50 Deep Love Quotes – And How Love Is More Than A Relationship

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Excerpt: These deep love quotes aren’t for you to copy and paste and send to your lover—they’re for you to copy and paste onto the walls of your heart.

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Introduction: Love is more than a relationship

Whether you’re single, in a relationship, or unsure is irrelevant. These deep love quotes aren’t for you to copy and paste and send to your lover, friend, or current person of interest. These quotes are for you to copy and paste onto the walls of your heart. I’ve collected them to remind you of the true essence of love—not the tabloid kind of love that’s been made popular by modern media.

The true essence of love is the love that can’t be given to you by another—it can only be manifested from within. It’s the love that radiates from your way of living, not laser pointed at you from another or from you to another. It’s the love that is self-replenishing, not the kind that is draining and in constant need of refilling. It’s the kind of love that is forever flowing—not forever fleeting. It is the love that is always inside of you, never outside.

Contrary to popular belief, love is easy. It is an overflowing of joy, presence, warmth, and kindness. It’s one of our most natural states. It is the state that you defaulted to when you were a young child and your basic needs were met. It’s also the state you find yourself in when you’re playing with young children and you’re free of mind and living in the moment. Or, really, when you’re free of mind and living in the moment in general. Love isn’t the problem.

It’s conditions that are the problem. Conditions that we form in our minds about what love should look like. Who deserves to be in love. How we’re supposed to act in order to find love. That we’re incomplete and missing half of ourselves when we’re without an advertised kind of love. This is what makes love hard. And it is hard to break free from these conditions as they are constantly being shoved down our throat by much of what surrounds us in our everyday lives.

This post has been carefully curated to combat that. To remind you, deeply, that love isn’t always what big companies, movies, influencers want you to believe it is. It is not a dozen roses; it’s not a box of chocolates; it’s not a diamond ring; it’s not a fairy tale story; it’s not a soulmate who completes you—it is far beyond any of that. It is so much more profound than that. It is so much more wholesome and readily available than any of that. You just need to see it; to understand it; to believe it. And this is my best attempt to help you believe.

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The List: 50 Deep Love Quotes – To Remind You That Love Is More Than A Relationship

“You can be in love and you can be in a relationship.  But they’re not always the same thing.”

Iain Thomas, I Wrote This For You

“Love is never a relationship; love is relating.  It is always a river, flowing, unending.  Love knows no full stop; the honeymoon begins but never ends.  It is not like a novel that starts at a certain point and ends at a certain point.  It is an ongoing phenomenon.  Lovers end, love continues—it is a continuum.  It is a verb, not a noun.”

Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships

“I could never wrap my head around the idea of love. For some, it was a person, a cheery memory, a reason to move forward. But for some, it was a distant memory, a drought, a long forgotten incident. I asked my mother how should I know what love truly is; and she told me: Love will never be a person. It will be the respect in your eyes and care in your heart. It will also be the worry in your mind and pain in your head. It will come in all your passions, sounds of the laughter of your friends and glimmer of all the things you care about. Don’t cage it around the idea of a person; this is the only way it would hurt.”

Noor Unnahar (See the Picture Quote version)

“What is love? Love is the absence of judgment.”

Dalai Lama (See the Picture Quote version)

“Many come close, yet few dare, so boldly, to live without judgment, to give without expecting and to love for no reason. We call it a spiritual trifecta, to the winner’s circle.”

Notes from the Universe (See the Picture Quote version)

”Love is a fabric which never fades, no matter how often it is washed in the water of adversity and grief.”

Robert Fulghum

“As you put more emphasis on being a loving person, which is something you can control – and less emphasis on receiving love, which is something you can’t control – you’ll find that you have plenty of love in your life.”

Richard Carlson, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get—only what you are expecting to give—which is everything. What you will receive in return varies. But it really has not connection with what you give. You give because you love and cannot help giving.”

Katharine Hepburn (See the Picture Quote version)

“Love is given, not received.”

Naval Ravikant, Medium

“When I genuinely love I am extending myself, and when I am extending myself I am growing.  The more I love, the longer I love, the larger I become.  Genuine love is self-replenishing.  The more I nurture the spiritual growth of others, the more my own spiritual growth is nurtured.  I am a totally selfish human being.  I never do something for somebody else but that I do it for myself.  And as I grow through love, so grows my joy, ever more present, ever more constant.”

Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

“Sometimes we give love to the wrong person, and we sit there and wonder, ‘how could I have given love to that person? They don’t even deserve it,’ or ‘what a waste of time.‘ But the thing is, you shouldn’t think about it that way. You should think of the fact that you were able to give love, because if you are able to give, that means you have it inside of you. It’s the same thing with kindness, with honesty, with your ability to care about people. Don’t focus on the way that people abuse that. Focus on the fact that you have it within you, and that it makes you who you are. It makes you a beautiful person, a beautiful human being.”

Najwa Zebain (See the Picture Quote version)

“They say love is blind. I disagree. Infatuation is blind. Love is all-seeing and accepting. Love is seeing the flaws and blemishes and accepting them. Love is accepting the bad habits and mannerisms, and working around them. Love is recognizing all the fears and insecurities, and knowing your role is to comfort. Love is working through all the challenges and painful times. Infatuation is fragile and will hatter when life is not perfect. Love is strong and it strengthens because it is real.”

Unknown (See the Picture Quote version)

“Love is the oxygen of life; it’s what we all want and need most.  When we love completely, we feel alive, but when we lose love, the pain is so great that most people settle on connection, the crumbs of love.  You can get that sense of connection or love through intimacy, or friendship, or prayer, or walking in nature.  If nothing else works, you can get a dog.”

Tony Robbins, Money: Master the Game

“It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love or how you love. It matters only that you love.”

John Lennon (See the Picture Quote version)

“Love is not a relationship. Love is a state of being; it has nothing to do with anybody else. One is not in love, one is love. And of course when one is love, one is in love—but that is an outcome, a by-product, that is not the source. The source is that one is love.”

Osho, Courage (Page 76)

“The aliveness, peace, beauty, and love I seek are never out there, but always right here right now.”

Robert Kull, Solitude

“Many people are desperate to find a soul mate, someone who responds to their deep image of love and intimacy.  They go to great lengths to meet people, and they spend considerable time feeling achingly deprived of the joys of intimacy they imagine.  Their attitude is summed up in the frequent lament: When am I going to find the person who is right for me?  This approach to love seems to reflect the narcissism of the times.  When am I going to get what I need for my growth and my satisfaction? An alternative would be to give all that attention either to one’s own life – developing one’s talents, educating oneself in culture, and simply becoming an interesting person – or to a needy society.  This crafting of a life is a positive way of preparing oneself for intimacy.”

Thomas Moore, Original Self

“In real love there is no relationship, because there are not two persons to be related to.  In real love there is only love, a flowering, a fragrance, a melting, a merging.  Only in egoistic love are there two persons, the lover and the loved.  And whenever there is the lover and the loved, love disappears.  Whenever there is love, the lover and the beloved both disappear into love.”

Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships

“Love has nothing to do with someone else. It is all about you. It is a way of being. It essentially means you have brought sweetness into your emotion. If a loved one travels to another country, would you still be able to love them? You would. If a loved one passed away, would you still be able to love them? You would. Even if a loved one is not physically with you anymore, you are still capable of being loving. So, what is love then? It is just your own quality. You are only using the other person as a key to open up what is already within you.”

Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 65) (Read Matt’s Blog on this quote)

“You are what you believe you are.  There is nothing to do except to be just what you are.  You have the right to feel beautiful and enjoy it.  You can honor your body and accept it as it is.  You don’t need anyone to love you.  Love comes from the inside.  It lives inside us and is always there, but with that wall of fog, we don’t feel it.  You can only perceive the beauty that lives outside you when you feel the beauty that lives inside you.”

Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love

“Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form. In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.”

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 154)

“True love has no object. Many speak of their unconditional love for another. Unconditional love is the experience of being; there is no ‘I’ and ‘other,’ and anyone or anything it touches is experienced in love. You cannot unconditionally love someone. You can only be unconditional love. It is not a dualistic emotion. It is a sense of oneness with all that is. The experience of love arises when we surrender our separateness into the universal. It is a feeling of unity. You don’t love another, you are another. There is no fear because there is no separation.”

Stephen Levine, Who Dies?, via Sunbeams (Page 15)

“Love is not selective, just as the light of the sun is not selective. It does not make one person special. It is not exclusive. Exclusivity is not the love of God but the ‘love’ of ego. However, the intensity with which true love is felt can vary. There may be one person who reflects your love back to you more clearly and more intensely than others, and if that person feels the same toward you, it can be said that you are in a love relationship with him or her. The bond that connects you with that person is the same bond that connects you with the person sitting next to you on a bus, or with a bird, a tree, a flower. Only the degree of intensity with which it is felt differs.”

