Finding the right words to express your feelings of love can be tough. You might feel a whirlwind of emotions, but when it comes time to speak from the heart or jot down that perfect note, you’re lost for words.
Love is a complex mix of joy, passion, and a deep connection with someone else – how can you capture all that in just a few phrases?
Lucky for you, we’ve gathered over 150 inspirational love quotes from some of the greatest minds, like Victor Hugo and Mahatma Gandhi, to contemporary poets who have mastered expressing affection.
Whether it’s your sweetheart’s birthday or an ordinary day made extraordinary by saying “I love you,” our collection caters to every moment with tender wisdom. Dive into this treasure trove of heartfelt sayings to help you articulate those butterflies in your stomach.
Ready to spread some love? Keep reading!
150 Inspirational Love Quotes
“Love is not about possession, love is about appreciation.”
Osho
“To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.”
David Viscott
“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”
Maya Angelou
“The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.”
Audrey Hepburn
“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
Robert A. Heinlein
“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“Love is an endless act of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.”
Hannah Arendt
“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
“Love is like the wind, you can’t see it but you can feel it.”
Nicholas Sparks
“We are shaped and fashioned by those we love.”
Goethe
“At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”
Plato
“Love is not about how many days, months, or years you have been together. Love is about how much you love each other every single day.”
Unknown
“Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.”
Andre Breton
“The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.”
William Saroyan
“Love is not just looking at each other, it’s looking in the same direction.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
Lao Tzu
“Love is a game that two can play and both win.”
Eva Gabor
“Grow old with me! The best is yet to be.”
Robert Browning
“Love doesn’t make the world go ’round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile.”
Franklin P. Jones
“A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and man cannot live without love.”
Max Muller
“Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each includes the other, each is enriched by the other.”
Felix Adler
“Love is when the other person’s happiness is more important than your own.”
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
“Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.”
Voltaire
“In love, one and one are one.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
“The art of love is largely the art of persistence.”
Albert Ellis
“Love is a force more formidable than any other. It is invisible—it cannot be seen or measured, yet it is powerful enough to transform you in a moment, and offer you more joy than any material possession could.”
Barbara de Angelis
“Love is when you give someone else the power to destroy you, and you trust them not to do it.”
Unknown
“Love is the poetry of the senses.”
Honoré de Balzac
“To love is to burn, to be on fire.”
Jane Austen
“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.”
Blaise Pascal
“Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.”
Peter Ustinov
“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
“A loving heart is the truest wisdom.”
Charles Dickens
“There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.”
George Sand
“Love is when you sit beside someone doing nothing, yet you feel perfectly happy.”
Unknown
“Love does not die easily. It is a living thing. It thrives in the face of all life’s hazards, save one—neglect.”
James D. Bryden
“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”
Nat King Cole
“Love is not a volunteer thing.”
Samuel Richardson
“Love is a better teacher than duty.”
Albert Einstein
“Any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what is done by a natural impulse.”
Plato
“True love is rare, and it’s the only thing that gives life real meaning.”
Nicholas Sparks
“Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.”
Robert Frost
“Love is not a because, it’s a no matter what.”
Jodi Picoult
“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
Dr. Seuss
“The best proof of love is trust.”
Joyce Brothers
“Love is a friendship set to music.”
Joseph Campbell
“Love is not finding someone to live with; it’s finding someone you can’t live without.”
Rafael Ortiz
“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
“Love is something eternal; the aspect may change, but not the essence.”
Vincent van Gogh
“Love is all we have, the only way that each can help the other.”
Euripides
“The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love.”
Henry Miller
“Love’s greatest gift is its ability to make everything it touches sacred.”
Barbara De Angelis
“Love is not a matter of counting the years, but making the years count.”
Michelle St. Amand
“The first duty of love is to listen.”
Paul Tillich
“Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.”
Samuel Johnson
“True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked.”
Erich Segal
“Love is a choice you make from moment to moment.”
Barbara De Angelis
“We love because it’s the only true adventure.”
Nikki Giovanni
“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Love does not dominate; it cultivates.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.”
Tom Robbins
“To be brave is to love someone unconditionally, without expecting anything in return.”
Madonna
“Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.”
Tom Wolfe
“Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.”
James Thurber
“The best proof of love is trust.”
Joyce Brothers
“Love is when he gives you a piece of your soul, that you never knew was missing.”
Torquato Tasso
“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Love is a fabric which never fades, no matter how often it is washed in the water of adversity and grief.”
Robert Fulghum
“In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities.”
Janos Arany
“Love is not losing freedom, it is sharing freedom with another.”
Unknown
“Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your heart or burn down your house, you can never tell.”
Joan Crawford
“The heart wants what it wants. There’s no logic to these things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that’s that.”
Woody Allen
“Love is a wild 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
“Love is not only something you feel, it is something you do.”
