I have been a word nerd for as long as I can remember. I inherited my love of languages from my mom. She used to write poems about our family members and was regularly invited to compose speeches and poems for friends and colleagues. When I was in Grade 6, I asked her to write a poem about all the kids in my class, which we then performed at our school’s poetry eisteddfod.
I don’t write a lot of poetry (my writing is mostly blogging) but I love to consume beautifully crafted words. In my teens, I adopted the practice of recording my favourite poems or quotes. Whenever I come across a piece of writing that speaks to me, I write it down in one of my little notebooks, or screenshot it for a rainy day.
I should probably mention at this point that I am not a big fan of cheesy love poems. You won’t find any ‘roses are red, violets are blue’ stuff in my notebooks. I am a seeker of those expressions of love that really make you think, and feel.
Up until now, I have always kept my collections of love poems and quotes close to my heart but I have decided that it’s time to share some of the beautiful words that have meant so much to me over the years, so that you can hopefully find little pieces of your heart in these expressions.
You may even find some ideas for your wedding invitations, day-of stationery, and even your vows or your wedding speech in my collection of love notes and quotes.
How to incorporate love quotes into your wedding day
The perfect quote might just what you need to help you get started on writing your vows, or designing your wedding stationery. Before you just start copying and pasting quotes into your vows, speeches or stationery, consider these tips:
- Select a quote that means something to you and is an authentic refection of your love
- Choose words that you and your partner can relate to – and which are an accurate reflection on your relationship and personalities
- Don’t worry too much about whether your guests will understand the meaning behind your selected quote. This is your day!
Happy reading…
On-screen love
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.
– When Harry Met Sally
You make me want to be a better man.
– As Good As It Gets
The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love, and be loved in return.
– Moulin Rouge
I vow to fiercely love you in all your forms, now and forever. I promise to never forget that this is a once in a lifetime love.
– The Vow
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.
– Ted, How I Met Your Mother


Hold my hand and we are halfway there,
hold my hand and I’ll take you there.
– Maria, character from West Side Story
Love is keeping the promise anyway.
– John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds.
– Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
When I look at you, I can feel it. I look at you and I’m home.
– Dory, Finding Nemo
I promise you to lay my heart in the palm of your hands. I promise you me.
– Meredith Grey, Grey’s Anatomy
You make me happier than I ever thought I could be and if you let me, I will spend the rest of my life trying to make you feel the same way.
– Chandler, proposing to Monica on Friends


Light-hearted
If I get married, I want to be very married.
– Audrey Hepburn
A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.
– André Maurois
I love being married. It’s so great to find one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.
– Rita Rudner
I love you more than coffee, but please don’t make me prove it.
– Elizabeth Evans
Great love affairs start with champagne…
– Honoré de Balzac
Romance is the icing, but love is the cake.
– Unknown
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.
– Dr Seuss


Sentimental
and I need you.
not in the ways
to survive, but
in the ways that
make life worth
living.
– JmStorm
I would rather share one lifetime with you than face all the ages of this world alone.
– J.R. R. Tolkien
Fall in love with someone who is both your safe place,
And your biggest adventure.
– Bianca Sparacino
darling, you are all I ever wanted love to be.
– e.s.


…true love is never blind, but rather brings an added light.
– Phoebe Cary
Love recognises no barriers, it jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination, full of hope.
– Maya Angelou
For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul.
– Judy Garland
I love you with everything I am,
Everything I’ve been
And everything I hope to be.
I love you with my past,
And I love you for my future,
And for the years we’ll have together.
I love you for every one of my smiles,
And even more, for every one of yours.
– Julia Quinn
Love is like a friendship caught on fire.
– Jeremy Taylor
I swear I couldn’t love you more than I do right now, and yet I know I will tomorrow.
– Leo Christopher
You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.
– Dr Seuss
Somebody who betters you. Somebody
who inspires and encourages you in love
and in life, who pushes you towards
dreams and goals you’d otherwise ignore,
who selflessly sacrifices their time to
helping you become a more courageous,
well rounded and happy human being.
That’s sacred. You hold onto a love like that.
– Beau Taplin, Growth


