Valentine’s Day Poems and Sayings

How Do I Love Thee?

How Do I Love Thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being an ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,- I love thee with the Breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
– Elizabeth Barret Browning

To Celia
Drink to me, only, with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kisse but in the cup,
And Ile not look for wine.
The thirst, that from the soule doth rise,
Doth aske a drink divine:
But might I of Jove’s Nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee, late, a rosie wreath,
Not so much honoring thee,
As giving it a hope, that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon did’st onely breathe,
And sent’st it back to mee:
Since when it growes, and smells, I sweare,
Not of it selfe, but thee.
– Robert Burns: The Poetry (1896)

Love Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

– William Shaespeare

One Perfect Rose
A single flow’r he sent me, since we met,
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted pure, with scented dew still wet – –
One perfect rose.

I know the language of the floweret.
My fragile leaves, it said, his heart enclose.
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.
– Dorothy Parker

Shall we compare our hearts to a garden –
with beautiful blooms, straggling weeds,
swooping birds and sunshine, rain –
and most importantly, seeds.
– Grey Livingston

You’ve given me a reason
For smiling once again,
You’ve filled my life with peaceful dreams
and you’ve become my closest friend.

You’ve shared your heartfelt secrets
And your trust you’ve given me,
You showed me how to feel again
To laugh, and love, and see.

If life should end tomorrow
And from this world I should part,
I shall be forever young
For you have touched my heart

Valentines is near
Just wishing you were here

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

A bell is no bell ’til you ring it,
A song is no song ’til you sing it,
And love in your heart
Wasn’t put there to stay –
Love isn’t love
‘Til you give it away.
– Oscar Hammerstein, Sound of Music, You Are Sixteen (Reprise)

Must, bid the Morn awake!
Sad Winter now declines,
Each bird doth choose a mate;
This day’s Saint Valentine’s.
For that good bishop’s sake
Get up and let us see
What beauty it shall be
That Fortune us assigns.
– Michael Drayton

Love is no respecter of age or practicality
Neither morality: unabashed
She enters where she will
Unheeding that her immortal fires
Burn up human hearts…
– Phillip Pulfrey, from Beyond Me

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

They who meet on an April night are forever lost in love,
if there’s moonlight all about and there’s no moon above.

Will you love me in December as you do in May,
Will you love me in the good old fashioned way?
When my hair has all turned gray,
Will you kiss me then and say,
That you love me in December as you do in May?
– James J. Walker

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

I love you like crazy, baby
‘Cuz I’d go crazy without you.
– Pixie Foudre

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

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

Staying far never breaks relation, staying near never builds relation.
Its a link between hearts, which never allows us to forget each other.
Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.
– Elynor Glyn

Candle light, moon light, star light,
The brightest glow is from love light.
– Grey Livingston

Many are the starrs I see,
but in my eye no starr like thee.
– English saying

I claim there ain’t
Another Saint
As great as Valentine.
– Ogden Nash

Must, bid the Morn awake!
Sad Winter now declines,
Each bird doth choose a mate;
This day’s Saint Valentine’s.
– Michael Drayton

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

Love me and the world is mine.
– David Reed

There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved. It is God’s finger on man’s shoulder.
– Charles Morgan

There is no remedy for love but to love more.
– Thoreau

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
– Anais Nin

You don’t marry someone you can live with – you marry the person who you cannot live without.

The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands.
– Quoted by Alexandra Penney in Self

Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.
– Rose Franken

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
– Saint-Exupery

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.
– Ingrid Bergman

I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Oh, if it be to choose and call thee mine, love, thou art every day my Valentine!
– Thomas Hood

True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.
– La Rochefoucauld

Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.
– St. Augustine

To love another person is to see the face of God.
– Les Miserables

Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.
– Alexander Smith

Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.
– Lawrence Durrell

Very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
-Stendhal

Love cures people – both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
– Dr. Karl Menninger

To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best.
-William M. Thackeray

If you love someone, let them go. If they return to you, it was meant to be. If they don’t, their love was never yours to begin with…

True love never dies for it is lust that fades away. Love bonds for a lifetime but lust just pushes away.
-Alicia Barnhart

Who says love never lives? Maybe we’ve never lived.

