Be loving, and you will never want for love.

Dinah Maria Mulock Craik was one of the most successful women poets and novelists of the 19th century. She published her first work, “The Ogilvies,” in 1849 to critical acclaim, and soon garnered comparison to such influential writers as George Eliot. “The Ogilvies,” in which this quote appears, follows the romantic entanglements and subsequent marriages of three cousins (a popular 19th-century literary convention, as Jane Austen proved decades earlier). Craik’s words offer a timeless truism about love’s cyclical nature — that the care and compassion we give others, we’ll receive in kind.