Here are the 157 best handpicked poets’ quotes about love categorized:
- Famous poets’ quote about love
- Poets’ quotes on relationships and love
So if you are looking for the best collection of poets’ quotes about love, then you’re in the right place.
Let’s get right into it!
Handpicked Poets’ Quotes About Love
Plunge into a collection of the most enchanting poets’ quotes about love, thoughtfully curated for your romantic journey.
Whether you’re seeking words that capture the passion and intensity of love, or reflect on the tender moments and profound connections it brings, our anthology offers a diverse range of heartfelt examples.
With our meticulously curated selection, the finest poets’ quotes about love are all conveniently located in one place.
So, take a moment to explore and appreciate the beauty and inspiration these words have evoked in poets throughout history!
Let’s jump right in!
My Favorite Poets’ Quote About Love
Oh! love! It is to be two and yet but one—it is a man and a woman blending into an angel—it is heaven itself.
–Victor Hugo
Famous Poets’ Quote About Love
All love is sweet, given or returned. Common as light is love, and its familiar voice wearies not ever.
–Percy Bysshe Shelley
The hottest love has the coldest end.
–Socrates
Love is a celestial harmony of likely hearts.
–E. Spenser
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
–Shakespeare
But love is blind, and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit.
–Shakespeare
Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure
Thrill the deepest notes of woe.
–R. Burns
Love reckons hours for months, and days for years;
And every little absence is an age.
–J. Dryden
The light that lies in woman’s eyes.
–T. Moore
When Love is hurt, it is self-love that requires the opiate
–George Meredith
All mankind love a lover.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love conquers all things; let us yield to its power.
–Virgil
Love bade me write.
–Ovid
Wine is the milk of love.
–Aristophanes
When Love claps him on the shoulder, even the man with no ear for poetic harmonies becomes poetical.
–Plato
Love is the earliest of our feelings.
–Fontanelle
Love is the groundwork which imagination has embroidered.
–Voltaire
The great proof of love is to obey the whims of her whom one loves.
–Molière
There’s no reasoning in love and hate.
–Regnard
Hate is unjust, but love is even more so.
–Goethe
Love is love’s reward.
–Schiller
Love knows no winter.
–Tieck
The man who is in love for the first time, even if his love is unrequited, is a godlike being.
–H. Heine
Love, whose lesson a gentle heart doth quickly learn.
–Dante
Love is a feeling that comes into our hearts of our own choice ; for neither force nor harshness can limit the heart’s freedom.
–Metastasio
Love which moves the sun and other stars of heaven.
–Dante
Neither Creator nor creature was ever without love.
–Dante
The power of Love over us is determined by the strength that our own hearts give it.
–Guarini
Sweet heavenly love, which dost array thyself in smiles.
–Dante
Love looks through spectacles which make copper appear gold, poverty appear wealth, and sore eyes seem to drop pearls.
–Cervantes
The course of true love never did run smooth.
–Shakespeare
All men honour love, because it looks up, and not down.
–Emerson
To be in love and act wisely is scarcely in the power of a god.
–Faber
Love is quickly learned by a noble heart.
–Dante
Love spares no loved one from loving.
–Dante
As love without esteem is capricious and volatile, esteem without love is languid and cold.
–Swift
Belief and love,—a believing love, will relieve us of a vast load of care.
–Emerson
But there’s nothing half so sweet in life As love’s young dream.
–Moore
But to see her was to love her—love but her, and love for ever.
–Burns
Colour is the type of love. Hence it is especially connected with the blossoming of the earth, and with its fruits; also with the spring and fall of the leaf, and with the morning and evening of the day, in order to show the waiting of love about the birth and death of man.
–Ruskin
Love is a credulous affection.
–Ovid
Dante, who loved well because he hated, Hated wickedness that hinders loving.
–Browning
That is true love which is ever the same, whether everything is conceded to it or everything denied.
–Goethe
Love is the price of love.
–Schiller
Eternal love made me.
–Dante
Every cloud that spreads above And veileth love, itself is love.
–Tennyson
God gives us love. Something to love He lends us; but when love is grown To ripeness, that on which it throve Falls off, and love is left alone.”
–Tennyson
Love is at once easy to satisfy and insatiable.
–Rückert
Love ranges about in all thoroughfares; fidelity dwells by herself alone. Love comes to meet you with quick footstep; fidelity will be sought out.
–Goethe
Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.
–Emerson
Love betters what is best, Even here below, but more in heaven above.
