Whilst there’s no doubt Shakespeare could always write a great love quote, many famous philosophers down the years have also had a go at coining their own philosophical quotes about love. In this blog post we’ve researches all the great philosophers on love, and pulled together the top love quotes by philosophers whether written or spoken:
“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”
Nietzsche
“At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”
Plato
“Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.”
Aristotle
“Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.”
Bruce Lee
“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Where there is love there is life.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly.”
Sam Keen
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
Lao Tzu
“Forgiveness is the final form of love.”
Reinhold Niebuhr
“Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”
Rumi
“Selfishness doesn’t consist in a love to yourself, but in a big degree of such love.”
Aristotle
“Love has three kinds of origin, namely: suffering, friendship and love. A human love has a corporal and intellectual origin.”
Boethius
“A person has two passions for love and abhorrence. A big disposition to excessiveness has just a love, because it is more ardent and stronger.”
Descartes
“Love comes with hunger.”
Diogenes
“Love is a person’s idea about his/her needs in other person what you are attracted to.”
Thomas Hobbes
“The sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love.”
Philip James Bailey
“Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, Hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Endless torments dwell about thee: Yet who would live, and live without thee!”
Joseph Addison
“People who are sensible about love are incapable of it.”
Douglas Yates
“One’s first love is always perfect until one meets one’s second love.”
Elizabeth Aston
“There is love, of course. And then there’s life, its enemy.”
Jean Anouilh
“In this world of extremes, we can only love too little.”
Richard Cannarella
“Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.”
John Ciardi
“Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.”
Voltaire
“Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.”
John Donne
“He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals.”
Benjamin Franklin
“No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved.”
Mignon McLaughlin
“I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love.”
Henry Ward Beecher
“Pleasure of love lasts but a moment, Pain of love lasts a lifetime.”
Jean Pierre Claris De Florian
“Love won’t be tampered with, love won’t go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.”
Louise Erdrich
“There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.”
Erich Fromm
“The love we give away is the only love we keep.”
Elbert Hubbard
“Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it… It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.”
Erica Jong
“We are not the same person 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 is a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.”
Ambrose Bierce
“Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames.”
Thomas Moore
“Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common-sense.”
Helen Rowland
“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”
Henry David Thoreau
“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”
Oscar Wilde
“In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities.”
Janos Arany
“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.”
Fyodor Dostoevski
“One word frees us
Of all the weight and pain in life,
That word is Love.”
Socrates
“Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.”
St. Augustine
“Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.”
Aristotle
“The first duty of love is to listen.”
Paul Tillich
“Where there is love there is life.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”
Plato
“A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“If you want to be loved, be lovable.”
Ovid
“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”
Bertrand Russell
“All mankind love a lover.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.”
H. L. Mencken
“Love is the beauty of the soul.”
Saint Augustine
“The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.”
Jiddu
“The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.”
George Edward Moore
“Love is being stupid together.”
Paul Valery
“Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.”
Khalil Gibran
“Fortune and love favour the brave.”
Ovid
“Don’t forget to love yourself.”
Soren Kierkegaard
What do you think of this list of philosophical quotes about love – any more philosophers on love we should include?
Yes l want more quotes about love because l am a lover.
Love is indeed the most beautiful feeling in the world but most people suffer here because of it too. I hope people will understand the true meaning of love and let all other negative emotions go.
Also, this is a beautiful collection. I enjoy every single quote. Thanks for sharing.