Article image

14 Quotes To Change How You Think About Love

Growing up, we may have been taught by movies and society that love is a neat and tidy thing, easy to categorize and identify. We find the one person in the world who’s right for us, we instantly click, and if it’s real love, it’s easy sailing from there on out. No fights, no hurt, just bliss.

But as we all eventually learn, that idealized version of love doesn’t align with reality. Not only that, but that narrow concept of love totally undersells it. As we’ve written in the past, there are many glorious forms of love, and they all weave colorful threads into the tapestries of our lives.

There may be much more to learn (and unlearn) about love than any of us realize. If we’re lucky, we’ll spend our whole lives getting to know the heights and depths of this complicated human feeling.

To help you along in your journey, we’ve assembled 14 quotes that might just completely change the way you look at love.

Nobody is right for anyone. Actually, what makes somebody right is commitment. Then when you’re committed to each other and you have true dialogue, [you] allow the other to impact upon you and they allow you to impact on them … It’s like two stones rubbing together until suddenly they fit.
Philippa Perry

Share Quote

Love is the quality of attention we pay to things.
J.D. McClatchy

Share Quote

[Love is] not just about who you find, it’s also about who you’re going to be. Love is not a state of enthusiasm. It’s a verb. It implies action, demonstration, ritual, practices, communication, expression.
Esther Perel

Share Quote

The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.
Cheryl Strayed

Share Quote

Do not mistake desire for love. Desire leaves home in a frantic search for one gratification after another. Love is at home with itself.
Vernon Howard

Share Quote

The best frame of mind to be in — for anything you want — is an ability to walk away from it, were it not to come right … The capacity to say, “I could be alone,” is strangely one of the most important guarantees of one day being with somebody else in a happy way.
Alain de Botton

Share Quote

Expecting someone to fill in a hole that’s within you? That’s expecting too much of any one person. That’s not your friend’s job or your partner’s job. That’s your job.
Ayisha Malik

Share Quote

The love of a partnership can be an incredibly important and transforming experience, but only one of many important and transforming experiences.
Sarah Hepola

Share Quote

True, solid love [can] withstand difficulty. It can withstand you being human and being flawed and being unhappy or having a problem with your partner. I wish I had known that love doesn’t disappear when you aren’t quiet and perfect.
Roxane Gay

Share Quote

Love is not possession. Love is letting your loved ones follow their own paths, even if those paths lead them away from you.
Cloris Kylie

Share Quote

The lack of love in my life was not a reality but a poverty of imagination and a carelessly narrow use of an essential word.
Krista Tippett

Share Quote

If you tell me, “I care about my partner,” then my second question is, “How do you show it?” The fact that you feel it isn’t enough.
Esther Perel

Share Quote

The people we love are a constellation. In loving them, it is our privilege to see and bring out all the different worlds and colours and depths within them, just as they have the potential to do the same for us.
Natasha Lunn

Share Quote

Love is not the answer / But the line that marks the start.
Laura Marling

Share Quote

Featured image credit: Joe Scarnici/ Getty Images Entertainment via Getty Images

Author image
About the Author
Brooke Robinson
Inspiring Quotes editor, bibliophile, cinephile, and curry enthusiast based in Cleveland, Ohio.
Play more header background
Play more icon
Daily Question
Who wrote, "Healing begins where the wound was made"?

More Inspiration

happiness theme icon

Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

separator icon
Barbara Kingsolver
motivation theme icon

The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.

separator icon
Mitch Albom
hope theme icon

Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.

separator icon
Pope John Paul II
love theme icon

In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.

separator icon
Patti Smith
wisdom theme icon

If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you.

separator icon
Sue Monk Kidd
happiness theme icon

Enthusiasm is the great hill-climber.

separator icon
Elbert Hubbard
motivation theme icon

I have stood on a mountain of no's for one yes.

separator icon
B. Smith
hope theme icon

I can't give you a recipe for success, but I can give you a recipe for failure: try to please everybody.

separator icon
Frank Langella
love theme icon

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

separator icon
Eudora Welty
wisdom theme icon

You can't learn style. Style, I think, is in your DNA.

separator icon
Iris Apfel
happiness theme icon

The best friend is he that, when he wishes a person's good, wishes it for that person's own sake.

separator icon
Aristotle