celebrating love! a collection of quotable quotes

"Upon waking each day
My first words to my heart always are
'Tell me all your news of Love.' "
- Hafiz

it's that time of year again! Valentine's Day is around the corner, love is in the air - & I've been thinking it should really be renamed Love Week, or Love Month, or perhaps Love Year, since celebrating love only one day out of a whole year seems insulting to the very essence of love itself. (only ONE day? what about all the rest?)

that said, I decided to reach into my extremely lengthy file of quotes that inspire, uplift, inform, or make people laugh out loud - and share all the ones about love.  initially, I thought I'd just do about ten of the top great quotes... but I'm a quote junkie, I have to admit. like a good bag of potato chips - or a box of Belgian chocolates - well, ten just isn't enough.

then I had the idea to break the quotes into categories, as a way to organize them nicely & keep folks accustomed to short, manageable lists on the internet happy. okay, I thought, maybe five categories of five quotes each - simple, clear, no fuss. 

oh, dear. that really didn't work, either.

maybe because love is such an incredibly huge topic in itself, with so many different facets & aspects of its nature... or maybe because I just love love in all forms, and the quotes that shed light on those different forms... or maybe because each quote is such a gem that to exclude any of them would be a disservice to any reader... however it shakes out, here's the point: I'm including all of the quotes I really love about love here. 

it turns out that I came up with eleven different categories of love - from romantic, human love to love for nature & animals, to universal, transcendent, mystical love... & the result is a celebration of the different faces & facets of love, through the words of amazing people from all corner of this earth & all different times in history & walks of life & all far more brilliant than I will ever be.

I hope these quotes inspire you, too, & provide a treasure-trove of heartful, stimulating jewels that keep you thinking, laughing, & loving deeply, throughout this Heart Week (or Month or Year).

Enjoy!


Romantic Love

"You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams."
- Theodore Geissel, aka Dr. Seuss

"Eternity was in our lips and yes,
Bliss in our brows bent."
- William Shakespeare

"What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined... to strengthen each other... to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories."
- George Eliot

"Love makes you do strange things..."
- Charles M. Schulz

"Men are April when they woo, December when they wed.
Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives."
- William Shakespeare

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”
- Jane Austen

"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

"Love is reducing the universe to one being."
- Victor Hugo

“A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking.”
- Eckhart Tolle

"A woman would run through fire and water for such a kind heart."
- Shakespeare

"Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other.  Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then."
- Katharine Hepburn

"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."
- Emily Bronte

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Much more genius is needed to make love than to command armies."
- Ninon de l'Enclos


“I do not trust people who don't love themselves and yet tell me, 'I love you.' There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”
- Maya Angelou

“The very first moment I beheld him, my heart was irrevocably gone.”
- Jane Austen

"If grass can grow through cement, love can find you at every time in your life."
- M. C. Escher

"A man is given the choice between loving women and understanding them."
- Ninon de L'Enclos

"We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love."
- Tom Robbins

"Take away love and our earth is a tomb."
- Robert Browning

"Love hard when there is love to be had."
- Bob Marley

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride."
- Pablo Neruda

“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

"God, the best maker of all marriages,
Combine your hearts in one." 
- Shakespeare

“You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters? She's not perfect - you aren't either, and the two of you may never be perfect together but if she can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto her and give her the most you can. She may not be thinking about you every second of the day, but she will give you a part of her that she knows you can break - her heart. So don't hurt her, don't change her, don't analyze and don't expect more than she can give. Smile when she makes you happy, let her know when she makes you mad, and miss her when she's not there.”
- Bob Marley

"Sex without love is merely healthy exercise." 
- Robert A. Heinlein

"Then love knew it was called love.
And when I lifted my eyes to your name,
suddenly your heart showed me my way."
- Pablo Neruda

“When you trip over love, it is easy to get up. But when you fall in love, it is impossible to stand again.”
- Albert Einstein

“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 our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.”
- Thomas Merton

“To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.”
- Elizabeth Gilbert

"L.O.V.E. = Lots Of Valuable Education." 
- Sri Kaleshwar

"Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along."
- Rumi

Family Love

"You naturally love those who are dear to you and you must learn to give that kind of love to the whole world."
- Paramahansa Yogananda

"What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family."
- Mother Teresa

"One day we will wake up and realise that we are family."
- Bishop Desmond Tutu

"The soul is healed by being with children."
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they're gone from your life."
- Maya Angelou

"Also remember, sisters make the best friends in the world."
- Marilyn Monroe

"To understand your parents' love, you must raise children yourself."
- Chinese Proverb

"F.A.M.I.L.Y. =  Forget. About. Me. I. Love. You."
- Unknown

Love Between Friends

"Can miles truly separate you from friends? If you want to be with someone you love, aren't you already there?"
- Richard Bach

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
- Elbert Hubbard

"Above our life we love a steadfast friend."
- Christopher Marlowe

"A faithful friend is a strong defense; And he that hath found him hath found a treasure."
- Louisa May Alcott

“A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.”
– Tim Cahill

"The language of friendship is not words but meanings."
- Henry David Thoreau

"Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens." 
- J.R.R. Tolkien

"I've learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back."
- Maya Angelou

