58 True Love Quotes That Perfectly Express Your Deepest Emotions
Kick your love quotient up a notch.
Charm Canupin, sparklestroke, Anmark, and kmdkcreative via Canva Sometimes you want to remind the one you love, as well as yourself, that true love is worth the struggle and delight, the pain and the pleasure.
But even when your love runs deep, you might need a little help finding exactly the right words to express the myriad of emotions you feel about your partner and your life together: love, lust, gratitude, grace, vulnerability, friendship, and so on.
In such moments, you can turn to the best experts on love — poets, philosophers, authors, therapists, and a variety of wise pop culture idols — and sift through the most inspirational true love quotes.
From Plato to Dolly Parton, Mr. Rogers to Rumi, Julia Child to John O'Donohue — lovers of love agree: true love is fabulous, and it's worth the struggle.
If you desire to experience the full gamut of the human experience, allowing yourself to love demands that you allow yourself to be vulnerable. In order to love fully, you must lean into the grace and accept others for who they are.
And, perhaps most importantly, in order to love, the biggest requirement is that you must love yourself as well.
Best true love quotes
1. “True love stories never have endings.” — Richard Bach
2. “You’re not looking for perfection in your partner. Perfection is all about the ego. With soulmate love, you know that true love is what happens when disappointment sets in – and you’re willing to deal maturely with these disappointments.” — Karen Salmansohn
3. “True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.” — François de La Rochefoucauld
4. “Real love means loving-kindness and compassion, the kind of love that does not have any conditions.” — Nhat Hanh
5. "To me, obligation is not love. Letting someone be open, honest, and free — that's love. It's got to come natural and it's got to be real." — Dolly Parton
6. "The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise, we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them." ― Thomas Merton
7. “True love is usually the most inconvenient kind.” — Kiera Cass
8. “True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked.” — Erich Segal
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9. “Real love is accepting other people the way they are without trying to change them.” — Don Miguel Ruiz
10. “Love and electricity are one in the same, my dear. If you do not feel the jolt in your soul every time a kiss is shared, a whisper is spoken, a touch is felt, then you're not really in love at all.” — C. J. Franks
11. "Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now." ― Fred Rogers
12. “When love is not madness, it is not love.” — Pedro Calderón de la Barca
13. “You know it’s love when all you want is that person to be happy, even if you’re not part of their happiness.” — Julia Roberts
14. "Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength while loving someone deeply gives you courage." — Lao Tzu
15. "Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other." ― M. Scott Peck
16. "You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams." — Dr. Seuss
17. "Love comes when manipulation stops; when you think more about the other person than about his or her reactions to you. When you dare to reveal yourself fully. When you dare to be vulnerable." ― Dr. Joyce Brothers
18. “Love is when the other person’s happiness is more important than your own.” — H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
19. “Love is absolute loyalty. People fade, looks fade, but loyalty never fades. You can depend so much on certain people; you can set your watch by them. And that’s love, even if it doesn’t seem very exciting.” — Sylvester Stallone
20. “Love is blind. It will take over your mind. What you think is love, is truly not. You need to elevate your mind.” — Eve
21. "Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'" — Erich Fromm
22. "True love cannot be found where it does not exist, nor can it be denied where it does." — Torquato Tasso
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23. "True love is not a strong, fiery, impetuous passion. It is, on the contrary, an element calm and deep. It looks beyond mere externals, and is attracted by qualities alone. It is wise and discriminating, and its devotion is real and abiding." — Ellen G. White
24. “True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.” — Honore de Balzac
25. “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.” — Harry Burns
26. "Love consists in giving without getting in return; in giving what is not owed, what is not due the other. That's why true love is never based, as associations for utility or pleasure are, on a fair exchange." — Mortimer Adler
27. "True love brings up everything - you're allowing a mirror to be held up to you daily." — Jennifer Aniston
28. "True love does not only encompass the things that make you feel good, it also holds you to a standard of accountability." — Monica Johnson
29. “True love – that is, deep, abiding love that is impervious to emotional whims or fancy – is a choice. It's a constant commitment to a person regardless of the present circumstances.” — Mark Manson
30. “True love is felonious… You take someone’s breath away… You rob them of the ability to utter a single word… You steal a heart.” ― Jodi Picoult
31. “Two things you will never have to chase: true friends and true love." — Mandy Hale
