Love is among the greatest muses, inspiring the world’s most famous romantics, from Shakespeare, who wrote 154 sonnets dealing with love, time, beauty and mortality, to Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda. The work of these authors, poets and playwrights speaks to the enduring power of love across the ages of human history.
Quotes Above Love, Affection and Romance Through History
Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. –Aristotle
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. –Lao Tzu
My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite. —William Shakespeare
If I had a flower for every time I thought of you … I could walk through my garden forever. –Alfred Tennyson
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. –Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep-burning, unquenchable. –Henry Ward Beecher
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age. —Anais Nin
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward in the same direction. –Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Love has no desire but to fulfill itself. But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires; To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To know the pain of too much tenderness. To be wounded by your own understanding of love; And to bleed willingly and joyfully. –Kahlil Gibran
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. –Helen Keller
Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. —Rainer Maria Rilke
Love does not dominate; it cultivates. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.– Zora Neale Hurston
Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love.– Leo Tolstoy
Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away. –Dorothy Parker
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
I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.– Alice Walker
We're all a little weird, and life's a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love. —Dr. Seuss
There is no remedy for love but to love more. — Henry David Thoreau
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way than this: where I does not exist nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep. –Pablo Neruda
