Love can be cheesy and ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean it’s not special and worthy of respect. If you’re a secret hopeless romantic but sick of love quotes that make you roll your eyes, these 40 are non-cheesy, beautiful, funny, quirky, and poetic — and not at all cringe-worthy.
- “There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
- “You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known and even that is an understatement.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “Who, being loved, is poor?” — Oscar Wilde
- “First best is falling in love. Second best is being in love. Least best is falling out of love. But any of it is better than never having been in love.” — Maya Angelou
- “The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.” — Mother Teresa
- “Love is friendship that has caught fire.” — Ann Landers
- “Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold.” — Zelda Fitzgerald
- “The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.” — Audrey Hepburn
- “You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.” — My Sister’s Keeper
- “I love being married. It’s so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life. ” — Rita Rudner
- “I look at you, and I’m home.” — Finding Nemo
- “In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.” — Mother Theresa
- “Love is like Pi: natural, irrational, and very important.” — Lisa Hoffman
- “You have made a place in my heart where I thought there was no room for anything else. You have made flowers grow where I cultivated dust and stones.” — Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time
- “Love makes you do the wacky.” — Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world in my arms.” — Mary Oliver
- “Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.” — Jules Renard
- “Love is too strong a word to say it too early, but it has too beautiful a meaning to say it too late.” — Kurt Cornish
- “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” — Wuthering Heights
- “I love you. You annoy me more than I ever thought possible, but… I want to spend every irritating minute with you.” — Scrubs
- “Love me when I least deserve it, because that’s when I really need it.” — Swedish Proverb
- “We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.” — Robert Fulghum
- “That’s why they call them crushes. If they were easy, they’d call them something else.” — Sixteen Candles
- `”You know you’re in love when you don’t want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.” — Dr. Seuss
- “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
- “But love doesn’t make sense. You can’t logic your way into or out of it. Love is totally nonsensical. But we have to keep doing it or else we’re lost and love is dead and humanity should just pack it in. Because love is the best thing we do.” — How I Met Your Mother
- “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’s Anna Karenina
- “Love builds bridges where there are none.” — R. H. Delaney
- “All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.” — Charles Schulz
- “Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your heart or burn down your house, you can never tell.” — Joan Crawford
- “What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork.” — Pearl Bailey
- “Love is like an hourglass with the heart filling up as the brain empties.” — Jules Renard
- “I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That’s the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they’re not much to look at, or even if they’re sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.” — J.D. Salinger
- “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.” — Charles Dickens
- “And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” — Paul McCartney
- “Hearts will never be practical until they are made unbreakable.” — The Wizard of Oz
- “Love is a two-way street constantly under construction.” — Carroll Bryant
- “Love is the answer, but while you’re waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty interesting questions.” — Woody Allen
- “Just give me a comfortable couch, a dog, a good book, and a woman. Then if you can get the dog to go somewhere and read the book, I might have a little fun.”— Groucho Marx
- “Maybe you don’t need the whole world to love you, you know. Maybe you just need one person.” — Kermit the Frog