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 155) (Read Matt’s Blog on this quote)

“Perhaps, the problem is not the intensity of your love, but the quality of the people you are loving.”

Warsan Shire

“People come to me, they always say, ‘The other is not loving me.’ Nobody comes and says, ‘I am not loving the other.’ Love has become a demand: ‘The other is not loving me.’ Forget about the other! Love is such a beautiful phenomenon, if you love you will enjoy. And the more you love, the more you become lovable. The less you love and the more you demand that other should love you, the less and less you are lovable, the more and more you become closed, confined to your ego.”

Osho, Courage (Page 67) (Read Matt’s Blog on this quote)

“love is not cruel
we are cruel
love is not a game
we have made a game
out of love”

Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey (Page 127) (Read Matt’s Blog on this quote)

“Drop all fears and love more—and love unconditionally. Don’t think that you are doing something for the other when you love; you are doing something for yourself. When you love it is beneficial to you. So don’t wait; don’t say that when others love, you will love—that is not the point at all. Be selfish. Love is selfish. Love people—you will be fulfilled through it, you will be getting more and more blessedness through it. And when love goes deeper, fear disappears; love is the light, fear is darkness.”

Osho, Courage (Page 70)

“There are millions of ways to express your happiness, but there is only one way to really be happy, and that is to love.  There is no other way.  You cannot be happy if you don’t love yourself.  That is a fact.  If you don’t love yourself, you don’t have any opportunity to be happy.  You cannot share what you do not have.”

Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

A Course In Miracles, Sunbeams (Page 7)

“Many times I say learn the art of love, but what I really mean is: Learn the art of removing all that hinders love.  It is a negative process.  It is like digging a well:  You go on removing many layers of earth, stones, rocks, and then suddenly there is water.  The water was always there; it was an undercurrent.  Now you have removed all the barriers, the water is available.  So is love: Love is the undercurrent of your being.  It is already flowing, but there are many rocks, many layers of earth to be removed.”

Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships

“how you love yourself is
how you teach others
to love you”

Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey (Page 186)

“I don’t trust people who don’t love themselves and tell me, ‘I love you.’ … There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”

Maya Angelou

“When you make it your goal to create the perfect relationship between you and your body, you are learning to have a perfect relationship with anyone you are with, including your mother, your friends, your lover, your children, your dog.  When you have the perfect relationship between you and your body, in that moment your half of any relationship outside you is completely fulfilled.  You no longer depend upon the success of a relationship from the outside.”

Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love (Read Matt’s blog on this quote)

“Here is the secret we all know:  We all want to love.  We’re all afraid we are alone.  We’re afraid no one will know who we are.  Because on some level, we all know you can die without love, without anyone, without even you knowing who you are.  (Unless you take care of you, and give yourself love.  Unless you meet yourself, inside yourself.  Unless you know yourself like you were meant to.  Forgive yourself for being you—you have done nothing wrong and tomorrow is another chance.  I swear, there is a day after, every day.)”

Iain Thomas, Every Word you Cannot Say (Page 68)

“If you have to be in love, you should not be. The English expression ‘falling in love’ is very significant. You don’t climb in love, you don’t stand in love, you don’t fly in love, you fall in love. Something of you should fall or melt away to accommodate the other. There is a distinction between a transaction and a love affair. A love affair need not be with any particular person; you could be having a great love affair with life itself.”

Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 200)

“When you like a flower, you just pluck it. But, when you love a flower, you water it daily. One who understands this, understands life.”

Buddha (Read Matt’s Blog on this quote)

“A French journalist once told me that love is best spelled T-I-M-E. I don’t think I’ve heard anything truer or more important in my role as a husband or father.”

Ryan Holiday, Medium

“Unless meditation is achieved, love remains a misery.  Once you have learned how to live alone, once you have learned how to enjoy your simple existence, for no reason at all, then there is a possibility of solving the second, more complicated problem of two persons being together.  Only two meditators can live in love – and then love will not be a koan.  But then it will not be a relationship, either, in the sense that you understand it.  It will be simply a state of love, not a state of relationship.”

Osho, Love, Freedom, Alonenss: The Koan of Relationships

“The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it’s not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone care capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person—without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.”

Osho (See the Picture Quote version)

“Making one person the only source of love does not work because love is in everything and everyone. When we miss that, we miss the point of life. Really.”

