Whilst there’s no doubt Shakespeare could always write a great quote about love, many famous writers down the years have done the same. In this blog post we’ve pulled together the top love quotes by famous writers, whether written or spoken:
“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”
Victor Hugo
“Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”
Victor Hugo
“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”
“‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
Tennyson
“True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.”
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
“A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.”
Honore de Balzac
“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
“A loving heart is the truest wisdom.”
“I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.”
George Eliot
“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
“We loved with a love that was more than love.”
Edgar Allan Poe
“The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.”
Henry Miller
“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
“How absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself. Everybody should try it.”
Barbara Pym
“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”
G. K. Chesterton
“To say ‘I love you’ one must first be able to say the ‘I’.”
Ayn Rand
“Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.”
George Eliot
“To love another person is to see the face of God.”
Lawrence Durrell
“The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.”
Stendhal
“A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.”
Henry David Thoreau
“The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved.”
Leo Tolstoy
“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
“Love: the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.”
Mark Twain
“To love someone is to see a miracle invisible to others.”
Francois Mauriac
“We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.”
Anais Nin
“Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.”
W. Somerset Maugham
“Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.”
Hermann Hesse
“There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.”
George Sand
“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.”
Oscar Wilde (read about the most famous Irish authors, or see more Oscar Wilde quotes, and Oscar Wilde quotes about love)
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
Oscar Wilde
“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
Love quotes by writers
What do you think of this list of love quotes by famous writers – any more quotes we should include?
That’s your lot for love quotes by poets. What do you think – any great ones we’re missing? Let us know in the comments below!
How do I love thee, let me count the ways… Shakespeare