Some love lasts a lifetime. True love lasts forever.

If love is great, and there are no greater things, then what I feel for you must be the greatest.

The Eskimos have 52 words for snow because it is so special to them; there ought to be as many for love!
– Margaret Atwood

Love is like playing the piano. First you must learn to play by the rules, then you must forget the rules and play from your heart.

Within you, I lose myself. Without you, I find myself wanting to be lost again.

Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense.
– Helen Rowland

Never close your lips to those whom you have opened your heart.
– Charles Dickens

To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.
– Mark Twain

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
– Friedrich Nietzshe

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.
– Victor Hugo

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.
– Voltaire

True love is like a fine wine, the older the better.
– Fred Jacob

Love is a perfume you cannot pour onto others without getting a few drops on yourself.
– Emerson

True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.
– Francois de la Rochefoucauld

Love is a driver, bitter and fierce if you fight and resist him,
Easy-going enough once you acknowledge his power.
– Ovid

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.
– Michel de Montaigne

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
– Emily Brontë

Love doesn’t sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all of the time, made new.
– Ursula K. LeGuin

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.
– Lynda Barry

Love has no desire but to fulfill itself. To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.
– Kahlil Gibran

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

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

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

Love – a wildly misunderstood although highly desirable malfunction of the heart which weakens the brain, causes eyes to sparkle, cheeks to glow, blood pressure to rise and the lips to pucker.

Love one another and you will be happy. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.
– Michael Leunig

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

Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire. – François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.
– Jean Anouilh

‘Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark our coming, and look brighter when we come.
– Lord Byron

An old man in love is like a flower in winter.
– Portuguese Proverb

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.

True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked.
– Erich Segal

Love is being stupid together.
– Paul Valery

Before I met my husband, I’d never fallen in love. I’d stepped in it a few times.
– Rita Rudner

You really shouldn’t say I love you unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget.

Love is when you can be your true self with someone, and you only want to be your true self because of them.
– Terri Guillemets

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.

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.
– William Shakespeare

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, The Catcher in the Rye

Trip over love, you can get up. Fall in love and you fall forever.

Like I’ve always said, love wouldn’t be blind if the braille weren’t so damned much fun.
– Armistead Maupin, Maybe the Moon

If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden.
– Claudia Ghandi

The simple lack of her is more to me than others’ presence.
– Edward Thomas

When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.
– Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally

Anyone can catch your eye, but it takes someone special to catch your heart.

Grow old with me! The best is yet to be.
– Robert Browning

Are we not like two volumes of one book?
– Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

I’ve fallen in love many times… always with you.

Without love, what are we worth? Eighty-nine cents! Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely.
– Hawkeye, M*A*S*H

I recently read that love is entirely a matter of chemistry. That must be why my wife treats me like toxic waste.
– David Bissonette

I don’t understand why Cupid was chosen to represent Valentine’s Day. When I think about romance, the last thing on my mind is a short, chubby toddler coming at me with a weapon.

Romance is dead – it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, and sold off piece by piece. – Lisa Simpson, The Simpsons

When you’re attracted to someone it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously, so what we know as fate is two neuroses knowing that they’re a perfect match. – Jeff Arch, Nora Ephron, and David S. Ward, Sleepless in Seattle

If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?

Love is the thing that enables a woman to sing while she mops up the floor after her husband has walked across it in his barn boots.
– Hoosier Farmer

Love means nothing in tennis, but it’s everything in life.

Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.
– Jules Renard

You can’t put a price tag on love, but you can on all its accessories.
– Melanie Clark

…a friendship caught on fire.

…like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.

…an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.

…but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.

…like playing the piano. First you must learn to play by the rules, then you must forget the rules and play from your heart.

…the master key that opens the gates of happiness.

…a driver, bitter and fierce if you fight and resist him; easy-going enough once you acknowledge his power.

…a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.

…like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.

…like a fine wine, the older the better.

…when you can be your true self with someone, and you only want to be your true self because of them.

…a smoke made with the fume of sighs.

…above all, the gift of oneself.