Need the perfect words for the perfect person? These love quotes can help if you're feeling tongue-tied.
98 Love Quotes to Share with Your Special Someone
Updated on Nov. 05, 2024
New love, old love, love that fizzled and then sparked again—it’s all magnificent and wondrous. Each love story is packed with emotions and experiences that shape those involved. While it may seem impossible to sum up your relationship in a few words, sometimes moving and meaningful love quotes can capture the essence of a relationship (especially around Valentine’s Day).
That’s what this list is for: to give you the best “I love you” messages about finding that special someone. Some of these “loving you” quotes are uplifting; others are quite funny or deeply romantic. Since every relationship is different, read on to see which quotes about love perfectly sum up your union so you can turn them into Happy Valentine’s Day messages or sweet notes on any day of the week. Plus, we have “I love you” quotes for her and “I love you” quotes for him to specifically reference your husband, wife, girlfriend or boyfriend—some taken from the most romantic Valentine’s Day movies of all time.
Get Reader’s Digest’s Read Up newsletter for more quotes, holiday tips, fun facts, humor, cleaning, travel and tech all week long.
Best “I love you” quotes
1. “I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.” —Paul Coelho, The Alchemist
2. “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.” —Pablo Neruda
3. “I love you to the moon.” —Sam McBratney, Guess How Much I Love You
4. “Say ‘I love you’ out loud and often.” —Every Day Spirit: A Daybook of Wisdom, Joy and Peace
5. “For you see, each day I love you more, today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.” —Rosemonde Gérard
6. “Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says: ‘I need you because I love you.'” —Erich Fromm
7. “I love you—I am at rest with you—I have come home.” —Dorothy L. Sayers
8. “Love is like the wind, you can’t see it but you can feel it.“ —Nicholas Sparks, A Walk to Remember
9. “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
10. “I loved you yesterday … I love you to-day … I shall love you to-morrow. Every day I am yours.” —
Famous love quotes
11. “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.” —1 Corinthians 13
12. “To paint is to love again, and to love is to live life to the fullest.” —Henry Miller
13. “Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.” —Maya Angelou
14. “When the Godiva is gone, the gift of real love is having someone who’ll go the distance with you. Someone who, when the wedding day limo breaks down, is willing to share a seat on the bus.” —Oprah Winfrey
15. “True love believes everything, and bears everything, and trusts everything.” —Charles Dickens
16. “It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.” —Vladimir Nabokov
17. “Who, being loved, is poor?” —Oscar Wilde
18. “One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.” —Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
19. “I love you, not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you.” —Erich Fried
20. “I am grateful … that you were born, and that your love is mine and our two lives woven and welded together!” ” —Mark Twain
21. “Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.” —Zora Neale Hurston
22. “Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” —James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
23. “Love is a juice with many tastes. Some bitter, others sweet. A wine which has few vineyards.” —Justice, Poetic Justice
Love quotes for him
24. “To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.” —Oscar Wilde
25. “The real lover is the man who can thrill you by kissing your forehead or smiling into your eyes or just staring into space.” —Marilyn Monroe
26. “Falling for him would be like cliff diving. It would be either the most exhilarating thing that ever happened to me or the stupidest mistake I’d ever make.” —Tiger’s Curse
27. “As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.” —John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
28. “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” —Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
29. “So dear I love him, that with him, all deaths I could endure, without him, live no life.” —John Milton
30. “I love that you are my person and I am yours, that whatever door we come to, we will open it together.” —A.R. Asher
31. “Come live in my heart, and pay no rent.” —Samuel Lover
32. “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” —Kurt Vonnegut
Love quotes for her
33. “The simple lack of her is more to me than others’ presence.” —Edward Thomas
34. “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.” —Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
35. “I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self-respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her, and it is the beginning of everything.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
36. “I felt her absence. It was like waking up one day with no teeth in your mouth. You wouldn’t need to run to the mirror to know they were gone.” —The Scorch Trials
37. “Till my last day, I’ll be loving you.” —Unknown
38. “He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.” —
Romantic love quotes
39. “We lie in each other’s arms, eyes shut and fingers open, and all the colors of the world pass through our bodies like strings of fire.” —Marge Piercy
40. “You and I, it’s as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to Earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.” —Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
41. “I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope … I have loved none but you.” —Jane Austen, Persuasion
42. “I am who I am because of you. You are every reason, every hope and every dream I’ve ever had.” —Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
43. “Because of you, I can feel myself slowly, but surely, becoming the me I have always dreamed of being.” —Tyler Knott Gregson
44. “Ancient lovers believed a kiss would literally unite their souls, because the spirit was said to be carried in one’s breath.” —Eve Glicksman
45. “In all the world, there is no heart for me like yours. In all the world, there is no love for you like mine.” —Maya Angelou
46. “There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
47. “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
48. “Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
49. “Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! / For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.” —William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
50. “Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get—only with what you are expecting to give, which is everything.” —Katharine Hepburn
51. “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
52. “Love doesn’t make the world go ’round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile.” —Unknown
53. “I am in you and you in me, mutual in divine love.” —William Blake
54. “It’s like in that moment the whole universe existed just to bring us together.” —Serendipity
55. “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
56. “Thinking of you keeps me awake. Dreaming of you keeps me asleep. Being with you keeps me alive.” —Unknown
Short love quotes
57. “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.” ―Jane Austen, Emma
58. “Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.” —Zelda Fitzgerald
59. “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” —Pablo Neruda
60. “If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.” —Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
61. “Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.” —Robert Frost
62. “If I know what love is, it is because of you.” —Herman Hesse
63. “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” —Aristotle
64. “Love is the soul’s light, the taste of morning, no me, no we, no claim of being.” —Rumi
65. “All love is sweet, given or returned.” —Percy Bysshe Shelley
66. “Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.” —Emily Dickinson
67. “Grow old along with me; the best is yet to be.” —Robert Browning
68. “There is no remedy for love but to love more.” —Henry David Thoreau
69. “We loved with a love that was more than love.” —Edgar Allen Poe
70. “Love is shown more in deeds than in words.” —Saint Ignatius of Loyola
True love quotes
71. “Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.” —William Goldman, The Princess Bride
72. “True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.” —François de la Rochefoucauld
73. “True love has no expiration date.” —Unknown
74. “There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.” —The Truth About Forever
75. “What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” —Helen Keller
Falling in love quotes
76. “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
77. “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.” —Harry, When Harry Met Sally…
78. “Falling in love is not at all the most stupid thing that people do—but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.” —Albert Einstein
79. “You can’t help who you fall in love with.” —Cautious
Funny love quotes
80. “I love being married. It’s so great to find one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.” —Rita Rudner
81. “Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.” —Phyllis Diller
82. “The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.” —Blaise Pascal
83. “It wasn’t love at first sight. It took a full five minutes.” —Lucille Ball
84. “Love is something sent from heaven to worry the hell out of you.” —Dolly Parton
85. “Love does not dominate, it cultivates. And that is more.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
86. “Save a boyfriend for a rainy day—and another, in case it doesn’t rain.” —Mae West
87. “I love you no matter what you do, but do you have to do so much of it?” —Jean Illsley Clarke
88. “Love kills intelligence. The brain and the heart act upon each other in the manner of an hourglass. One fills itself only to empty the other.” —Jules Renard
Cute love quotes
89. “I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.” —John Keats
90. “I would love to say that you make me weak in the knees, but to be quite upfront and completely truthful you make my body forget it has knees at all.” —Tyler Knott Gregson
91. “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
92. “You are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing.” —E.E. Cummings, “I Carry Your Heart with Me”
93. “To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.” —David Viscott
94. “Love is like the wind—you can’t see it but you can feel it.” —A Walk to Remember
95. “I can’t see anything I don’t like about you.” —Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
96. “You found parts of me I didn’t know existed, and in you I found a love I no longer believed was real.” —Unknown
97. “There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.” —George Sand
98. “Passion makes the world go ’round. Love just makes it a safer place.” —Ice-T
Why trust us
At Reader’s Digest, we’ve been sharing our favorite quotes for over 100 years. The sayings and quips that appear in the magazine’s “Quotable Quotes” (formerly “Remarkable Remarks”) are curated from interviews and essays originally published in the magazine, reprints from trusted titles and other verified sources. For this piece on kindness quotes, Kelly Kuehn tapped her experience as a lifestyle editor for Reader’s Digest to ensure that all information is accurate. We’ve gone the extra step and had Ambrose Martose, a fact-checker with 20-plus years of experience researching for national publications including National Geographic Adventure and Popular Mechanics, verify that all quotes are attributed correctly and have credible sourcing. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
