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Valentine's Day Quotes

This page has no collection of its own behind it. It is built from the pages on love, romance and beauty, so it is very large and not selective. Use it as a place to start, and check what you pick.

The check matters more for love than for most topics, because so many of the famous lines are not what they seem. “Choose a job you love” is not Confucius, and “God made beer because he loves us” is probably a garbled Franklin on wine. See the Love page for both. If you are going to put a quote in a card, look at the label next to it first.

Random quote on Valentine's Day

Most quoted on valentine's day:

We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.

Wendell Berry Life Is A Miracle : An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000)

I love you like a river that creates the right conditions for trees and bushes and flowers to flourish along its banks. I love you like a river that gives water to the thirsty and takes people where they want to go.

Paulo Coelho Aleph (2011)

The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a glowing depth, beauty, and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing, it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of Divine accident.

Hugh Walpole Wisdom for the Soul : Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006)

Love is the capacity to take care, to protect, to nourish. If you are not capable of generating that kind of energy toward yourself — if you are not capable of taking care of yourself, of nourishing yourself, of protecting yourself — it is very difficult to take care of another person.

Thích Nhất Hạnh

Love is beyond description; but not beyond demonstrating. Love is beyond the mind because it is always new. Any product of the mind is a reaction of the past, a synthesis of what is old. So the mind is a modifier, a reactor; a renovator, but it cannot create the new.

Barry Long Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

How many times do I love, again?
Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain
Unravelled from the trembling main
And threading the eye of a yellow star:—
So many times do I love again.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes

I do not love thee less for what is done,
And cannot be undone. Thy very weakness
Hath brought thee nearer to me, and henceforth
My love will have a sense of pity in it,
Making it less a worship than before.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sweetheart, when you walk my way,
Be it dark or be it day;
Dreary winter, fairy May,
I shall know and greet you.
For each day of grief or grace
Brings you nearer my embrace;
Love hath fashioned your dear face,
I shall know you when I meet you.

Frank Lebby Stanton

To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn'd his clothes,
And dupp'd the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.

William Shakespeare

Hail to thy returning festival, old Bishop Valentine! Great is thy name in the rubric, Thou venerable arch flamen of Hymen. * * * Like unto thee, assuredly, there is no other mitred father in the calendar.

Charles Lamb

She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd
That heaven had made her such a man: she thank'd me,
And bade me, if I had a friend that lov'd her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story
And that would woo her.

William Shakespeare Othello (1603)

Alas! to seize the moment
When heart inclines to heart,
And press a suit with passion,
Is not a woman's part.
If man come not to gather
The roses where they stand,
They fade among their foliage,
They cannot seek his hand.

William Cullen Bryant

Full little knowest thou that hast not tried,
What hell it is in suing long to bide:
To loose good dayes, that might be better spent;
To waste long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow.

Edmund Spenser

Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. [...] The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due—she reminds us to much of a prima donna.

E. M. Forster Aspects of the Novel (1927)

The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;
And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.

Emily Dickinson

A mother’s... love... will always be felt by the children in flesh. It will manifest in their dreams, and often in various events—in providential protections and escapes, for love is a strong shield, and is not limited by space or time.

Helena Blavatsky The Key to Theosophy (1889)

There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds, in the ebb and flow of the tides; in the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature-the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

Rachel Carson Speech (1954)

A man's first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart; his next to escape the censures of the world: if the last interferes with the former, it ought to be entirely neglected; but otherwise there cannot be a greater satisfaction to an honest mind, than to see those approbations which it gives itself seconded by the applauses of the public: a man is more sure of his conduct, when the verdict which he passes upon his own behaviour is thus warranted and confirmed by the opinion of all that know him.

Joseph Addison The Spectator (1711)

Sad hours and glad hours, and all hours, pass over;
One thing unshaken stays:
Life, that hath Death for spouse, hath Chance for lover;
Whereby decays
Each thing save one thing: — mid this strife diurnal
Of hourly change begot,
Love that is God-born, bides as God eternal,
And changes not; — Nor means a tinseled dream pursuing lovers
Find altered by-and-bye,
When, with possession, time anon discovers
Trapped dreams must die, —
For he that visions God, of mankind gathers
One manlike trait alone,
And reverently imputes to Him a father's
Love for his son.

James Branch Cabell The Certain Hour (1916)

The vicious lover is the follower of earthly Love who desires the body rather than the soul; his heart is set on what is mutable and must therefore be inconstant. And as soon as the body he loves begins to pass the first flower of its beauty, he "spreads his wings and flies away," giving the lie to all his pretty speeches and dishonoring his vows, whereas the lover whose heart is touched by moral beauties is constant all his life, for he has become one with what will never fade.

Plato

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