–Wordsworth
Love can hope where reason would despair.
–Lyttleton
Love has made its best interpreter a sigh.
–Byron
Love has the tendency of pressing together all the lights, all the rays emitted from the beloved object, by the burning-glass of fantasy, into one focus, and making of them one radiant sun without spots.
–Goethe
Love is a bottomless pit; it is a cormorant—a harpy that devours everything.
–Swift
Love is a boy by poets spoiled.
–S. Butler
Love is a spirit all compact of fire; Not gross to sink, but light and will aspire.
–Shakespeare
Love is an exotic of the most delicate constitution.
–Goldsmith
Love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage round his eyes. Blind: yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love for finding what he seeks, and only that.
–Emerson
Love is not a fire which can be confined within the breast; everything betrays it; and its fires imperfectly covered, only burst out the more.
–Racine
Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds.
–Shakespeare
Love is old, old as eternity, but not outworn; with each new being born or to be born.
–Byron
Love is the eldest, noblest, and mightiest of the gods, and the chiefest author and giver of virtue in life and happiness after death.
–Plato
Love, the last relay and ultimate outpost of eternity.
–D. G. Rossetti
Love the sense of right and wrong confounds; Strong love and proud ambition have no bounds.
–Dryden
Love will find its way Through paths where wolves would fear to prey.
–Byron
Love works a different way in different minds, The fool enlightens and the wise he blinds.
–Dryden
Love’s the noblest frailty of the mind.
–Dryden
Love’s of a strangely open simple kind, And thinks none sees it ’cause itself is blind.
–Cowley
Men love things best; women love persons best.
–Jean Paul
Love is a kind of warfare.
–Ovid
Only love may break the flower of love.
–Schiller
Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, and tell them.
–Bailey
Pure love cannot merely do all, but is all.
–Jean Paul
The attraction of love is in an inverse proportion to the attraction of the Newtonian philosophy.
–Burns
The magic power of love consists in its ennobling whatever its breath touches, like the sun whose golden ray transmutes even thunderclouds into gold.
–Grillparzer
The plainest man that can convince a woman that he is really in love with her, has done more to make her in love with him than the handsomest man, if he can produce no such conviction. For the love of woman is a shoot, not a seed, and flourishes most vigorously only when ingrafted on that love which is rooted in the breast of another.
–Colton
The sweets of love are washed with tears.
–George Herbert
They said that Love would die when Hope was gone, And Love mourn’d long, and sorrow’d after Hope; At last she sought out Memory, and they trod The same old paths where Love had walk’d with Hope, And Memory fed the soul of Love with tears.
–Tennyson
Love is a pure dew which drops from heaven into our heart, when God wills.
–Arsène Houssaye
Love is the yearning for the unknown carried to madness.
–Petiet
What happiness to be beloved; and O, what bliss, ye gods, to love!
–Goethe
What state of man such rapture can impart As the soft passions of an amorous heart? What life so blest as his, decreed to prove With pleasing chains the servitude of Love?
–Ariosto (Hoole, Translator)
This way and that; to and fro. Ovid wrote an Art of Love, but it is all untrue. Love and poetry do not satisfy by their art, for poets are born, and lovers are made by love.
–Tirso de Molina
Love is the support of human life.
–A. Perez
Love, requited or unrequited, produces melancholy.
–Antonio Perez
Poets’ Quotes on Relationships and Love
Love, like death, levels all ranks, and lays the shepherd’s crook beside the sceptre.
–E. Bulwer-Lytton
Love is the tyrant of the heart; it darkens reason, confounds discretion; deaf to counsel it runs a headlong course to desperate madness.
–J. Ford
A mighty pain to love it is,
And ‘t is a pain that pain to miss;
But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain.
–A. Cowley
Is she not more than painting can express,
Or youthful poets fancy when they love?
–N. Rowe
O, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
–C. Marlowe
A love that took an early root, And had an early doom.
–T. K. Hervey
Love has no age, no limit; and no death
–John Galsworthy
Love can outlive slander.
–Gilbert Parker
Love, too, is a game, and needs playing.
–Gilbert Parker
Love knows not distance; it hath no continent.
–Gilbert Parker
Love has nothing to do with ugliness or beauty, or fortune
–Gilbert Parker
Charity itself fulfils the law,
And who can sever love from charity?
–Shakespeare
A friendship that like love is warm,
A love like friendship steady.
–T. Moore
Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like;
Friendship is a sheltering tree.
–S. T. Coleridge
The quarrelling of lovers is the renewal of love.
