Love quotes to live by from some of history's greatest women

Love is hard to put into words — but these women did a pretty good job.
love quotes

Looking for love quotes? You're not alone. After all, love is notoriously hard to put into words — but over the years, some women have managed to capture the complex highs and lows of romance.

Whether you're looking for a way to express the depth of your emotion to your significant other or you simply want to find the perfect phrase to capture the pain and suffering that comes from an unrequited passion, sometimes love quotes can express exactly how you're feeling better than you ever could.

From the beautiful novels of Virgina Woolf and Emily Brontë to the wise words of Katherine Hepburn and Viola Davis to the sobering phrases of Jeanette Winterson, these love quotes from some of history's finest wordsmiths are sure to do the trick.


“I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.”

–Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“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, Me: Stories of My Life

“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

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Nora Ephron

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“The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It's followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.”

Nora Ephron

"Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold."

Zelda Fitzgerald

Viola Davis

Viola Davis

Jon Kopaloff

"The regret of my life is that I have not said 'I love you' often enough."

—Yoko Ono

"Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality."

Emily Dickinson

“I don’t have any time to stay up all night worrying about what someone who doesn’t love me has to say about me.”

—Viola Davis

“I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.”

—Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou

Larry Marano

“Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.”

—Ann Landers

“Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze. ”

―Elinor Glyn

“All love shifts and changes. I don't know if you can be wholeheartedly in love all the time.”


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Julie Andrews

Jim Spellman

“The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down.”

—Jeanette Winterson

“Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense.”

—Helen Rowland

“Love doesn’t make the world go round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.”

–Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity."

–Edna St. Vincent Millay

“To you I shall say, as I have often said before, do not be in a hurry, the right man will come at last.”

—Jane Austen

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift

Fernando Leon/TAS23

“The secret of a happy marriage is finding the right person. You know they're right if you love to be with them all the time.”

—Julia Child

“As long as you're neurotic and crazy, he's great. But once he solves all your problems, he becomes the problem.”

―Candace Bushnell, Sex and the City

"And you'll save all your dirtiest jokes for me. And at every table, I'll save you a seat. Lover.”

Taylor Swift, "Lover"

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