What is Love?
Exactly what is love? Can an emotion be summed up in a few words? It appears as if people from all walks of life have been trying to answer these questions since the beginning of time. For example, Plato attempted to define love in general via the Symposium in 360 B.C. while singer Pink shared her views on romantic love through the lyrics of her song “True Love” in 2013. With the following 200 all-time favorite love quotes from famous books, movies and celebrities we try to explain what love is. Some answers are humorous whereas others have a more serious tone.
- “Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.” – Joan Crawford.
- Love is just a word until someone comes along and gives it meaning. – Paulo Coelho
- A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love. – Friedrich Nietzsche
- A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve. – Joseph Joubert
- A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love. – Stendhal
- A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea. – Honore de Balzac
- Absence – that common cure of love. – Lord Byron
- Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires. – Francois de La Rochefoucauld
- Absence sharpens love, presence strengthens it. – Thomas Fuller
- Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives. – C. S. Lewis
- All love shifts and changes. I don’t know if you can be wholeheartedly in love all the time. – Julie Andrews
- All mankind love a lover. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name. – Andre Breton
- As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words. – William Shakespeare
- At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet. – Plato
- Before I met my husband, I’d never fallen in love. I’d stepped in it a few times. – Rita Rudner
- Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. – Lao Tzu
- Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all. – St. Augustine
- Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another. – George Eliot
- Blushing is the color of virtue. – Diogenes
- Can miles truly separate you from friends… If you want to be with someone you love, aren’t you already there? – Richard Bach
- Come live in my heart, and pay no rent. – Samuel Lover
- Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time… It tells us to tell each other right now that we love each other. – Leo F. Buscaglia
- Do all things with love. – Og Mandino
- Don’t brood. Get on with living and loving. You don’t have forever. – Leo Buscaglia
- Everything is clearer when you’re in love. – John Lennon
- Faith makes all things possible… love makes all things easy. – Dwight L. Moody
- First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity. – George Bernard Shaw
- For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul. – Judy Garland
- For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. – Carl Sagan
- For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love. – Carl Sagan
- For you see, each day I love you more. Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow. – Rosemonde Gerard
- Fortune and love favor the brave. – Ovid
- Friends can help each other. A true friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself – and especially to feel. Or, not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment is fine with them. That’s what real love amounts to – letting a person be what he really is. – Jim Morrison
- Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship – never. – Charles Caleb Colton
- Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. – Albert Einstein
- Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love. – Albert Einstein
- Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
- He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals. – Benjamin Franklin
- How absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself. Everybody should try it. – Barbara Pym
- I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence. – Theodore Dreiser
- I can live without money, but I cannot live without love. – Judy Garland
- I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
- I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love. – Mother Teresa
- I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved. George Eliot
- I love that feeling of being in love, the effect of having butterflies when you wake up in the morning. That is special. – Jennifer Aniston
- I love you, not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love. – Henry Ward Beecher
- I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That’s the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty… you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. – J. D. Salinger
- I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it. – Audrey Hepburn
- I would rather have eyes that cannot see; ears that cannot hear; lips that cannot speak, than a heart that cannot love. – Robert Tizon
- 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
- If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I. – Michel de Montaigne
- If you want to be loved, be lovable. – Ovid
- If you wish to be loved, show more of your faults than your virtues. – Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
- Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says ‘I need you because I love you.’ – Erich Fromm
- In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities. – Janos Arany
- It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- It is sad not to love, but it is much sadder not to be able to love. – Miguel de Unamuno
- It’s often just enough to be with someone. I don’t need to touch them. Not even talk. A feeling passes between you both. You’re not alone. Marilyn Monroe
- It’s useless to hold a person to anything he says while he’s in love, drunk, or running for office. – Shirley MacLaine
- Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. – Oscar Wilde
- Kindness in words creates confidence; kindness in thinking creates profoundness; kindness in giving creates love. – Lao Tzu
- Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love. – Mother Teresa
- Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. – Saint-Exupery
- Life is messy. Love is messier. – Catch and Release
- Life is the flower for which love is the honey. – Victor Hugo
- Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit. – Khalil Gibran
- Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so. – David Grayson
- Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do… but how much love we put in that action. – Mother Teresa
- Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies. – John Donne
- Love can sometimes be magic. But magic can sometimes… just be an illusion. – Javan
- Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. – Rainer Maria Rilke
- Love cures people – both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it. – Dr. Karl Menninger
- 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.
- Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- Love does not dominate; it cultivates. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Love doesn’t make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile. – Franklin Jones
- 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 a friendship set to music. – Joseph Campbell
- Love is a game that two can play and both win. – Eva Gabor
- Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs. – William Shakespeare
- Love is always bestowed as a gift – freely, willingly and without expectation. We don’t love to be loved; we love to love. – Leo Buscaglia
- Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. – Robert Frost
- Love is being stupid together. – Paul Valery
- Love is blind, but friendship closes its eyes. – unknown
- Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition. – Alexander Smith
- Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. – Aristotle
- Love is friendship set on fire. – Jeremy Taylor
- Love is life. And if you miss love, you miss life. – Leo Buscaglia
- Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable. – Bruce Lee
- Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop. – H. L. Mencken
- Love is now, is always. All that is missing is the coup de grace — which is called passion. – Clarice Lispector
- Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses. – Lao Tzu
- Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. – Robert Heinlein
- Love is the beauty of the soul. – Saint Augustine
- Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another. – H. L. Mencken
- Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow. – John Lennon
- Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. – H. L. Mencken
- Love isn’t something you find. Love is something that finds you. – Loretta Young
- Love knows not distance; it hath no continent; its eyes are for the stars. – Gilbert Parker
- Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place. – Zora Neale Hurston
- Love me when I least deserve it, because that’s when I really need it. – Swedish Proverb
- Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world. – Lucille Ball
- .. it surrounds every being and extends slowly to embrace all that shall be. – Khalil Gibran
- Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold. – Zelda Fitzgerald
- Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky. – Rainer Maria Rilke
- One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving. – Paulo Coelho
- One love, one heart, one destiny. – Bob Marley
- One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can’t utter. – James Earl Jones
- Only do what your heart tells you. – Princess Diana
- Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough. – George Moore
- Paradise is always where love dwells. – Jean Paul Richter
- People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel. – Maya Angelou
- So much of what we know of love we learn at home. – unknown
- 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
- Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye. – H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
- Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Tell me who admires you and loves you, and I will tell you who you are. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- Tell me whom you love and I will tell you who you are. – Houssaye
- The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen or even heard, but must be felt with the heart. – Helen Keller
- The best portion of a good man’s life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. – William Wordsworth
- The best proof of love is trust. – Joyce Brothers
- The best thing to hold onto in life is each other. – Audrey Hepburn
- The giving of love is an education in itself. – Eleanor Roosevelt
- The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. – Victor Hugo
- The heart has no wrinkles. – Marie de Sevigne
- The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough. – George Edward Moore
- The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread. – Mother Teresa
- The madness of love is the greatest of heaven’s blessings. – Plato
- The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed. – Jiddu Krishnamurti
- The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers. – Thich Nhat Hanh
- The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love. – Henry Miller
- The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time. – Lawrence Durrell
- The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost. – Gilbert K. Chesterton
- There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. – Friedrich Nietzsche
- There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment. – Sarah Dessen
- There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not. – La Rochefoucauld
- There is no remedy for love but to love more. – David Henry Thoreau
- 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
- ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. – Alfred Lord Tennyson
- To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead. – Bertrand Russell
- To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best. – William Makepeace Thackeray
- To love another person is to see the face of God. – Les Miserables
- To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. – Oscar Wilde
- To say I love you one must first be able to say the I. – Ayn Rand
- To the world you may be just one person, but to one person you may be the world. – Anonymous
- True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen. – Francois de La Rochefoucauld
- True love is the need for not one single other thing. It is air. It is sustenance. It is shelter. Love is truly all you need. – Paul Mole
- We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person. – W. Somerset Maugham
- We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities. – Jacques Maritain
- We loved with a love that was more than love. – Edgar Allan Poe
- We perceive when love begins and when it declines by our embarrassment when alone together. – La Bruyere
- We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone. – Orson Welles
- What the work really needs is more love and less paperwork. – Pearl Bailey
- What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us. – Helen Keller
- When we are in love we often doubt that which we most believe. – La Rochefoucauld
- Where there is love there is life. – Mahatma Gandhi
- Who ever loved that loved not at first sight? – Christopher Marlowe
- Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love – and to put its trust in life. – Joseph Conrad
- You don’t marry someone you can live with – you marry the person who you cannot live without. – unknown
- You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams. – Anonymous
- You never lose by loving. You always lose by holding back. – Barbara de Angelis
- You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love. – Henry Drummond
- Your heart is free, have the courage to follow it. – Braveheart