Banu Sekendur, Tiny Buddha

“Can I tell you a secret? You don’t have to be in a relationship. I mean it. I know they force it down your throat until you choke on it. Girls aren’t pretty unless they’re wanted. Boys aren’t men unless they’re having sex with someone. People aren’t lovable until they’re dating someone. But a relationship won’t always make you happy, and as wonderful as romance is, it isn’t the only love that exists. I have seen friendships that are deeper and more pure than couples who swear it’s forever—and yet the friendship is the one people ignore. I have heard so often ‘nobody loves me’ out of the mouths of people who are single. And it kills me because if you ask them: where are your parents, your teachers, your classmates, your pets—they say, yes, okay, but it doesn’t count. Of course it counts, love doesn’t diminish just because someone doesn’t want to have sex with you. In fact, doesn’t it sort of make that love more real that they want nothing—not even a date—out of you? It is pretty to be in love. It’s magical, I’m sure. But it’s also wonderful to stop for ice cream in your prom dress with six other girls. It’s also wonderful to go visit the world with nothing but a bunch of buddies who are really excited about learning. The problem is: we’ve made everything about ‘the one.’ But maybe, ‘the one’ is just you, loving yourself, having fun, and being happy. Maybe instead of looking for our other halves, we should be piecing ourselves together. Maybe I wasn’t born unfinished. Maybe I am the one who makes myself better.”

Unknown (See the Picture Quote version)

“Meet people, mix with people, with as many people as possible, because each person expresses a different facet of God. Learn from people. Don’t be afraid, this existence is not your enemy. This existence mothers you, this existence is ready to support you in every possible way. Trust, and you will start feeling a new upsurge of energy in you. That energy is love. That energy wants to bless the whole existence, because in that energy one feels blessed. And when you feel blessed, what else can you do except bless the whole existence?”

Osho, Courage (Page 78)

“To be loving is simply this: a willingness to respond freely and openly. Right now, it may be limited to one or two people in your lives. But it is possible to extend this ability to embrace the entire world. Does it mean going out into the streets and hugging everyone? No. That would be crazy—not to mention, irresponsible. As we have said, responsibility is not about action, but a way of being. Love is not something you do; it is just the way you are.”

Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 65)

“I am slowly learning love is meant to bring peace. Love is meant to nurture. Love is meant to heal.”

Unknown (See the Picture Quote version)

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

Corinthians 13:4-7

“Be kind. Always. Give love freely and never wait for it to come back. If it breathes, grows, or has even a single cell bouncing around inside it, love it, too. Each and every thing deserves and has earned more respect than it’s given so start the trend and I promise, promise that you will feel part of it all when you hold life in your hands.”

Tyler Knott Gregson

“In the end, after letting go of my ideals of perfection, after letting go of my striving for goals, after wanting things to be a certain way… what am I left with?  I’m left with Love.  This feeling of boundless love, not for one specific person and not even limited to human beings, can motivate me to get up in the morning and write.  It motivates me to be vegan, because my love extends to animals.  It motivates me to work out, because my love extends to me, and to my kids for whom I’m setting this example of an active lifestyle.  It motivates me to let go of attachments that lead to frustrations, because why fight with someone you love?  Love can move you to be mindful, to appreciate the reality of this current moment, to appreciate and embrace impermanence as something beautiful, to be grateful, to make the most of this dewlike life.  Love can move you to overcome struggles.  Love can transform bitterness into softness, anger into kindness, self-hatred into self-compassion.  Love is both the path, and the mover.”

Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 204)

“The source of love is deep in us, and we can help others realize a lot of happiness.  One word, one action, or one thought can reduce another person’s suffering and bring him joy.  One word can give comfort and confidence, destroy doubt, help someone avoid a mistake, reconcile a conflict, or open the door to liberation.  One action can save a person’s life or help him take advantage of a rare opportunity.  One thought can do the same, because thoughts always lead to words and actions.  If love is in our heart, every thought, word, and deed can bring about a miracle.”

Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step

“Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.”

L. R. Knost

“At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done.  We will be judged by ‘I was hungry and you gave me food to eat, I was naked and you clothed me, I was homeless and you took me in.’  Hungry not only for bread — but hungry for love. Naked not only for clothing — but naked for human dignity and respect. Homeless not only for want of a room of bricks — but homeless because of rejection.”

Mother Teresa

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5 Deep Love Quotes In Pictures To Share: