157 Best Poets' Quotes About Love (Handpicked) (2024)

Here are the 157 best handpicked poets’ quotes about love categorized:

  • Famous poets’ quote about love
  • Poets’ quotes on relationships and love

So if you are looking for the best collection of poets’ quotes about love, then you’re in the right place.

Let’s get right into it!

  • 179 Best Quotes by Famous Poets
  • 117 Best Poet Quotes About Life
  • 127 Best Inspirational Poet Quotes

157 Best Poets' Quotes About Love (Handpicked) (1)

Contents: hide

1Handpicked Poets’ Quotes About Love

2My Favorite Poets’ Quote About Love

3Famous Poets’ Quote About Love

4Poets’ Quotes on Relationships and Love

Handpicked Poets’ Quotes About Love

Plunge into a collection of the most enchanting poets’ quotes about love, thoughtfully curated for your romantic journey.

Whether you’re seeking words that capture the passion and intensity of love, or reflect on the tender moments and profound connections it brings, our anthology offers a diverse range of heartfelt examples.

With our meticulously curated selection, the finest poets’ quotes about love are all conveniently located in one place.

So, take a moment to explore and appreciate the beauty and inspiration these words have evoked in poets throughout history!

Let’s jump right in!

My Favorite Poets’ Quote About Love

Oh! love! It is to be two and yet but one—it is a man and a woman blending into an angel—it is heaven itself.
–Victor Hugo

Famous Poets’ Quote About Love

All love is sweet, given or returned. Common as light is love, and its familiar voice wearies not ever.
–Percy Bysshe Shelley

The hottest love has the coldest end.
–Socrates

Love is a celestial harmony of likely hearts.
–E. Spenser

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
–Shakespeare

But love is blind, and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit.
–Shakespeare

Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure
Thrill the deepest notes of woe.
–R. Burns

Love reckons hours for months, and days for years;
And every little absence is an age.
–J. Dryden

The light that lies in woman’s eyes.
–T. Moore

When Love is hurt, it is self-love that requires the opiate
–George Meredith

All mankind love a lover.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love conquers all things; let us yield to its power.
–Virgil

Love bade me write.
–Ovid

Wine is the milk of love.
–Aristophanes

When Love claps him on the shoulder, even the man with no ear for poetic harmonies becomes poetical.
–Plato

Love is the earliest of our feelings.
–Fontanelle

Love is the groundwork which imagination has embroidered.
–Voltaire

The great proof of love is to obey the whims of her whom one loves.
–Molière

There’s no reasoning in love and hate.
–Regnard

Hate is unjust, but love is even more so.
–Goethe

Love is love’s reward.
–Schiller

Love knows no winter.
–Tieck

The man who is in love for the first time, even if his love is unrequited, is a godlike being.
–H. Heine

Love, whose lesson a gentle heart doth quickly learn.
–Dante

Love is a feeling that comes into our hearts of our own choice ; for neither force nor harshness can limit the heart’s freedom.
–Metastasio

Love which moves the sun and other stars of heaven.
–Dante

Neither Creator nor creature was ever without love.
–Dante

The power of Love over us is determined by the strength that our own hearts give it.
–Guarini

Sweet heavenly love, which dost array thyself in smiles.
–Dante

Love looks through spectacles which make copper appear gold, poverty appear wealth, and sore eyes seem to drop pearls.
–Cervantes

The course of true love never did run smooth.
–Shakespeare

All men honour love, because it looks up, and not down.
–Emerson

To be in love and act wisely is scarcely in the power of a god.
–Faber

Love is quickly learned by a noble heart.
–Dante

Love spares no loved one from loving.
–Dante

As love without esteem is capricious and volatile, esteem without love is languid and cold.
–Swift

Belief and love,—a believing love, will relieve us of a vast load of care.
–Emerson

But there’s nothing half so sweet in life As love’s young dream.
–Moore

But to see her was to love her—love but her, and love for ever.
–Burns

Colour is the type of love. Hence it is especially connected with the blossoming of the earth, and with its fruits; also with the spring and fall of the leaf, and with the morning and evening of the day, in order to show the waiting of love about the birth and death of man.
–Ruskin

Love is a credulous affection.
–Ovid

Dante, who loved well because he hated, Hated wickedness that hinders loving.
–Browning

That is true love which is ever the same, whether everything is conceded to it or everything denied.
–Goethe

Love is the price of love.
–Schiller

Eternal love made me.
–Dante

Every cloud that spreads above And veileth love, itself is love.
–Tennyson

God gives us love. Something to love He lends us; but when love is grown To ripeness, that on which it throve Falls off, and love is left alone.”
–Tennyson

