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Love can be the most exhilarating and excruciating experience.
By Carolyn Hidalgo — Written on May 31, 2020
Love. It’s the only thing truly worth living for, yet it can be so heart-wrenching when it calls to you.
The best love quotes describe this singular emotion in countless ways because it’s only from personal experience that any of us can fully understand what true love is and what it means to say "I love you."
If you’ve found yourself confused by love’s thousand imitations, the best teacher can sometimes be found in reading inspirational love quotes full of life lessons and experiences as captured by the wisest of souls.
To help enlighten your personal experience of that beautifully human emotion, here are 30 of the best spiritual love quotes from deep, wise souls.
1. Keep your dream of love alive.
"You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams." ― Dr. Seuss
2. Value loved ones over things.
"What most people need to learn in life is how to love people and use things instead of using people and loving things."
3. Spiritual growth is fundamental to love.
"Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." — Dr. Scott Peck, MD
4. Love means living judgment-free.
"Love is the absence of judgment." — Dalai Lama XIV
5. Return to love.
"Love is what we’re born with. Fear is what we learned here." — Marianne Williamson
6. Love was present before you met.
"Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along." — Rumi
7. Love holds the intention for another’s joy.
"If you truly love someone then the only thing you want for them is to be happy. Even if it’s not with you."
8. Let go and trust love comes.
"If you love someone set them free. If they come back, they’re yours; if they don’t, they never were." — Richard Bach
9. Love knows no time.
"You don’t measure love in time. You measure love in transformation. Sometimes the longest connections yield little growth, while the briefest of encounters change everything. The heart doesn’t wear a watch." — Jeff Brown
10. Love is more than just physical.
"Important encounters are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other." — Paulo Coelho
11. Love demands that you follow your heart.
"True love does not leave you a choice." — Caroline Myss
12. What love you give within, you will attract.
"You demonstrate love by giving it unconditionally to yourself. And as you do, you attract others into your life who are able to love you without conditions." — Paul Ferrini
13. Self-love is mandatory.
"It’s not selfish to love yourself, take care of yourself, and to make your happiness a priority. It’s necessary." — Mandy Hals
14. Love sees fully.
"To be fully seen by somebody, then and be loved anyhow — this is a human offering that can border on miraculous." — Elizabeth Gilbert
15. Love isn’t about expectations.
"Real love begins when nothing is expected in return." — Thich Nhat Hanh
16. Love for no reason.
"Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It's not 'I love you' for this or that reason, not 'I love you if you love me.' It's love for no reason, love without an object." — Ram Dass
17. The qualities love gives you.
"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength while loving someone deeply gives you courage." — Lao Tzu
18. Love is enough.
"Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty thru good times and bad. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses. Love is content with the present; it hopes for the future and it doesn't brood over the past. It is the day-in and out chronicles of irritations, problems, compromises, small disappointments, big victories and common goals. If you have love in your life, it can make up for a great many things that you lack. If you don't have it, no matter what else is there, it isn't enough." — Ann Landers
19. Love is a unifying force.
"Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves." — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
20. Love sees in the same direction.
"Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction." — Antoine de Saint-Exupery
21. Love survives beyond our body’s health.
"Treasure the love you receive above all. It will survive long after your good health has vanished." — Og Mandino
22. Love maintains your sense of self.
"Love creates an 'us' without destroying a 'me'." — Leo Buscalgia
23. Love is of lasting value.
"When you make loving others the story of your life, there’s never a final chapter, because the legacy continues. You lend your light to one person, and he or she shines it on another and another and another. And I know for sure that in the final analysis of our lives- when the to-do lists are no more, when the frenzy is finished, when our e-mail inboxes are empty- the only thing that will have any lasting value is whether we’ve loved others and whether they’ve loved us." ― Oprah Winfrey
24. Love lets you choose.
"Real love is freedom, and this is what you’ve been given by the Creator — the freedom to love and to choose your own path." — Ophelius & the Circle of Seven
25. The important work leads to love.
"For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation." — Rainer Maria Rilke
26. Love is the light from both sides.
"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." — Robert A Heinlein
27. Love and faith go hand in hand.
"To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides." — David Viscott
28. The essential condition of love.
"Whoso loves, believes the impossible." — Elizabeth Barrett Browning
29. Love is the highest wealth.
"Who, being loved, is poor?" — Oscar Wilde
30. Love sees the Divine in each other.
"To love another person is to see the face of God." — Victor Hugo, "Les Misérables"
More for You:
Carolyn Hidalgo is a soul relationship coach who believes that by practicing non-judgment, you can co-create the space to love unconditionally, having the freedom to be you with me. Pick up her guide to living judgment-free.