Romantic Quotations

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach. ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning


When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks. ~Natalie Clifford Barney


Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain,
Unravelled from the tumbling main,
And threading the eye of a yellow star: -
So many times do I love again.
~Thomas Lovell Beddoes


He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began. ~Leo Tolstoy


When love is not madness, it is not love. ~Pedro Calderon de la Barca


When I am with you, the only place I want to be is closer. ~Author Unknown


...Let the world know, if there was ever love:
Mine for you...
~Peter Winstanley


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 have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough. ~George Moore


I need the starshine of your heavenly eyes,
After the day's great sun.
~Charles Hanson Towne


How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said. ~Victor Hugo


Let me lie,
let me die on thy snow-covered bosom,
I would eat of thy flesh as a delicate fruit,
I am drunk of its smell, and the scent
of thy tresses
Is a flame that devours.
~George Moore


Ah me! love can not be cured by herbs. ~Ovid


I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports.... When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them. ~Gustave Flaubert, letter to wife Louise Colet, 15 August 1846


The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence. ~Edward Thomas


They who meet on an April night are forever lost in love, if there's moonlight all about and there's no moon above. ~E.Y. "Yip" Harburg and Fred Saidy, dialogue just before the song "Old Devil Moon" in the musical Finian's Rainbow (Thanks, Katherine!)


My heart to you is given:
Oh, do give yours to me;
We'll lock them up together,
And throw away the key.
~Frederick Saunders


I can no longer think of anything but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me. ~Honore de Balzac, letter to Evelina Hanska, June 1836


Many are the starrs I see, but in my eye no starr like thee. ~English saying used on poesy rings


See! the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea: -
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, Love's Philosophy


Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law. ~Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, A.D. 524


We loved with a love that was more than love. ~Edgar Allan Poe


In melody divine,
My heart it beats to rapturous love,
I long to call you mine.
~Author Unknown


[M]y love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break... ~Sullivan Ballou, letter to wife Sarah, 14 July 1861


Who, being loved, is poor? ~Oscar Wilde


A hundred hearts would be too few
To carry all my love for you.
~Author Unknown


Ah me! why may not love and life be one? ~Henry Timrod


Once he drew
With one long kiss my whole soul thro'
My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson


Love me and the world is mine. ~David Reed


I wish I had the gift of making rhymes, for methinks there is poetry in my head and heart since I have been in love with you. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, letter to wife Sophia, 5 December 1839


I love thee - I love thee,
'Tis all that I can say
It is my vision in the night,
My dreaming in the day.
~Thomas Hood


I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain. ~John Keats


I love your hills and I love your dales,
And I love your flocks a-bleating;
but oh, on the heather to lie together,
With both our hearts a-beating!
~John Keats


Two lovers in the rain have no need of an umbrella. ~Japanese Proverb


For you see, each day I love you more
Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.
~Rosemonde Gerard


You know you're in love when you don't want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams. ~Dr. Seuss


If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.
~John Donne


My debt to you, Belovèd,
Is one I cannot pay
In any coin of any realm
On any reckoning day.
~Jessie B. Rittenhouse


Ah, lady, when I gave my heart to thee,
It passed into thy lifelong regency.
~Gilbert Parker


Until then, mio dolce amor, a thousand kisses; but give me none in return, for they set my blood on fire. ~Napolean Bonaparte, letter to wife Josephine, December 1795


Oh, hasten not this loving act,
Rapture where self and not-self meet:
My life has been the awaiting you,
Your footfall was my own heart's beat.
~Paul Valéry


As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words. ~William Shakespeare


To lovers, I devise their imaginary world, with whatever they may need, as the stars of the sky, the red, red roses by the wall, the snow of the hawthorn, the sweet strains of music, and aught else they may desire to figure to each other the lastingness and beauty of their love. ~Williston Fish, "A Last Will," 1898