Love is at once easy to satisfy and insatiable.
–Rückert

Love ranges about in all thoroughfares; fidelity dwells by herself alone. Love comes to meet you with quick footstep; fidelity will be sought out.
–Goethe

Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.
–Emerson

Love betters what is best, Even here below, but more in heaven above.
–Wordsworth

Love can hope where reason would despair.
–Lyttleton

Love has made its best interpreter a sigh.
–Byron

Love has the tendency of pressing together all the lights, all the rays emitted from the beloved object, by the burning-glass of fantasy, into one focus, and making of them one radiant sun without spots.
–Goethe

Love is a bottomless pit; it is a cormorant—a harpy that devours everything.
–Swift

Love is a boy by poets spoiled.
–S. Butler

Love is a spirit all compact of fire; Not gross to sink, but light and will aspire.
–Shakespeare

Love is an exotic of the most delicate constitution.
–Goldsmith

Love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage round his eyes. Blind: yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love for finding what he seeks, and only that.
–Emerson

Love is not a fire which can be confined within the breast; everything betrays it; and its fires imperfectly covered, only burst out the more.
–Racine

Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds.
–Shakespeare

Love is old, old as eternity, but not outworn; with each new being born or to be born.
–Byron

Love is the eldest, noblest, and mightiest of the gods, and the chiefest author and giver of virtue in life and happiness after death.
–Plato

Love, the last relay and ultimate outpost of eternity.
–D. G. Rossetti

Love the sense of right and wrong confounds; Strong love and proud ambition have no bounds.
–Dryden

Love will find its way Through paths where wolves would fear to prey.
–Byron

Love works a different way in different minds, The fool enlightens and the wise he blinds.
–Dryden

Love’s the noblest frailty of the mind.
–Dryden

Love’s of a strangely open simple kind, And thinks none sees it ’cause itself is blind.
–Cowley

Men love things best; women love persons best.
–Jean Paul

Love is a kind of warfare.
–Ovid

Only love may break the flower of love.
–Schiller

Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, and tell them.
–Bailey

Pure love cannot merely do all, but is all.
–Jean Paul

The attraction of love is in an inverse proportion to the attraction of the Newtonian philosophy.
–Burns

The magic power of love consists in its ennobling whatever its breath touches, like the sun whose golden ray transmutes even thunderclouds into gold.
–Grillparzer

The plainest man that can convince a woman that he is really in love with her, has done more to make her in love with him than the handsomest man, if he can produce no such conviction. For the love of woman is a shoot, not a seed, and flourishes most vigorously only when ingrafted on that love which is rooted in the breast of another.
–Colton

The sweets of love are washed with tears.
–George Herbert

They said that Love would die when Hope was gone, And Love mourn’d long, and sorrow’d after Hope; At last she sought out Memory, and they trod The same old paths where Love had walk’d with Hope, And Memory fed the soul of Love with tears.
–Tennyson

Love is a pure dew which drops from heaven into our heart, when God wills.
–Arsène Houssaye

Love is the yearning for the unknown carried to madness.
–Petiet

What happiness to be beloved; and O, what bliss, ye gods, to love!
–Goethe

What state of man such rapture can impart As the soft passions of an amorous heart? What life so blest as his, decreed to prove With pleasing chains the servitude of Love?
–Ariosto (Hoole, Translator)

This way and that; to and fro. Ovid wrote an Art of Love, but it is all untrue. Love and poetry do not satisfy by their art, for poets are born, and lovers are made by love.
–Tirso de Molina

Love is the support of human life.
–A. Perez

Love, requited or unrequited, produces melancholy.
–Antonio Perez

Poets’ Quotes on Relationships and Love

Love, like death, levels all ranks, and lays the shepherd’s crook beside the sceptre.
–E. Bulwer-Lytton

Love is the tyrant of the heart; it darkens reason, confounds discretion; deaf to counsel it runs a headlong course to desperate madness.
–J. Ford

A mighty pain to love it is,
And ‘t is a pain that pain to miss;
But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain.
–A. Cowley

Is she not more than painting can express,
Or youthful poets fancy when they love?
–N. Rowe

O, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
–C. Marlowe

A love that took an early root, And had an early doom.
–T. K. Hervey

Love has no age, no limit; and no death
–John Galsworthy

Love can outlive slander.
–Gilbert Parker

Love, too, is a game, and needs playing.
–Gilbert Parker

Love knows not distance; it hath no continent.
–Gilbert Parker

Love has nothing to do with ugliness or beauty, or fortune
–Gilbert Parker

Charity itself fulfils the law,
And who can sever love from charity?
–Shakespeare