"Life is not a fist. Life is an open hand waiting for another to enter it, into friendship."
- Elie Wiesel

"He has a right to criticize who has a heart to help."
- Abraham Lincoln

"Friendship is one mind in two bodies. Unknown friends are the siblings God never gave us."
- Mencius

" 'Stay' is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary."
- Louisa May Alcott

“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.”
- W.H. Auden

"Girls will be your friends - they'll act like it anyway. But just remember, some come, some go. The ones that stay with you through everything - they're your true best friends. Don't let go of them." 
- Marilyn Monroe

"At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us."
- Albert Schweitzer

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche

“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 may have our private opinions but why should they be a bar to the meeting of hearts?"
- Gandhi

"The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is your friends who make your world."
- William James




Love For Animals

"I welcome all the creatures of the world with grace."
- Hildegard von Bingen

"Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet."
- Colette

"Time spent with a cat is never wasted."
- Colette

"The smallest feline is a masterpiece."
- Leonardo Da Vinci

"One small cat changes coming home to an empty house to coming home."
- Pam Brown

"Cats are living adornments."
- Edwin Lent

"What greater gift than the love of a cat?"
- Charles Dickens

"There is no such thing as 'just a cat'."
- Robert A. Heinlein

"If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian."
- Paul McCartney

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace.”
- Milan Kundera

“If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.”
- Will Rogers

“Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”
- Mark Twain

“I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.”
- Abraham Lincoln




Love In Nature

"The lover of nature is the true worshipper of God."
- Hazrat Inayat Khan

"Our task must be to free ourselves… by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty." 
- Albert Einstein

“ 'God will reward you,' he said. 'You must be an angel since you care for flowers.' ”
- Victor Hugo

"I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets…"
- George Washington Carver

"I don’t think existence wants you to be serious. I have not seen a serious tree. I have not seen a serious bird. I have not seen a serious sunrise. I have not seen a serious starry night. It seems they are all laughing in their own ways, dancing in their own ways. We may not understand it, but there is a subtle feeling that the whole existence is a celebration.
 And laughter has certainly to be one of the major ingredients in this celebration.”
- Osho

"When I admire the wonders of a sunset or the beauty of the moon, my soul expands in the worship of the creator."
- Gandhi

"The earth has music for those who listen."
- Shakespeare






Love And The Arts

"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“Music is ... A higher revelation than all wisdom & philosophy.”
- Ludwig van Beethoven

"Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art."
- Leonardo da Vinci

"I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity."
- Billy Joel

"The way to know life is to love many things."
- Vincent van Gogh

“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”
- Novalis

"Music is well said to be the speech of angels."
- Thomas Carlyle

"Where there's music there can be love."
- French Proverb

"In art as in love, instinct is enough."
- Anatole France

“Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable."
- Leonard Bernstein

"To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist."
- Robert Schumann

"Love is a friendship set to music."
- Channing Pollock

"Music… is the can-opener of the soul."
- Henry Miller

"Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart."
- Pablo Casals




Healing Power Of Love

"Love cures people -- both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it."
- Karl Menninger

"Through love, all pain will turn to medicine."
- Rumi

"I have decided to stick with love.
Hate is too great a burden to bear."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it...”
- Nicholas Sparks

"Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat."
- Ben Hecht

"Love manifests towards those whom we like as love; towards those whom we do not like as forgiveness."
- Hazrat Inayat Khan

"I think the biggest disease this world suffers from in this day and age is a disease of people feeling unloved. And I know that I can give that love for a minute, for a half an hour, for a day, for a month. But I can give and I'm very happy to do that and I want to do that."
- Princess Diana

"Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another."
- George Eliot

"When love is present, the body & mind are lifted up. They are infused with light, possibility & celebration."
- Paul Ferrini

"Love is always the answer to healing of any sort."
- Louise Hay

"Overcome the demons with a thing called love."
- Bob Marley

"Eventually you will come to understand that love heals everything, and love is all there is."
- Gary Zukav

"Who, being loved, is poor?"
- Oscar Wilde

“What happens when people open their hearts?"
"They get better.”
- Haruki Murakami

"Meet hostility and suspicion with kindness. Helping others out of love is always the best option."
- Dalai Lama

"Love sometimes wants to do us a great favor: hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out."
- Hafiz

"Love works in miracles every day: such as weakening the strong, & strengthening the weak; making fools of the wise, and wise men of fools; favouring the passions, destroying reason, and in a word, turning everything topsy-turvy."
- Marguerite De Valois

"One word frees us of all the weight & pain in life. That word is love."
- Sophocles

“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Love Of The Self

"When you learn to get along with yourself, you will know how to get along with everybody."
- Paramahansa Yogananda

"Because of a great love, one is courageous."
- Lao Tzu

"I am the miracle."
- Buddha

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting."
- e.e.cummings

“I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.”
- Jane Austen

“If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?”
- Maya Angelou

"Be kind to others, so that you may learn the secret art of being kind to yourself."
- Paramahansa Yogananda

