Valentine's Day Quotations

Authors, poets and playwrights have been trying to capture love in words for thousands of years. Their work speaks to the enduring power of love across the ages of human history.  Check out this collection of quotes about love from some of the world's most famous romantics.

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Did You Know?

Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets dealing with love, time, beauty and mortality.

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, Romeo and Juliet

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 Prophet

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 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

I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.
- Alice Walker

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, "Love Sonnet XVII"

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