A friendship that like love is warm,
A love like friendship steady.
–T. Moore

Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like;
Friendship is a sheltering tree.
–S. T. Coleridge

The quarrelling of lovers is the renewal of love.
–Terence

If I have freedom in my love and in my soul am free, Angels alone that soar above, enjoy such liberty.
–Lovelace

At lovers’ perjuries they say Jove laughs.
–Shakespeare

Grievous is it not to love, and grievous, too, to love; but far more grievous is it to love and love in vain.
–Anacreon

Faith, in the language of heaven, is Love in the language of men.
–Victor Hugo

The poet’s soul is the soul of darkness and of love ; it is a flower which unfolds its petals when the day has fled, and bares its beauties to the stars.
–Victor Hugo

The poet’s heart is an unlighted torch, which gives no help to his footsteps till love has touched it with flame.
–Lowell

That is true love which is always the same, whether you give everything or deny everything to it.
–Goethe

That is the true season of love, when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will love in the same way after us.
–Goethe

Love often makes a poet; herself a wonder, she works wonders.
–Bodenstedt

Oh, that it remained for ever green, the fair season of early love.
–Schiller

Oh, that it would stay for ever, the double bliss of the tones as well as of the love.
–Goethe

No man flatters the woman he truly loves.
–Tuckermann

Men love us, or they need our love.
–Keble

Men judge on rational grounds; the woman’s judgment is her love; where the woman does not love, she has judged.
–Schiller

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart; ‘Tis woman’s whole existence.
–Byron

Love is sparingly soluble in the words of men, therefore they speak much of it; but one syllable of woman’s speech can dissolve more of it than a man’s heart can hold.
–Holmes

The first sigh of love is the last of wisdom.
–Charron

Right is with the strongest in love as in war, And the woman we love will always be right.
–A. de Musset

Kisses are pledges and incentives of love.
–Cotton

Voluntary dependence is the noblest condition we can be in; and how were that possible without love?
–Goethe

Happy he who dares courageously to defend what he loves.
–Ovid

Fear is the virtue of slaves; but the heart that loveth is willing.
–Longfellow

Faults are beauties in lover’s eyes.
–Theocritus

Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.
–Channing

The wrinkles of every sorrow disappear as long as the spell of love is unbroken.
–Schiller

Only since I loved is life lovely; only since I loved knew I that I lived.
–Körner

From the moment one falls in love, one becomes sweet in the temper.
–Marmontel

Doubting the reality of love leads to doubting everything.
–Amiel

Divine love is a sacred flower, which in its early bud is happiness, and in its full bloom is heaven.
–Hervey

Dignity and love do not blend well, nor do they continue long together.
–Ovid

Love embraces woman’s whole life; it is her prison and her kingdom of heaven.
–Chamisso

Love converts the cottage into a palace of gold.
–Hölty

Love follows no measure of time; it buds and blossoms and ripens in one happy hour.
–Körner

What I was ashamed to say, love has ordered me to write.
–Ovid

As soon as beauty is sought, not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
–Emerson

A woman’s friendship borders more closely on love than a man’s.
–Coleridge

A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind.
–Shakespeare

In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities.
–J. Arany

Love is mortals’ crowning blessing.
–Louis Ferrier

The heart that never loved was the first atheist.
–Alfred Mercier

When friendship becomes love, they blend like two streams, of which the most famous absorbs even the name of the other.
–Mlle. de Scudéri

Sip love as a sober man takes wine, and never become besotted with it.
–Alfred de Musset

Love transforms the humble cottage into a golden palace.
–Hölty

That man alone knows what love is, who loves when hope is gone.
Schiller

We love girls for what they are; we love lads for what they seem likely to become.
–Goethe

He who tries to unite love with prudence knows nothing of love.
–Metastasio

Kisses, when given in love, are, so to speak, the meeting together of two loving hearts.
–Guarini

Leave, leave the woods, silly boy, leave thy hunting, and learn to love.
–Guarini

Fidelity and love are seldom found together.
–Metastasio

The heart is the root whence grow Faith and Love.
–Antonio Perez

For men say they often find Love’s the slayer of their mind.
–Calderon

Love owns one universal claim To Love, it only needs To Be, – Whether a bird, a flower, a tree: Then the chief glory, far above All else in life must be Love, Love,
–Calderon (D. F. MacCarthy, Translator)

