced.
Supple, breathing gently, you become reborn.
Clearing your vision, you become clear.
Nurturing your beloved, you become impartial.
Opening your heart, you become accepted.
Accepting the World, you embrace Tao.
Bearing and nurturing,
Creating but not owning,
Giving without demanding,
Controlling without authority,
This is love.”
Laozi, The Teachings of Lao-Tzu: The Tao-Te Ching
“Without love we all like birds with broken wings.”
Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
“Everything is clearer when you're in love.”
John Lennon
“Love only grows by sharing. You can only have more for yourself by giving it away to others.”
Brian Tracy
“The love we give away is the only love we keep.”
Elbert Hubbard
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
“Hide yourself in God, so when a man wants to find you he will have to go there first.”
Shannon L. Alder
“The best use of life is love. The best expression of love is time. The best time to love is now.”
Rick Warren
“Give me the Love that leads the way
The Faith that nothing can dismay
The Hope no disappointments tire
The Passion that'll burn like fire
Let me not sink to be a clod
Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God”
Amy Carmichael
“The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”
Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God
“When you love you should not think you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.”
Khalil Gibran
“What barrier is there that love cannot break?”
Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi: An autobiography
“...to be in a relationship with God is to be loved purely and furiously. And a person who thinks himself unlovable cannot be in a relationship with God because he can't accept who God is; a Being that is love. We learn that we are lovable or unlovable from other people...That is why God tells us so many times to love each other.”
Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
“Love chooses to believe the best about people. It gives them the benefit of the doubt. It refuses to fill in the unknowns with negative assumptions. And when our worst hopes are proven to be true, love makes every effort to deal with them and move forward. As much as possible, love focuses on the positive.”
Stephen Kendrick, The Love Dare
“I'm telling you this for one reason and one reason only: No matter how sure you are of someone's love, it's always nice to hear it.”
Mike Gayle, Turning Thirty
“Everyone says love hurts, but that is not true. Loneliness hurts. Rejection hurts. Losing someone hurts. Envy hurts. Everyone gets these things confused with love, but in reality love is the only thing in this world that covers up all pain and makes someone feel wonderful again. Love is the only thing in this world that does not hurt.”
Meša Selimović
“God's definition of what matters is pretty straightforward. He measures our lives by how we love.”
Francis Chan, Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God
“It’s too bad if a heart lacks fire,
and is deprived of the light
of a heart ablaze.
The day on which you are
without passionate love
is the most wasted day of your life.”
Omar Khayyam
“Love, and you shall be loved.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“If in thirst you drink water from a cup, you see God in it. Those who are not in love with God will see only their own faces in it.”
Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi
“I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.”
Leo Tolstoy
“Faith goes up the stairs that love has built and looks out the windows which hope has opened.”
Charles H. Spurgeon
“Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.”
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
“Love is not an emotion. It is your very existence.”
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
“Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything's possible when it comes to love.”
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.”
David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
“He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.”
Confucius
“People die. Love endures.”
Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea
“There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.
George Sand
“Time is how you spend your love.”
Zadie Smith
“In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.”
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
“love is what moves the world, I've always thought...it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down...bring them low...and make them crawl...”
Stephen King
“Love is a fruit in season at all times and within reach of every hand.”
Mother Teresa
“Love has no limitations. It cannot be measured. It has no boundaries. Although many have tried, love is indefinable.”
Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
“We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection.”
Dalai Lama
“…if a man can be properly said to love something, it must be clear that he feels affection for it as a whole, and does not love part of it to the exclusion of the rest.”
Plato, The Republic and Other Works
“What will survive of us is love.
- from A Writer”
Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings
“All love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction. Love is therefore the only law of life. He who loves lives, he who is selfish is dying. Therefore love for love's sake, because it is the only law of life, just as you breathe to live.”
Swami Vivekananda, Letters of Swami Vivekananda
“Nothing of real worth can ever be bought. Love, friendship, honour, valour, respect. All these things have to be earned.”
David Gemmell, Shield of Thunder
“Love is the only future God offers.”
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
“... it’s a blessed thing to love and feel loved in return.”
E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
“If you follow the will of God, you know that in spite of all the terrible things that happen to you, you will never lose a final refuge. You know that the foundation of the world is love, so that even when no human being can or will help you, you may go on, trusting in the One that loves you.”
Pope Benedict XVI
“You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.”
Hermann Hesse, Wer lieben kann, ist glücklich. Über die Liebe
“If people did not love one another, I really don't see what use there would be in having any spring.”
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
“Love people who hate you. Pray for people who have wronged you. It won’t just change their life…it’ll change yours.”
Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
Love is the absence of judgement.
Dalai Lama XIV