"Knowing others is wisdom; knowing the self is enlightenment.”
- Tao Te Ching

"Friendship with one's self is all important because, without it, one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world."
- Eleanor Roosevelt

"Our sorrows and wounds are healed only when we touch them with compassion."
- Buddha

"When you cannot get a compliment any other way, pay yourself one."
- Mark Twain

"The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well."
- Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

"Perhaps love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"If you want to see the love of your life, look in the mirror."
- Byron Katie

True Love

"When one loves, one does not calculate."
-  St. Therese de Lisieux

"Love goes toward love."
- Shakespeare

"In true love the smallest distance is too great, and the greatest distance can be bridged.”
- Hans Nouwens

"There's nothing so clear-sighted as True Love, nothing.... Addiction is blind, attachments are blind. Clinging, craving and desire are blind. But not True Love."
- Anthony de Mello

"As long as in love there is "you" and "me," love is not fully kindled."
- Hazrat Inayat Khan

"Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get - only with what you are expecting to give - which is everything."
- Katharine Hepburn

"Love takes up where knowledge leaves off."
- Saint Thomas Aquinas

"It is not a question of being in love with someone. It is a question of being Love."
- Osho

"The more you love, the more you can love - and the more intensely you love."
- Robert A. Heinlein

"Millions of people are suffering: they want to be loved but they don't know how to love. And love cannot exist as a monologue; it is a dialogue, a very harmonious dialogue."
- Osho

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.”
- Thomas Merton

"When the heart becomes whole It will know the flavors of falsehood and truth."
- Rumi

"Love never claims, it ever gives."
- Gandhi

"True love is no game of the faint-hearted and the weak. It is born of strength and understanding."
- Meher Baba

"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own… Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition.  The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy."
- Robert A. Heinlein

"We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection."
- Dalai Lama

"Love liberates everything.”
- Maya Angelou

"True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen."
- François de la Rochefoucauld

"Where there is great love, there are always miracles."
- Willa Cather




Global Love: For Humanity

"If you judge people, you have no time to love them."
- Mother Teresa

"What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other?"
- George Eliot

"Love is the force that transforms and improves the Soul of the World."
- Paulo Coelho

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."
- Dr. Seuss

"Love is the merchandise which all the world demands; if you store it in your heart, every soul will become your customer."
- Hazrat Inayat Khan

"Love all, trust a few. Do wrong to none."
- William Shakespeare

“One can love the world without liking it.”
- Dr. George King

“Love each other or perish.”
- W.H. Auden

"To live in love is to sail forever, spreading seeds of joy & peace in hearts."
- St. Therese de Lisieux

The secret to long & happy life, is "to love people and believe in people."
- advice from the oldest man in America, 111 yrs old, 2012

"The happiness of one's own heart alone cannot satisfy the soul; one must try to include, as necessary to one's own happiness, the happiness of others."
- Paramahansa Yogananda

"A transformed planet requires a transformed self.
"Transformed" means continually giving up whatever is in the way of love."
- Matthew and Terces Engelhart

"You're here, not only for yourself, you're here to help others.  Be a symbol for the love." 
- Sri Kaleshwar

"The world is my country, all mankind are my bethren, and to do good is my religion."
- Thomas Paine

"There is room for everyone; there is room for every culture, race, language and point of view."
- Desmond Tutu

“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.”
- Thomas Merton






Mystical, Universal Love

"My lover speaks; he says to me 'Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one, and come!' "
- Song of Songs

“As you love your own body, so regard everyone as equal to your own body."
- Anandamayi Ma

“A woman's heart should be so hidden in God that a man has to seek Him just to find her.”
- Maya Angelou

"A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life l saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth -- that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. 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."
- Victor Frankl

"At last I have found my vocation. My vocation is love. I will be love, and then I will be all things."
- St. Therese de Lisieux

"True surrender is true power: the love-force that moves the universe is also the love-force that breathes your breath and beats your heart. When fear dissolves, you no longer separate yourself from this single flow of immense force. Love is continuity with infinite life-force, a oneness of being with no separation."
- David Deida

"Love is the energizing elixir of the universe, the cause and effect of all harmonies."
- Rumi

" 'Heart' is merely another name for the Supreme Spirit, because He is in all hearts. The entire Universe is condensed in the body, and the entire body in the Heart. Thus the Heart is the nucleus of the whole Universe."
- Sri Ramana Maharshi

"I belong to no religion. My religion is Love. Every heart is my temple."
- Rumi

"All gods are one. Our religion is the religion of love."
- Sri Kaleshwar

"Those great souls who have brought the message of God to humanity from time to time, like Buddha, Krishna, Jesus Christ, Moses, Abraham or Zarathushtra, were well known as most learned men. But whatever they learned, they learned from the love principle. What they knew was compassion, forgiveness, sympathy, tolerance, the attitude of appreciation, the opening of the heart to humanity."
- Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

"Everything must be sacrificed, if necessary, for that one sentiment: universality."
- Vivekananda

"You will know what divine love is when you begin to see your oneness with every human being, not before."
- Paramahansa Yogananda

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart."
- Buddha

“If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world on fire!”
- St. Catherine of Siena

"Now is the time to turn your heart into a temple of fire!"
- Rumi