Love is beautiful. Terrifying. Possibly fatal. Also: why did they leave you on “read” four hours ago when you clearly just said “have a great day ☺️”?
This isn’t about candlelit dinners or perfect movie kisses.
These romantic quotes are the real deal.
They get awkward, dramatic, hilarious, poetic—sometimes all at once. Some will make you sigh.
Others will make you question your life choices. A few might make you text your ex. (Please don’t.)
If you’ve ever felt anything ever—congrats, you’re ready.
1. “I have always been a romantic, one of those people who believes that a woman in pink circus tights contains all the secrets of the universe.” – Tom Robbins
2. “What I’d really like to write is a romantic comedy. This is my favorite kind of movie. I feel almost embarrassed revealing this, because the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years that saying you like romantic comedies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity.” – Mindy Kaling
3. “When the heart speaks, its language is the same under all latitudes.” – Ella Maillart
4. “What is love? It is the morning and the evening star.” – Sinclair Lewis
5. “The more we are filled with thoughts of lust the less we find true romantic love.” – Douglas Horton
6. “My idea of a romantic night is to watch action films.” – Corey Hart
7. “I think the American West really attracts me because it’s romantic. The desert, the empty space, the drama.” – Ang Lee
8. “I don’t get off on romantic parts. But I often think if I had had my dental work done early on, well, maybe.” – Morgan Freeman
9. “Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock do romantic comedies. I do dark dramas. I do these movies well.” – Jodie Foster
10. “I grew up in southeastern Oklahoma on a working cattle ranch, and it was always very romantic to me: The West, the cowboy, the Western way of life.” – Reba McEntire
11. “Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.” – Carolyn Gold Heilbrun
12. “Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, this it overflows upon the outward world.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne
13. “Yeah, but there’s nobody who represents romance to me like Cary Grant.” – Aaron Eckhart
14. “Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.” – Thomas Wolfe
15. “Beauty is the lover’s gift.” – William Congreve
16. “Animals are everywhere. Some are more romantic, like tigers and elephants and chimpanzees, and some are less romantic, like earthworms, but they are just as interesting.” – Isabella Rossellini
17. “I do not like to work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it is because of envy – I, too, crave enchantment. Perhaps it is because love and psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection.” – Irvin D. Yalom
18. “If I had no family, my wife and I would lead a much more romantic and nomadic existence.” – David McCallum
19. “In a clown, we see what we do that makes us laugh and cry. I kept the white face, the tradition of the Pierrot. My clown became a romantic and stylized figure. I wanted to be an abstract and concrete figure, a symbol of humanity.” – Marcel Marceau
20. “All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.” – James Russell Lowell
21. “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” – Edgar Allan Poe
22. “I’m not the most romantic guy, although I do try.” – Seth Rogen
23. “The real lover is the man who can thrill you just by touching your head or smiling into your eyes – or just by staring into space.” – Marilyn Monroe
24. “Wave after wave of love flooded the stage and washed over me, the beginning of the one great durable romance of my life.” – Bette Davis
25. “The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.” – Havelock Ellis
26. “True love stories never have endings.” – Richard Bach
27. “There are certain romances that belong in certain cities, in a certain atmosphere, in a certain time.” – Sammy Davis, Jr.
28. “I don’t know where my romanticism comes from. My mom and dad would read to me a lot. ‘Treasure Island,’ ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ tales of chivalry and knights, things like that. Those are the stories I loved growing up.” – Daniel Radcliffe
29. “If I can give you one strong piece of advice, when you go away for that romantic weekend, whatever you do, do not accept or take the upgrade to the honeymoon suite.” – Gordon Ramsay
30. “I’m a feminist, but I think that romance has been taken away a bit for my generation. I think what people connect with in novels is this idea of an overpowering, encompassing love – and it being more important and special than anything and everything else.” – Emma Watson
31. “Romance is mush, stifling those who strive.” – Billy Strayhorn
32. “I’ve always loved the ’40s romantic comedies and the idea of those mistaken identities and lovers’ misunderstandings.” – Pearl Cleage
33. “The curse of the romantic is a greed for dreams, an intensity of expectation that, in the end, diminishes the reality.” – Marya Mannes
34. “The whole westward expansion myth is seen as romantic. But it’s a joke, a blot on American history.” – Frank Waters
35. “If you talk about, say, ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ most people will think of it as a play about the highest form of romantic love. They won’t realize that it is a horrible tragedy. And this notion of a soul mate is so damaging. That isn’t love at all.” – Michael Penn
36. “I think Bond the character is distinct: He’s British, he has a certain code that he lives by, he’s incorruptible… he’s a classical hero, but he’s also fallible. He has inner demons, inner conflicts, and he’s a romantic.” – Barbara Broccoli
37. “Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn’t be able to write about.” – Alan Bennett
38. “When men attempt bold gestures, generally it’s considered romantic. When women do it, it’s often considered desperate or psycho.” – Sarah Jessica Parker
39. “Learning to give up on perfection may be just about the most romantic move any of us could make.” – Alain de Botton
40. “I’m very romantic, I’m extremely romantic. I date my wife.” – Alice Cooper
41. “Romance is dead – it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, and sold off piece by piece.” – Yeardley Smith
42. “Falling in love, romance, matters of the heart – when you fall in love, on some biochemical level you know there is a chance it won’t work out. It’s ingrained in us that if you take such an enormous risk on someone with your heart that it might not pay off. I gamble all my chips and I might actually lose everything.” – Rachael Taylor
43. “You only need to look at Jane Austen to see how crossed wires can become a defining aspect of romantic life. Then again, if the course of true love ran more smoothly, it would have a terribly detrimental effect on our cache of love stories.” – Mariella Frostrup
44. “The romantic love we feel toward the opposite sex is probably one extra help from God to bring you together, but that’s it. All the rest of it, the true love, is the test.” – Joan Chen
45. “Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a hopeless romantic who listens to love ballads and doo-wop songs all the time.” – Henry Rollins
46. “Spandau wasn’t just about the music; it was about the fashion that went with it too. We were part of the New Romantic movement that happened around the Blitz nightclub in London, and we thought the best way to sell the band to America was to take the whole package to New York.” – Martin Kemp
47. “When I give I give myself.” – Walt Whitman
48. “If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance.” – Bernard Williams
49. “Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.” – George William Curtis
Hey fellow Linguaholics! It’s me, Marcel. I am the proud owner of linguaholic.com. Languages have always been my passion and I have studied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and Sinology at the University of Zurich. It is my utmost pleasure to share with all of you guys what I know about languages and linguistics in general.