On and around Valentine’s Day is the perfect time to reflect on true love and all the good things that come with it.
Whether you’re in a happy, healthy relationship or hoping you find your soulmate this year, you may appreciate knowing how others feel about love.
I’ve compiled twenty-five quotes about true love from writers, poets, musicians, and philosophers through the ages. There are a few ways to use this list of love quotes, including helping you find a Valentine’s Day gift (or a gift for any occasion) to give your loved one.
Romantic Quotes for Valentine’s Day
The best way is to read them and let them inspire you to find a meaningful gift for your sweetheart on Valentine’s Day or any special date throughout the year. Perhaps they’ll help you write your own words or verses.
You can also simply copy the quote and include it in a greeting card or the card that comes with the bouquet of flowers you’re sending. If you’re buying a special gift, you might be able to engrave it with one of these loving quotes. If you’re buying a special book, such as the ones we mention below, include a quote with a special message to your love on the inside cover.
Whichever way you decide to use these quotes, be sure you share a piece of yourself in what you give. That always makes for the best gifts.
Although these quotes fall under the heading of love, I divided them further into Classical Love Quotes, Humorous Love Quotes, and Thought-Provoking, Inspirational Love Quotes.
Thought-Provoking and Inspirational Love Quotes for Valentine’s Day
People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that’s not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.
― Jodi Picoult in Handle with Care
If I am to write anything fine or noble in the future I shall do so only by listening at the doors of your heart.
― James Joyce in Selected Joyce Letters
True love gives us beauty, freshness, solidity, freedom, and peace. True love includes a feeling of deep joy that we are alive. If we don’t feel this way when we feel love, then it’s not true love.
― Thich Nhat Hanh in How to Love
Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.
― Thomas Merton in Love and Living
Eros will have naked bodies; friendship naked personalities.
― C.S. Lewis
I’m here not because I am supposed to be here, or because I’m trapped here, but because I’d rather be with you than anywhere else in the world.
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
People give flowers as presents because flowers contain the true meaning of love. Anyone who tries to possess a flower will have to watch its beauty fading. But if you simply look at a flower in the field, you’ll keep it forever.
That is what the forest taught me. That you will never be mine, and that is why I will never lose you.
― Paulo Coelho, Brida
To say that one waits a lifetime for his soulmate to come around is a paradox. People eventually get sick of waiting, take a chance on someone, and by the art of commitment become soulmates, which takes a lifetime to perfect.
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms
Composer Brahms Writes To His True Love
Here’s the famously gifted composer Johannes Brahms writing to Clara Schumann:
I would gladly write to you only by means of music, but I have things to say to you to-day which music could not express.
And a few days later…
If the great longing that has possessed me during the last few days has any influence on my playing etc., it ought soon to enable me to cast a spell over people.
― Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms
I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
I could not tell you if I loved you the first moment I saw you, or if it was the second or third or fourth. But I remember the first moment I looked at you walking toward me and realized that somehow the rest of the world seemed to vanish when I was with you.
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only with what you are expecting to give — which is everything.
― Katherine Hepburn
You are like the Great Spirit, who befriends man not only to share his life, but to add to it. My knowing you is the greatest thing in my days and nights, a miracle quite outside the natural order of things…
Each and every one of us, dear Mary, must have a resting place somewhere. The resting place of my soul is a beautiful grove where my knowledge of you lives.
― Kahlil Gibran, Beloved Prophet – the Love letters of Kahlil Gibran and Mary Haskell
True Love Goes Beyond Infatuation
Here, from playwright and actor Sam Shepard, is a description of something that goes much deeper than infatuation. It describes Shepard’s feelings for his true love, Jessica Lange. (They were together more than thirty years.)
I love this woman in a way I can’t describe and a feeling of belonging to each other that reaches across all the pain. It’s as though we’ve answered something in each other that was almost forgotten. I look back on that whole ten years in California and I see myself hunting desperately for something I wasn’t finding… That nothing outside can ever finally answer our yearning. I know that’s true but, in some way, finding Jessie has reached something inside me. A part of me feels brand new — re-awakened.
― Sam Shepard, Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark
The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.
― Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi, The Illuminated Rumi
I think… if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought — and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds…
I simply want to tell you that somehow I can’t imagine life without you…
You came into my life — not as one comes to visit … but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps.
― Vladimir Nabokov in Letters to Vera
Kissing seems not a great matter, in a way. And yet in one way it speaks the million things which words can’t…A real girl doesn’t care to be kissed, much, unless real love goes with it.
― James Thurber, The Thurber Letters – The Wit, Wisdom and Surprising Life of James Thurber
Humorous Love Quotes for Valentine’s Day
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, True Love
How many slams in an old screen door? Depends how loud you shut it. How many slices in a bread? Depends how thin you cut it. How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live ’em. How much love inside a friend? Depends how much you give ’em.”
― Shel Silverstein
This is one of my favorites, one I believe can only be appreciated with the wisdom that comes from living several decades.
It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.
― Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie – An Autobiography
Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.
― Joan Crawford
Classical Love Quotes for Valentine’s Day
Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails.
― St. Paul
You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope…I have loved none but you.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman’s Odyssey
I hope these Valentine’s Day quotes about love help you a little with your dating skills.
Have a quote that you really like? Share it with us in the comments.
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