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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:

Time Is...
Too slow for those who wait,
Too swift for those who fear,
Too long for those who grieve,
Too short for those who rejoice,
But for those who love,
Time is Eternity. (Music and Other Poems, 1904)

Henry van Dyke

My friends are gone and
My hair is grey.
I ache in the places where I used to play.
And I'm crazy for love but
I'm not coming on.
I'm just paying my rent everyday
In the Tower Of Song.

Leonard Cohen I'm Your Man (1988)

(Q: I couldn't live without…) Love. It's more important than oxygen. I'm someone who believes that hearts don't beat voluntarily, they need a reason. If you lack self love or love for others you die.

Melody Gardot

Words that warmed women, wooed and won them, snipped the final thread of inhibition and gratified the male egos of ungrateful lovers; [...] for which they were eternally in his debt, for which they may eternally hate him.

Gay Talese Frank Sinatra Has a Cold (1966)

How was it that destruction could be so beautiful? Was there something in the scale of it? Was there some shadow in people, lusting for it? Or was it just a coincidental combination of the elements, the final proof that beauty has no moral dimension?

Kim Stanley Robinson Red Mars (1992)

Japan was to be married, not to Hitler, but to the German forests; not to Mussolini, but to the Roman pantheon. It was a pact joining German, Roman, and Japanese mythology: a friendship among the beautiful, masculine, pagan gods of East and West.

Yukio Mishima The Temple of Dawn (1970)

...i believe
the most beautiful poem
...is your heart
racing

Nikki Giovanni The Women and The Men (1970)

Romance gathers round an old story like lichen on an old branch. And the story of Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard is so old now — some say a year old, some say even two. How can the children be expected to remember?

Eleanor Farjeon Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard (1922)

There was a time when I drew a distinction between Benjamin Netanyahu's policies and this country I have loved so long. No more. Every single day we wake to yet another outrage.

Bradley Burston It's Time to Admit It. Israeli Policy Is What It Is: Apartheid (2015)

“Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often,” he grinned and pushed at her belly, “expressed in curves.”

Kim Stanley Robinson Red Mars (1992)

A thousand graces diffusing
He passed through the groves in haste,
And merely regarding them
As He passed
Clothed them with His beauty. ~ 5

John of the Cross

If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.

Charles de Gaulle

If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

Malcolm X

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.

Eric Hoffer The Ordeal of Change (1963)

Spend time on excellence, and love the right,
And don’t let shameful profit master you.

Theognis of Megara

Be a clown, be a clown,
All the world loves a clown.
Act the fool, play the calf,
And you'll always have the last laugh.

Cole Porter The Pirate (1948)

It is self-love, and its offspring, self-deception, which shut the gates of heaven, and lead men, as in a delicious dream, to hell.

Christian Scriver Gotthold's Emblems (1667)

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

Bertrand Russell The Conquest of Happiness (1930)

God deliver us all from prejudice and unkindness, and fill us with the love of truth and virtue.

William Ellery Channing

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