40 Quotes from Books and Authors That Define True Love

Love never fails. Love is the force that transforms and improves the Soul of the World. Love is not love if it compelled by reason and driven by logic — love exists in spite of those things, not because of them. It is a emotion which needs no fuel to fire it or oxygen to feed it; if you have to look for the why, then stop looking; it was never there at all.

Love is the substance of all life. Everything is connected in love, absolutely everything. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

Love is involuntary. Brain science tells us it’s a drive like thirst. It’s a craving for a specific person. It’s normal, natural to “lose control” in the early stage of romance. Love, like thirst, will make you do strange things.

Love is a wonderful experience. It’s one of the greatest experiences life has to offer. And it is something everyone should aspire to feel and enjoy. It’s love that holds it all together…it’s love that’s holding back the weather and the same will let it go. Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.

Indeed we can keep on going on the topic of love – as true as it is, no amount of words can describe and complete the tale behind it. Below you’ll find 40 popular quotes from books and directly from authors that we think, define the true representation of love. Brew your cup of tea, get comfortable and immerse yourself in the list below.

1. “That’s how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.” – Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
2. “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
3. “Love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don’t know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who’ve never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you’ve felt what it means to love as you and I know it – total passion for the total height- you’re incapable of anything less.” – Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
4. “Goldmund, will you be back?” – Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund
5. “The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe hating him a little” – Amir, The Kite Runner
6. “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
7. Kahlil Gibran on Love – Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
8. “Love is a trick played on us by the forces of evolution. Pleasure is the bait laid down by the same.” – TH White, The Once and Future King
9. “Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat’s blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind may be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.” – Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
10. “My life is nothing but room for you.” – Kurt Vonnegat, Mother Night
11. “If you ever, ever need my life, come and take it.” – Anton Chekov, The Seagull
12. “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” – Song of Solomon 8:3
13. “I was wrong to weep and beg and try to force you by your love. Love is not a thing to be so used.” – C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
14. “Beauty is the promise of happiness” – Stendhal, On Love
15. “To go it alone, or to go with a partner. When you choose a partner, you have to have compromises and sacrifices, but it’s the price you pay. Do I want to follow my every whim and desire as I make my way through time and space? Absolutely. But at the end of the day, do I need someone when I’m doubting myself and I’m insecure, and my heart’s failing me? Do I need someone who, when the heat gets hot, has my back? I do.” – Safety Not Guaranteed
16. “Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.” – Antoine de Saint Exupéry
17. “Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.” – Matt Groening
18. “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” – Robert Heinlein
19. “You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.” – Dr. Seuss
20. “When we fall on love we are filled with the sense of how defenseless human beings are, and we tremble at the daily existence we have led in blissful obliviousness until this time. For this reason people are occasionally made virtuous by love.” – Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colors
21. “She had blue skin, And so did he. He kept it hid And so did she. They searched for blue Their whole life through, Then passed right by – And never knew.” – Shel Silverstein
22. “Will we know what to do when we are thirty? When we are forty-two?” the girl asked. The boy shrugged. “Will there be a day when you decide to get the newspaper delivered and then another when your cholesterol numbers are part of our regular lives?” He shrugged again. “I don’t know anything about wrinkle cream or being a mother.” “I don’t want to know until I have to,” he said. He took her smooth hand. “This year we will try some new vegetables. We’ll listen to some new music. That’s all.” The girl closed her eyes, where the darkness was filled with unanswerable questions. “But you love me, right?” she asked. “That is exactly what I do,” he said. – Ramona Ausubel, The Ages
23. “Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move, Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.” – Hamlet, Shakespeare
24. “Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.” – William Faulkner, Light in August
25. “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
26. “What you seek is seeking you.” – Rumi
27. “I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.” – James Joyce, Dubliners
28. “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
29. “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
30. “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.” – Bernard M. Baruch
31. “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 Fulgham
32. “All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase… I love you.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
33. “It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won’t save us any more than love did.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
34. “Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.” – Hunter S. Thompson
35. “It’s not love to be static like the desert, nor is it love to roam the world like the wind. And it’s not love to see everything from a distance. Love is the force that transforms and improves the soul of the world…when we love we always strive to become better than we are.” – Paulo Coelho
36. “Isn’t love a sharing? Isn’t it opening your bag of sweets and passing it around, or whipping something up out of groceries you brought to someone else’s house? And if it’s sharing then you have to share it. Love makes the world go round, the hit songs collectively tell us, and the world is full of people you don’t know and might as well be nice to because they won’t leave.” – Daniel Handler, Adverbs
37. “What is love? What is this longing in our hearts for togetherness? Is it not the sweetest flower? Does not this flower of love have the fragrant aroma of fine, fine diamonds? Does not the wind love the dirt? Is not love not unlike the unlikely not it is unlikened to? Are you with someone tonight? Do not question your love. Take your lover by the hand. Release the power within yourself. Your heard me, release the power. Tame the wild cosmos with a whisper. Conquer heaven with one intimate caress. That’s right don’t be shy. Whip out everything you got and do it in the butt.” – Leon Phelps, The Ladies Man
38. “Love is an open book to a verse of your bad poetry.” – James Murphy
39. “To love another person is to see the face of God.” – Victor Hugo
40. “Love is like death. It doesn’t care whether you are strong or weak, old or young, hopeful greenhorn or a bitter veteran. When it comes, you can’t run away. The unpleasant difference is that death is the end of suffering. Love forebodes its arrival.” – Unknown