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32. "For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow." — Antoine de Saint-Exupery
33. "It may be an old cliche, but I think true love will last; it has no end. But finding the right person is a very difficult thing." — Bruce Forsyth
True love quotes for him
34. “I saw that you were perfect, and so I loved you. Then I saw that you were not perfect and I loved you even more.” — Angelita Lim
35. "The beautiful gift of my husband is that he saw me the way I've always wanted to be seen and there's something really powerful to that. When you find true love I really believe that that's what it is at its core." — Jeremiah Brent
36. "I love my husband very much. I knew it was real true love because I felt like I could be myself around that person. Your true, true innermost authentic self, the stuff you don't let anyone else see, if you can be that way with that person, I think that that's real love." — Idina Menzel
37. "I love true love, and I'm a woman who wants to be married for a lifetime. That traditional life is something that I want." — Ali Larter
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38. “Your love shines in my heart as the sun that shines upon the earth.” — Eleanor Di Guillo
39. “Each day I love you more, today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.” — Rosemonde Gerard
40. “I love you, with no beginning, no end. I love you as you have become an extra necessary organ in my body. I love you as only a girl could love a boy. Without fear. Without expectations. Wanting nothing in return, except that you allow me to keep you here in my heart, that I may always know your strength, your eyes, and your spirit that gave me freedom and let me fly.“ — Coco J. Ginger
41. “I have for the first time found what I can truly love–I have found you. You are my sympathy–my better self–my good angel–I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my center and spring of life, wrap my existence about you–and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.” — Jane Eyre
True love quotes for her
42. “If he can’t handle you at your worst then he does not deserve you at your best. Real love means seeing beyond the words spoken out of pain, and instead seeing a person’s soul.” — Shannon L. Alder
43. "Perhaps love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself." ― Antoine de Saint-Exupery
44. “If I know what love is, it is because of you.” — Herman Hesse
45. "True love, to me, is when she's the first thought that goes through your head when you wake up and the last thought that goes through your head before you go to sleep."— Justin Timberlake
46. "I want true love, because I don't have so much time, and I want to spend my time with the right girl." — Bill Kaulitz
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47. "I never take any commitment lightly, and I certainly don't take my wife lightly. I never did and I never will. That's permanent. That's true love." — John Lydon
48. “The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said to have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.” — George Moore
49. “I still haven’t figured out how to sit across from you, and not be madly in love with everything you do.” — William C. Hannon
50. “You make me want to be a better man.” — Melvin Udall
True love quotes for couples
51. “True love doesn't happen right away; it's an ever-growing process. It develops after you've gone through many ups and downs, when you've suffered together, cried together, laughed together.” — Ricardo Montalban
52. "Better to put your heart on the line, risk everything, and walk away with nothing than play it safe. Love is a lot of things, but 'safe' isn’t one of them." ― Mandy Hale
53. “A true relationship is with someone who accepts your past, supports your present, and encourages your future." — Michelle Yeoh
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54. "We don't fall in love with people because they're good people. We fall in love with people whose darkness we recognize. You can fall in love with a person for all of the right reasons, but that kind of love can still fall apart. But when you fall in love with a person because your monsters have found a home in them ― that's the kind of love that owns your skin and bones. Love, I am convinced, is found in the darkness. It is the candle in the night." ― C. Joybell C.
55. "I think careful cooking is love, don't you? The loveliest thing you can cook for someone who's close to you is about as nice a Valentine as you can give." ― Julia Child
56. “We simply can’t abandon ship every time we encounter a storm in our marriage. Real love is about weathering the storms of life together.” — Seth Adam Smith
57. "When we know love matters more than anything, and we know that nothing else really matters, we move into the state of surrender. Surrender does not diminish our power, it enhances it." ― Sara Paddison
58. "Love can be hard. Love requires you to be kind when you are angry, patient when you feel anxious, compassionate when you judge others, caring when you feel apathetic, trust when you've been wronged, let go when you want to hold on, know that the other person is you, take risks when you're scared, to always see the lesson and never look back once you've decided." ― Jackson Kiddard
Debra Smouse is a life coach and author who has been published in Time, Huffington Post, MSN, Psychology Today, and more.