Quotes
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In the realm of literature, love has always been a central theme, captivating readers for centuries. From the tragic to the triumphant, love quotes from literature have the unique power to express the most profound human emotions. This article explores 10 such quotes that have beautifully encapsulated love, transcending time and cultural boundaries.
Classic Love Quotes
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Literature has long been a reflection of the human heart, and nowhere is this more evident than in the timeless words of classic literature. Here, we explore some of the most profound and enduring love quotes that have captivated readers for generations.
- “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
- “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
- “I have for the first time found what I can truly love—I have found you.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
- “You have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you.” ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
- “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” ― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
- “I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.” ― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
- “He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.” ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
- “Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love.” ― William Shakespeare, Hamlet
- “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.” ― Jane Austen, Emma
- “I am yours, don’t give myself back to me.” ― Rumi, The Essential Rumi
- “Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever-fixed mark.” ― William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
- “We loved with a love that was more than love.” ― Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee
- “There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.” ― Jane Austen, Emma
- “The very essence of romance is uncertainty.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
- “I wish I knew how to quit you.” ― Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain
Love in Modern Literature
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As times change, so do expressions of love in literature. This section delves into modern literary works, where contemporary voices bring a fresh perspective to the age-old theme of love.
- “He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
- “After all this time? Always.” ― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
- “We accept the love we think we deserve.” ― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
- “I would always rather be happy than dignified.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
- “Each time you happen to me all over again.” ― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
- “I am half agony, half hope.” ― Jane Austen, Persuasion
- “You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how.” ― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
- “To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further.” ― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
- “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, Winnie-the-Pooh
- “When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides.” ― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
- “You have to be careful who you meet. You can’t unmeet them.” ― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl
- “I’ve never had a moment’s doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely.” ― Ian McEwan, Atonement
- “Whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same.” ― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
- “The half-life of love is forever.” ― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her
- “If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.” ― John Steinbeck, Letters
Love in Poetry
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Poetry, with its rhythm and rhyme, has a unique way of capturing the essence of love. These quotes from various poets beautifully articulate the depth and complexity of love in its many forms.
- “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.” ― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
- “That love is all there is, Is all we know of love.” ― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
- “I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart).” ― E.E. Cummings, Selected Poems
- “Love is not an emotion, it is your very existence.” ― Rumi, The Essential Rumi
- “Two souls with but a single thought, Two hearts that beat as one.” ― Friedrich Halm, Ingomar the Barbarian
- “I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” ― W.B. Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds
- “For I have been with you, from the beginning of me.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours
- “Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come.” ― William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
- “Yours is the light by which my spirit’s born: – you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.” ― E.E. Cummings, Selected Poems
- “At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.” ― Plato, The Symposium
- “I am who I am because of you. You are every reason, every hope, and every dream I’ve ever had.” ― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
- “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” ― Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese
- “I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.” ― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
- “Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine — tender, delicate your lovemaking…” ― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems
- “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” ― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Love in Tragic Narratives
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Tragedy and love often intertwine in literature, creating some of the most powerful and poignant expressions of love. These quotes from tragic narratives remind us of the depth of human emotion and the price of profound love.
- “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” ― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
- “If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day.” ― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
- “He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest.” ― W.H. Auden, Funeral Blues
- “Love cannot live where there is no trust.” ― Edith Hamilton, Mythology
- “When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew.” ― Arrigo Boito, Falstaff
- “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
- “The heart was made to be broken.” ― Oscar Wilde
- “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.” ― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
- “But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
- “There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.” ― Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat
- “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.” ― John Keats, Endymion
- “We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.” ― Oscar Wilde, The duch*ess of Padua
- “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” ― Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H.
- “The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.” ― Charlie Chaplin
- “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” ― Rumi
Love in Fantasy and Science Fiction
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Fantasy and science fiction take us to worlds beyond our imagination, yet the theme of love remains a universal constant. These genres offer a creative exploration of love, transcending the boundaries of reality.
- “I would rather share one lifetime with you than face all the ages of this world alone.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
- “As you wish.” ― William Goldman, The Princess Bride
- “Do I love you? My god, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches.” ― William Goldman, The Princess Bride
- “To the stars who listen — and the dreams that are answered.” ― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury
- “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” ― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
- “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” ― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
- “You could rattle the stars. You could do anything if only you dared.” ― Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass
- “She did not know that the wolf was a wicked sort of animal, and she was not afraid of him.” ― Marissa Meyer, Scarlet
- “I am not a good man, and I’m not a bad man. I am not a hero, and I’m definitely not a president. I’m not an officer. You know what I am? I am an idiot, with a box and a screwdriver.” ― Doctor Who
- “The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.” ― H.P. Lovecraft
- “You have me. Until every last star in the galaxy dies. You have me.” ― Amie Kaufman, Illuminae
- “In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
- “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
- “I knew the second I met you that there was something about you I needed. Turns out it wasn’t something about you at all. It was just you.” ― Jamie McGuire, Beautiful Disaster
- “You are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.” ― E.E. Cummings, often cited in fantasy and science fiction contexts.
Diverse Forms of Love
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Love is not a monolith; it takes various shapes and forms, transcending romantic boundaries. This section highlights quotes that celebrate the diversity of love, from platonic to familial, and beyond.
- “For you, a thousand times over.” ― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (Friendship)
- “You could hold me and I could hold you. And it would be so peaceful. We’d be safe and together.” ― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (Platonic)
- “What greater gift than the love of a cat.” ― Charles Dickens (Pets and Animals)
- “Perhaps it is our imperfections that make us so perfect for one another.” ― Douglas McGrath, Emma (Romantic)
- “My mother… she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel.” ― Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts (Maternal)
- “There is no love like the first.” ― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook (First Love)
- “You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing.” ― E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web (Friendship)
- “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” ― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband (Self-love)
- “The love of family and the admiration of friends is much more important than wealth and privilege.” ― Charles Kuralt (Familial)
- “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche (Marital)
- “There’s nothing like your mother’s sympathetic voice to make you want to burst into tears.” ― Sophie Kinsella, Confessions of a Shopaholic (Maternal)
Love Quotes in Non-Western Literature
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Love’s language transcends geographical and cultural boundaries. In this section, we explore love quotes from non-Western literature, offering insights into how love is expressed and experienced in different cultures around the world.
- “Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it.” ― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds (Indian)
- “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ― Rumi (Persian)
- “I have died many times, but your breath made me alive again.” ― Rumi (Persian)
- “In real love you want the other person’s good. In romantic love you want the other person.” ― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Canadian)
- “Let yourself be drawn by the stronger pull of that which you truly love.” ― Rumi (Persian)
- “The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you.” ― Rumi (Persian)
- “A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and man cannot live without love.” ― Max Muller (German)
- “Love is a river. Drink from it.” ― Rumi (Persian)
- “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.” ― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (British)
- “At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.” ― Plato (Greek)
- “Love is the whole thing. We are only pieces.” ― Rumi (Persian)
- “If you love a flower, don’t pick it up. Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.” ― Osho (Indian)
- “One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.” ― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (Brazilian)
- “Where there is love there is life.” ― Mahatma Gandhi (Indian)
- “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (American, non-traditional Western perspective)
Conclusion
These 101 love quotes from literature not only illuminate the multifaceted nature of love but also remind us of its universal and timeless appeal. They resonate across generations, offering solace, inspiration, and a deep connection to the human experience of love.