–Terence
If I have freedom in my love and in my soul am free, Angels alone that soar above, enjoy such liberty.
–Lovelace
At lovers’ perjuries they say Jove laughs.
–Shakespeare
Grievous is it not to love, and grievous, too, to love; but far more grievous is it to love and love in vain.
–Anacreon
Faith, in the language of heaven, is Love in the language of men.
–Victor Hugo
The poet’s soul is the soul of darkness and of love ; it is a flower which unfolds its petals when the day has fled, and bares its beauties to the stars.
–Victor Hugo
The poet’s heart is an unlighted torch, which gives no help to his footsteps till love has touched it with flame.
–Lowell
That is true love which is always the same, whether you give everything or deny everything to it.
–Goethe
That is the true season of love, when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will love in the same way after us.
–Goethe
Love often makes a poet; herself a wonder, she works wonders.
–Bodenstedt
Oh, that it remained for ever green, the fair season of early love.
–Schiller
Oh, that it would stay for ever, the double bliss of the tones as well as of the love.
–Goethe
No man flatters the woman he truly loves.
–Tuckermann
Men love us, or they need our love.
–Keble
Men judge on rational grounds; the woman’s judgment is her love; where the woman does not love, she has judged.
–Schiller
Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart; ‘Tis woman’s whole existence.
–Byron
Love is sparingly soluble in the words of men, therefore they speak much of it; but one syllable of woman’s speech can dissolve more of it than a man’s heart can hold.
–Holmes
The first sigh of love is the last of wisdom.
–Charron
Right is with the strongest in love as in war, And the woman we love will always be right.
–A. de Musset
Kisses are pledges and incentives of love.
–Cotton
Voluntary dependence is the noblest condition we can be in; and how were that possible without love?
–Goethe
Happy he who dares courageously to defend what he loves.
–Ovid
Fear is the virtue of slaves; but the heart that loveth is willing.
–Longfellow
Faults are beauties in lover’s eyes.
–Theocritus
Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.
–Channing
The wrinkles of every sorrow disappear as long as the spell of love is unbroken.
–Schiller
Only since I loved is life lovely; only since I loved knew I that I lived.
–Körner
From the moment one falls in love, one becomes sweet in the temper.
–Marmontel
Doubting the reality of love leads to doubting everything.
–Amiel
Divine love is a sacred flower, which in its early bud is happiness, and in its full bloom is heaven.
–Hervey
Dignity and love do not blend well, nor do they continue long together.
–Ovid
Love embraces woman’s whole life; it is her prison and her kingdom of heaven.
–Chamisso
Love converts the cottage into a palace of gold.
–Hölty
Love follows no measure of time; it buds and blossoms and ripens in one happy hour.
–Körner
What I was ashamed to say, love has ordered me to write.
–Ovid
As soon as beauty is sought, not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
–Emerson
A woman’s friendship borders more closely on love than a man’s.
–Coleridge
A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind.
–Shakespeare
In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities.
–J. Arany
Love is mortals’ crowning blessing.
–Louis Ferrier
The heart that never loved was the first atheist.
–Alfred Mercier
When friendship becomes love, they blend like two streams, of which the most famous absorbs even the name of the other.
–Mlle. de Scudéri
Sip love as a sober man takes wine, and never become besotted with it.
–Alfred de Musset
Love transforms the humble cottage into a golden palace.
–Hölty
That man alone knows what love is, who loves when hope is gone.
–Schiller
We love girls for what they are; we love lads for what they seem likely to become.
–Goethe
He who tries to unite love with prudence knows nothing of love.
–Metastasio
Kisses, when given in love, are, so to speak, the meeting together of two loving hearts.
–Guarini
Leave, leave the woods, silly boy, leave thy hunting, and learn to love.
–Guarini
Fidelity and love are seldom found together.
–Metastasio
The heart is the root whence grow Faith and Love.
–Antonio Perez
For men say they often find Love’s the slayer of their mind.
–Calderon
Love owns one universal claim To Love, it only needs To Be, – Whether a bird, a flower, a tree: Then the chief glory, far above All else in life must be Love, Love,
–Calderon (D. F. MacCarthy, Translator)
Love in those who truly love increases with absence.
–Antonio Perez
A cheerful life is what the Muses love; A soaring spirit is their prime delight.
–Wordsworth
All good colour is in some degree pensive, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.
–Ruskin
We bury love, Forgetfulness grows over it like grass;
That is a thing to weep for, not the dead.
–Alexander Smith