Love is powerful, but it’s also complicated.
More often than not, it’s difficult to put that feeling of love into words because it will steal them right out of your mouth. We can, thankfully, always turn to literature to fill in the gaps and find some romantic inspiration.
Whether you’re looking to get into the Valentine’s Day spirit, or you’re struggling with words to express how you feel for someone special, these beautiful love quotes from literature are sure to help.
Chances are, some of the best and most famous writers have already put your thoughts into words.
On our list of love quotes from books, you’ll find romantic quotes for him, love quotes for her, and inspirational love quotes you can use as Instagram captions, to remind someone how special they are to you, or anything else you can think of.
After all, there are (at least) a million different ways to say “I love you,” and no one knew them better than these wordsmiths.
Best love quotes from literature
1. “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
2. “I am nothing special; just a common man with common thoughts, and I’ve led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten. But in one respect I have succeeded as gloriously as anyone who’s ever lived: I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul; and to me, this has always been enough.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
3. “I’ve never had a moment’s doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement
4. “Having begun to love you, I love you for ever – in all changes, in all disgraces, because you are yourself.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
6. “…There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.”
― Homer, The Iliad
7. “Each time you happen to me all over again.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
8. “It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
9. “Who, being loved, is poor?”
— Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
10. “It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
11. “She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don’t know what she was – anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted. I was swallowed up in an abyss of love in an instant. There was no pausing on the brink; no looking down, or looking back; I was gone, headlong, before I had sense to say a word to her.”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
12. “It is better to love wisely, no doubt: but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
13. “Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam
14. “Wounds heal. Love lasts. We remain.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale
15. “I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
16. “Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.”
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Bound
17. “If I know what love is, it is because of you.”
— Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund
18. “All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
19. “Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
20. “Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi
21. “A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
22. “Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
23. “Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.”
― Toni Morrison, Jazz
24. “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, The Alchemist
25. “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
26. “To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.”
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
27. “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
28. “Love, whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
29. “Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.”
— Virginia Woolf, Selected Diaries
30. “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
30. “I have for the first time found what I can truly love – I have found you. You are my sympathy – my better self – my good angel – I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wrap my existence about you – and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.”
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
31. “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
32. “You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.”
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
33. “For where all love is, the speaking is unnecessary”
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
34. “To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
35. “Love is just a word until someone comes along and gives it meaning.”
― Paulo Coelho, Aleph
36. “Love is a great beautifier.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
37. “What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life–to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”
– George Eliot, Adam Bede
38. “Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
39. “The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
40. “We loved with a love that was more than love.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee
41. “I’ve always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
42. “So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
43. “You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper
44. “If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
45. “I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
46. “Beauty made you love, and love made you beautiful.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April
47. “It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That’s as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear
48. “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”
― Jane Austen, Emma
49. “Woman is sacred; the woman one loves is holy.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
50. “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
51. “When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are to become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No … don’t blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away. Doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? But it is!”
– Louis de Bernieres, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
52. “Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
53. “We are all fools in love.”
– Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
54. “The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
55. “Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,–a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
56. “There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.”
― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
57. “My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne
58. “Oh, you can’t describe someone you’re in love with!”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
59. “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
60. “The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy that loves you.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
61. “When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
62. “Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
63. “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
64. “If it’s true that here are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
65. “I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
66. “It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
67. “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
68. “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
69. “If you ever have need of my life, come and take it.”
— Anton Chekhov, The Seagull
70. “They held each other and kissed and pushed each others’ darkness into the corner, believing in each others’ light, each others’ dream.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream
71. “Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust
72. “I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
73. “Love is like the sea. It’s a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
74. “The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées
75. “And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.”
― Kiersten White, The Chaos of Stars
76. “I would rather spend one lifetime with you, than face all the ages of this world alone.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
77. “Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd
78. “The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.”
– Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
79. “To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.“
– Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
80. “My heart is, and always will be, yours.”
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
81. “And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet
82. “How frightening, that one person could mean so much, so many things.”
― Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds
83. “Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.”
― Orhan Pamuk, Snow
84. “Doubt thou that the sun is fire, Doubt that that the sun does move, doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt that I love.”
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
85. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.”
– Roald Dahl, The Witches
86. “If I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I’d stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name
87. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
― Erich Segal, Love Story
88. “Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
89. “The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
90. “I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
91. “I have so much of you in my heart.”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne
92. “It was good to be alive; it was better to be young; it was best of all to be in love.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
93. “I will follow you to the ends of the world.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
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