Timeless and inspiring thoughts written down and spread throughout the decades, centuries and, yes, even millenniums.
Thoughts not only about happy, romantic love but also the love between friends and family.
And about the love that is often neglected or pushed to the side: the love you have for yourself (if you want more on that then check out this post with quotes on self care).
This is 125 of the most touching, thought-provoking, helpful and…
“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
— James Baldwin
“Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.”
— Lucille Ball
“The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.”
— Morrie Schwartz
“Love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey.”
— Lord Byron
“If I know what love is, it is because of you.”
— Herman Hesse
“I love you not because of who you are, but because of who I am when I am with you.”
— Roy Croft
“Love is a friendship set to music.”
— Joseph Campbell
“When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.”
— Blaise Pascal
“Love in its essence is spiritual fire.”
— Seneca
“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”
— Gilbert K. Chesterton
“Don’t brood. Get on with living and loving. You don’t have forever.”
— Leo Buscaglia
“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”
— Maya Angelou
“There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.”
— George Sand
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
— Rumi
“Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.”
— Lao Tzu
“You know it’s love when all you want is that person to be happy, even if you’re not part of their happiness.”
— Julia Roberts
“At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”
— Plato
“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you… I could walk through my garden forever.”
— Alfred Tennyson
“The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen or even heard, but must be felt with the heart.”
— Helen Keller
“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.”
— Oscar Wilde
“The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love.”
— Henry Miller
“Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.”
— Oprah Winfrey
“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
– Buddha
“You know you’re in love when you don’t want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
— Dr. Seuss
“Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.”
— Khalil Gibran
“’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
— Alfred Lord Tennyson
“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 done well.”
— Vincent Van Gogh
“The art of love is largely the art of persistence.”
— Albert Ellis
“If you would be loved, love, and be loveable.”
— Benjamin Franklin
“Friends show their love in times of trouble, not in happiness.”
— Euripides
“Love does not dominate; it cultivates.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.”
— Paulo Coelho
“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
“We are most alive when we’re in love.”
— John Updike
“The love we give away is the only love we keep.”
— Elbert Hubbard
“The giving of love is an education in itself.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt
“The more one judges, the less one loves.”
— Honore de Balzac
“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
— Pablo Neruda
“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.”
— Ingrid Bergman
“You’re always with yourself, so you might as well enjoy the company.”
— Diane Von Furstenberg
“Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says ‘I need you because I love you.’”
— Erich Fromm
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
— Lao Tzu
“One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.”
— Sophocles
“Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.”
— Andre Breton
“Better to have lost and loved than never to have loved at all.”
— Ernest Hemingway
“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
— Elbert Hubbard
“Love is a better teacher than duty.”
— Albert Einstein
“True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked.”
— Erich Segal
“If you aren’t good at loving yourself, you will have a difficult time loving anyone, since you’ll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren’t even giving to yourself.”
– Barbara De Angelis
“The greatest healing therapy is friendship and love.”
— Hubert H. Humphrey
“Every person has to love at least one bad partner in their lives to be truly thankful for the right one.”
— Unknown
“There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
– Anaïs Nin
“Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.”
— James Thurber
“The best proof of love is trust.”
— Joyce Brothers
“A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.”
— Honore de Balzac
“When I loved myself enough, I began leaving whatever wasn’t healthy. This meant people, jobs, my own beliefs and habits – anything that kept me small. My judgment called it disloyal. Now I see it as self-loving.”
– Kim McMillen
“A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than you love yourself.”
— Josh Billings
“Fortune and love favor the brave.”
— Ovid
“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
— Carl Sagan
“To love is nothing. To be loved is something. But to love and be loved, that’s everything.”
— T. Tolis
“Love is not only something you feel, it is something you do.”
— David Wilkerson
“Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.”
— Wayne Dyer
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
— Anaïs Nin
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.
“Where there is love there is life.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
— Robert A. Heinlein
“And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.”
— Paul McCartney
“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.”
— A. A. Milne
“There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.”
— Jane Austen
“It’s easy to fall in love. The hard part is finding someone to catch you.”
— Bertrand Russell
“You’ve gotta dance like there’s nobody watching,
Love like you’ll never be hurt,
Sing like there’s nobody listening,
And live like it’s heaven on earth.”
— William W. Purkey
“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”
— Zelda Fitzgerald
“When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.”
— Leo Tolstoy
“In all the world, there is no love for you like mine.”
— Maya Angelou
“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
— Stephen Chbosky
“To the world, you may be one person, but to one person you are the world.”
— Dr. Seuss
“To be brave is to love someone unconditionally, without expecting anything in return.”
— Madonna
“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”
— Blaise Pascal
“A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”
— Jane Austen
“Patience is the mark of true love. If you truly love someone, you will be more patient with that person.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh
“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
— Andre Gide
“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”
— Victor Hugo
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Love is an endless act of forgiveness.”
— Beyoncé
“They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.”
— Tom Bodett
“You always gain by giving love.”
— Reese Witherspoon
“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”
— William Shakespeare
“The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.”
— Audrey Hepburn
“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is to love and be loved in return.”
— Nat King Cole
“There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
“First and foremost, self-love, and then give love away.”
— Katy Perry
“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
“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
— Neil Gaiman
“A simple “I love you” means more than money.”
— Frank Sinatra
“Love is the flower; you’ve got to let it grow.”
— John Lennon
“The real lover is the man who can thrill you by kissing your forehead or smiling into your eyes or just staring into space.”
— Marilyn Monroe
“I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”
— William Shakespeare
“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
— Jane Austen
“We love the things we love for what they are.”
— Robert Frost
“Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.”
— Oscar Wilde
“Love and kindness are never wasted. They always make a difference. They bless the one who receives them, and they bless you, the giver.”
— Barbara De Angelis
“Love is something sent from heaven to worry the hell out of you.”
— Dolly Parton
“You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh
“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.”
— Robert Fulghum
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.”
— David Byrne
“To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life.”
— Pablo Neruda
“You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.”
— Oscar Wilde
“If you love them in the morning with their eyes full of crust; if you love them at night with their hair full of rollers, chances are, you’re in love.”
— Miles Davis
“I love being married. It’s so great to find one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.”
— Rita Rudner
“Before you marry a person, you should first make them use a computer with slow Internet service to see who they really are.”
— Will Ferrell
“Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby—awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.”
— Lemony Snicket
“I love you like a fat kid loves cake.”
— Scott Adams
“I haven’t spoken to my wife in years. I didn’t want to interrupt her.”
— Rodney Dangerfield
“Love is telling someone their hair extensions are showing.”
— Natasha Leggero
“I love you no matter what you do, but do you have to do so much of it?”
— Jean Illsley Clarke
“Whatever you may look like, marry a man your own age – as your beauty fades, so will his eyesight.”
— Phyllis Diller
“Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.”
— Lynda Barry
“A guy knows he’s in love when he loses interest in his car for a couple of days.”
— Tim Allen
“Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your heart or burn down your house, you can never tell.”
— Joan Crawford
“My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem. But they don’t really know me.”
— Garry Shandling
“As a man in a relationship, you have a choice: You can be right or you can be happy.”
— Ralphie May
“Spend a few minutes a day really listening to your spouse. No matter how stupid his problems sound to you.”
— Megan Mullally
“A youth with his first cigar makes himself sick. A youth with his first girl makes everybody sick.”
— Mary Wilson