David Wilkerson
“The giving of love is an education in itself.”
Eleanor Roosevelt
“We can only learn to love by loving.”
Iris Murdoch
“Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat.”
Ben Hecht
“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”
G.K. Chesterton
“Love is a better master than duty.”
Albert Einstein
“Love is the only gold.”
Alfred Lord Tennyson
“To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.”
David Viscott
“Love is not a matter of what happens in life. It’s a matter of what’s happening in your heart.”
Ken Keyes
“Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within reach of every hand.”
Mother Teresa
“Anytime you love someone more than they deserve, you always end up with more pain than you deserve.”
Unknown
“Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it.”
Rabindranath Tagore
“Love is not about property, diamonds and gifts. It is about sharing your very self with the world around you.”
Pablo Neruda
“Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.”
John Lennon
“The heart is forever inexperienced.”
Henry David Thoreau
“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
“In order to be happy oneself it is necessary to make at least one other person happy.”
Theodor Reik
“The more one judges, the less one loves.”
Honoré de Balzac
“Love is when you take away the feeling, the passion, the romance and you find out you still care for that person.”
Unknown
“A life without love is like a year without summer.”
Swedish Proverb
“Love is a game that two can play and both win by losing their heart.”
Eva Gabor
“Love is not about who you live with. It’s about who you can’t live without.”
Unknown
“Love is the beauty of the soul.”
Saint Augustine
“Being deeply loved gives you strength; loving deeply gives you courage.”
Lao Tzu
“Love is when you don’t have to be with another person to touch their heart!”
Torquato Tasso
“The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.”
Anais Nin
“Love is something eternal; the aspect may change, but not the essence.”
Jeff Zinnert
“Love isn’t something you find. Love is something that finds you.”
Loretta Young
“Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.”
Voltaire
“Where there is love there is life.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“Love is the answer, and you know that for sure; Love is a flower, you’ve got to let it grow.”
John Lennon
“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”
Victor Hugo
“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
“Love is a friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving.”
Ann Landers
“The love we give away is the only love we keep.”
Elbert Hubbard
“Love is when you know all about someone, and you still want to be with them more than any other person.”
Unknown
“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”
Erich Fromm
“We loved with a love that was more than love.”
Edgar Allan Poe
“Love is a game that two can play and both win.”
Eva Gabor
“You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.”
Jodi Picoult
“Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each include the other, each is enriched by the other.”
Felix Adler
“Love is what makes the ride worthwhile.”
Franklin P. Jones
“To love is nothing. To be loved is something. But to love and be loved, that’s everything.”
T. Tolis
“In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.”
Mignon McLaughlin
“Love is not about how much you say ‘I love you,’ but how much you can prove that it’s true.”
Unknown
“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”
H. L. Mencken
“Love is a language spoken by everyone but understood only by the heart.”
Unknown
“Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.”
André Breton
“Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.”
William Shakespeare
“The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen or even heard, but must be felt with the heart.”
Helen Keller
“Love is an endless mystery, because there is no reasonable cause that could explain it.”
Rabindranath Tagore
“Love is a wild force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us.”
Paulo Coelho
“Love is not a matter of what happens in life. It’s a matter of what’s happening in your heart.”
Ken Keyes
“Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Love isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.”
Erich Fromm
“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
Pablo Neruda
“Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.”
Erich Fromm
“The art of love is largely the art of persistence.”
Albert Ellis
“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
James Baldwin
“The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love.”
Henry Miller
“Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.”
Helen Keller
“Love is not something you feel. It’s something you do.”
David Wilkerson
“Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods.”
Plato
“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds.”
Nicholas Sparks
“Love is not a volunteer thing.”
Samuel Richardson
“The more you are motivated by love, the more fearless and free your action will be.”
Dalai Lama XIV
“Love is a choice you make from moment to moment.”
Barbara De Angelis
“Love is showing your partner they’re safe, you’ll catch them if they fall, and you’ll drop everything if they need you.”
Unknown
“Love is not about possession. It’s all about appreciation.”
Chinese Proverb
“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Love is something sent from heaven to worry the hell out of you.”
Dolly Parton
“There is no love without forgiveness, and there is no forgiveness without love.”
Bryant H. McGill
“Love is not about how many days, months, or years you have been together. Love is about how much you love each other every single day.”
Unknown
“The essence of love is kindness.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
“Love is when the other person’s happiness is more important than your own.”
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
“True love is not a hide and seek game: in true love, both lovers seek each other.”
Michael Bassey Johnson
In Summary
Wow, 150 love quotes for all those special times! You can find just the right words for him or her. There are even sad quotes to comfort a broken heart. Think about how you might use these sayings to warm someone’s day.
How will you share these powerful messages with people you care about? Imagine their smile when they see your framed quote or custom pillow. Let these words inspire you to spread love in beautiful ways every day!