Inspiration
30 Love Quotes to Give, One a Day
30 love quotes from Hugo, Neruda, Shakespeare and Sand, to give one each day. The greatest writers say what you can't quite put into words on your own.
You've typed "I love you" into a message before, thumb resting on the screen, and felt that the three words didn't carry a hundredth of what you meant. You delete, you start again, you send them anyway, faintly let down. It isn't that you have nothing to say. It's that everyday words are too small for this.
So you borrow from elsewhere. A love quote carved by someone whose whole craft was naming love, who says, in one breath, exactly what you couldn't manage to put into words. Lending your voice to Hugo, to Neruda, to Saint-Exupéry isn't cheating. It's handing the other person a line truer than the ones you keep within easy reach.
Here are thirty. Not to read in one sitting, but to give one a day, like a single drop at a time. I've sorted them by the moment of love they speak to, so you can lay your hand on the one meant for this morning.
The dizzy first days, when it all begins
At the start, love is a fall you don't dare name. These lines are for the early days, the ones where the heart moves too fast.
— Jane Austen, Pride and PrejudiceYou must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus UnboundSoul meets soul on lovers' lips.
— Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVIII love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride.
— Victor Hugo (Unveil translation)Love, the panic of reason, passes from one to another through a shiver.
— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's DreamLove looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.
— Blaise Pascal, PenséesThe heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
— Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVIII love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
Love that lasts through the ordinary days
The hardest love to name is the ordinary kind. The one made of morning coffees and shared silences. These lines are for the long stories, the ones we think too settled to still deserve a declaration.
— Rosemonde Gérard, L'éternelle chanson (Unveil translation)For you see, each day I love you more, today more than yesterday and far less than tomorrow.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and StarsLove does not consist of gazing at each other, but of looking outward together in the same direction.
— Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Unveil translation)Love is like a tree, it grows of its own accord, it sends its roots deep into our whole being.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (Unveil translation)To love or to have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little PrinceIt is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little PrinceIt is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little PrinceYou become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.
— Alain (Unveil translation)To love is to find your wealth outside yourself.
(If you're torn between two lines, always keep the simpler one. That's the one that lands.)
Loving across the miles
Loves at a distance know a lack the others never feel. These lines are written for the evenings when the apartment goes quiet again after the call.
— Alphonse de Lamartine, L'Isolement (Unveil translation)One being is missing, and the whole world feels empty.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Love SongEverything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin's bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
— Victor Hugo, letter to Juliette Drouet (Unveil translation)I was dead, I am alive. You are the blood of my heart, the light of my eyes, the life of my life.
— Victor Hugo, letter to Juliette Drouet (Unveil translation)To me, you are more myself than I am.
— Marcel Proust (Unveil translation)Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young PoetLove consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.
— Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No ImportanceWho, being loved, is poor?
Bigger than the two of you
Some lines aim higher than the couple. They speak of love as a force, almost a faith. Save them for the great days, the ones that deserve a capital letter.
— Honoré de Balzac (Unveil translation)Love is the only passion that suffers neither past nor future.
— George Sand, letter to Lina Calamatta, 1862There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.
— Emily Brontë, Wuthering HeightsHe's more myself than I am.
— Alphonse de Lamartine (Unveil translation)To love in order to be loved is human. But to love for the sake of loving is almost angelic.
— Molière, The Princess of Elis (Unveil translation)To live without loving is not truly to live.
— Jacques Prévert (Unveil translation)There are not six or seven wonders in the world, there is only one: love.
— Ludwig van Beethoven, letter to the Immortal BelovedMy angel, my all, my very self.
— Ludwig van Beethoven, letter to the Immortal BelovedEver thine. Ever mine. Ever ours.
Thirty lines, thirty mornings. You can copy them into a card, slip them into a message, blend them with your own ways of saying I love you, write them by hand on a folded scrap of paper. But what makes them precious is giving them out one at a time, so the other person waits for the next.
One quote a day, for a month
Tuck these lines into a calendar the other person opens each morning, one word at a time, all the way to the last.
Create the calendarThe day you give the last one, the line by Prévert or Beethoven, the other person will already have understood that these words didn't really come from Hugo or Neruda. They came from you, the one who took the time to choose them.