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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:

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?

Sylvia Plath Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices (1962)

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
I loved light ever, light in eye and brain —
No tapers mirrored in long palace floors,
Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles,
But just the common dusty wind-blown day
That roofs earth's millions.

Edith Wharton Vesalius in Zante (1564)

In love affairs, there is no mediator like a merry, simple-hearted child — ever ready to cement divided hearts, to span the unfriendly gulf of custom, to melt the ice of cold reserve, and overthrow the separating walls of dread formality and pride.

Anne Brontë The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

Somewhere In Time is the story of a love which transcends time, What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death. ... I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form.

Richard Matheson

Love is just another means of manipulation. We can use that emotion like we use hatred and fear.

John Twelve Hawks Fourth Realm Trilogy (2005)

It was, therefore, the sort of loveliness which is not perfect, but draws its charm from a measure of imbalance, which can accommodate flaws and make little of them, for a while at least.

Tanith Lee Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977)

There is a reason that truth is considered to be a fundamentally different category than the beautiful or even the good. Sometimes, the truth can be ugly indeed, but even the ugliest truth is of intrinsic value.

Vox Day

I wanted the basic needs of human existence—satiation of hunger, good health, love—to take on the shapes of small fruits we could plant and harvest. But who would be the plantation owners, and who the harvesters?

Jaroslav Kalfař Spaceman of Bohemia (2017)

Thy love hath taken me from me; Thou, Thou art needed by me.
Day and night do I burn; Thou, Thou art needed by me.
Were they to slay me, let them winnow my ashes into the heavens.
There let my dust cry, "Thou, Thou art needed by me."

Yunus Emre

Beauty is a kind of supplement to being, a radiance that is added to being.

Jean Guitton

The beautiful lies in the very moment when one senses that beauty is no longer. Forever now, perhaps.

Manlio Sgalambro La morte del sole (1982)

That's the beauty of the Web: You can roll around in a stranger's obsession without having to smell his or her house. You can amscray whenever you want without being rude. The site gets its "hit" and you know more about our species' diversity.

Penn Jillette

If we only have love
Then tomorrow will dawn
And the days of our years
Will rise on that morn.

Rod McKuen If We Only Have Love (1968)

Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.

George Eliot Adam Bede (1859)

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.

George Eliot Adam Bede (1859)

Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled.

Harlan Ellison Title of book (1968)

Somewhere around the world someone would love to have my first world problems

Matthew Good

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.

Morarji Desai

How do I love thee?
Let me count the days.
If there are 50 ways to leave your lover
then there are 50 ways to be left.

Sheri-D Wilson Goddess Gone Fishing for a Map of the Universe (2012)

Beauty; beauty. What was the good of beauty, once it was over? It left nothing behind it but acid regrets, and no heart at all to start fresh. Nearly everything else left something.

Elizabeth von Arnim Mr. Skeffington (1940)

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