Love in those who truly love increases with absence.
–Antonio Perez

A cheerful life is what the Muses love; A soaring spirit is their prime delight.
–Wordsworth

All good colour is in some degree pensive, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.
–Ruskin

We bury love, Forgetfulness grows over it like grass;
That is a thing to weep for, not the dead.
–Alexander Smith

  • 179 Best Quotes by Famous Poets
  • 117 Best Poet Quotes About Life
  • 127 Best Inspirational Poet Quotes
157 Best Poets' Quotes About Love (Handpicked) (2024)

FAQs

Which poem is famous for true love? ›

"Sonnet 18," by William Shakespeare

In what is one of the most well-known love poems of all time, Shakespeare pays his lover a wonderful compliment by comparing them to a beautiful summer day.

What is the most romantic poem type? ›

Sonnets. Sonnets, or poems with 14 lines and patterned end-rhyme schemes, were often used by women poets during the Romantic period to portray the feelings and moods experienced in romantic relationships. Some poets during the era would write sonnet sequences to portray an extended drama between lovers.

What is the best form for a love poem? ›

Choose a Poetry Form

Popular choices for love poems include: Sonnet – A style of poetry most associated with Shakespeare. At only 14 lines long, a sonnet is perfect for expressing strong emotions. Acrostic – A poem in which the first letter of each line spells out a word (e.g., the name of your beloved).

Who said love is enough? ›

Love Is Enough by William Morris - Poems | Academy of American Poets.

Who is the best romantic poet ever? ›

  1. 1 William Wordsworth: The Major Works by Stephen Gill (editor)
  2. 2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works by H. J. Jackson (Editor)
  3. 3 Willam Blake: Selected Poetry by William Blake.
  4. 4 Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works by Michael O'Neill (Editor) & Zachary Leader (Editor)
Jul 18, 2016

How do poets say I love you? ›

One way to poetically express your love for someone is by saying, "My heart sings a symphony, with every beat it whispers your name. I am forever captivated by your love, my dear, and I will never be the same." This evokes the image of a beautiful and harmonious love, filled with passion and devotion.

What did Edgar Allan Poe say about love? ›

We loved with a love that was more than love. Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

Who wrote the oldest love poem? ›

The author is unknown but is believed to have been recited by a bride of Sumerian King Shu-Sin, who ruled between 2037 and 2029 BC.

Who is the best poetry man in the world? ›

The Top 10 Most Famous Poets
  1. Homer.
  2. William Shakespeare.
  3. John Keats.
  4. Edgar Allan Poe.
  5. Maya Angelou.
  6. Oscar Wilde.
  7. Walt Whitman.
  8. Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Jan 18, 2024

How do poets describe love? ›

Poets often describe love as an emotion that we can't control, one that overwhelms logic and common sense.

Why do humans love? ›

It has been suggested that the human capacity to experience love has been evolved as a signal to potential mates that the partner will be a good parent and be likely to help pass genes to future generations.

Do love poems have to rhyme? ›

There are many formats to choose from when writing a love poem. The easiest one is free verse, which doesn't rhyme, and can be any length you want. As a beginner, you'll probably want to avoid the more traditional forms (sonnets, villanelles, etc.)

Who is the poet of true love? ›

Sonnet 116 is a poem by William Shakespeare. Its primary theme is the constancy of love: the speaker argues that true love does not change even if lovers alter over time. As with almost all of Shakespeare's sonnets, it is written in iambic pentameter.

What is true love poem by Shakespeare about? ›

Answer and Explanation:

In sonnet number 116, William Shakespeare defines true love as the "marriage of true minds." In other words, true love does not change due to external influences or changes. If it does, then that is not true love, merely lust or sensuality.

What is the world's first love poem? ›

The World's Oldest Love Poem was discovered in the library of Ashurbanipal in Mesopotamia. Known as the Love Song of Shu-Sin, the World's Oldest Love Poem is about both romantic and erotic love, and was read as a part of a sacred ritual known as the 'sacred marriage.

What is the most beautiful short poem ever written? ›

  1. “No Man Is An Island” by John Donne.
  2. “Stopping by Woods On a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost.
  3. “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou.
  4. “Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day?” by William Shakespeare.
  5. “There Will Come Soft Rain” by Sara Teasdale.
  6. “If You Forget Me” by Pablo Neruda.
  7. “O Captain! ...
  8. “Fire And Ice” by Robert Frost.
Apr 16, 2019

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