Once upon a time, there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
– Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get, only with what you are expecting to give- which is everything.
– Katharine Hepburn, actress
True love stories never have endings.
– Richard Bach, American writer
I ask you to pass through life at my side – to be my second self, and best earthly companion.
– Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Once in a while, right in the middle of an ordinary life, love gives us a fairy tale.
– Unknown
And I knew exactly how old Walt Disney’s Cinderella felt when she found her prince.
– Elizabeth Young
Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
You will find, as you look back upon your life, that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.
– Henry Drummond
In a marriage, each partner is to be an encourager rather than a critic, a forgiver rather than a collector of hurts, and enabler rather than a reformer.
– Norman Wright
Keeper of my soul.
Holder of my heart.
– Unknown


For you see, each day I love you more. Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.
– Rosemonde Gerard
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you directly, without problems or pride: I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love, except in this form in which I am not nor are you, so close that your hand upon my chest is mine, so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
– Pablo Neruda, One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII
Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.
– Maya Angelou
Grow old along with me; the best is yet to be.
– Robert Browning
In all the world, there is no heart for me like yours. In all the world, there is no love for you like mine.
– Maya Angelou
The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.
– Audrey Hepburn
I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I love you, not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you, not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me.
– Roy Croft


To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow—this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.
– Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.
– Kiersten White, The Chaos of Stars
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Yours is the light by which my spirit’s born: you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.
– ee cummings, You are My Sun, My Moon, and All My Stars
I was made and meant to look for you and wait for you and become yours forever.
– Robert Browning, Pauline: The Fragment of a Confession
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.
– Elizabeth Barret Browning, “How Do I Love Thee?”
Love starts as a feeling,
But to continue is a choice;
And I find myself choosing you
More and more every day.
– Justin Wetch, Bending the Universe
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth is unknown, although his height be taken.
– William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
Grow old along with me; the best is yet to be.
– Robert Browning
Once in a while, right in the middle of an ordinary life, love gives us a fairy tale.
– Anonymous
Songs
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
– The Beatles
All you need is love, love. Love is all you need.
– The Beatles
But there is not enough time.
And there is no, no song I could sing.
And there is no combination of words I could say.
But I will still tell you one thing.
We’re better together.
– Jack Johnson


Faith
Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful and endures through every circumstance.
– 1 Corinthians 13:7
Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.’
– Genesis 2:18
Keep alert, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love.
– 1 Corinthians 16:13
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
– 1 Corinthians 13:13
I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.
– Song of Solomon 6:3
I found the one my soul loves.
– Song of Solomon 3:4


Non-traditional
You completely redefine my idea of what love is and should be.
That it needn’t be possessive, volatile or detrimental to your well-being,
But can be selfless, gentle and consistent – and should empower you to pursue your passions.
That it should balance and enrich a life, not tear it too pieces.
– Beau Taplin, The Redefining
chemistry
is
you
touching my arm
and
it
setting fire to my mind.
– Nayyirah Waheed
Let your love be stronger than your hate or anger.
Learn the wisdom of compromise, for it is better to bend a little than to break.
Believe the best rather than the worst.
People have a way of living up or down to your opinion of them.
Remember that true friendship is the basis for any lasting relationship. The person you choose to marry is deserving of the courtesies and kindnesses you bestow on your friends.
Please hand this down to your children and your children’s children. The more things change the more they stay the same.
– Jane Wells, Marriage Advice from 1886


The sky was lit
by the splendor of the moon
So powerful
I fell to the ground
Your love
has made me sure
I am ready to forsake
this worldly life
and surrender
to the magnificence
of your Being
– Rumi, Defeated by Love
Let us be like
Two falling stars in the day sky.
Let no one know of our sublime beauty
As we hold hands with God
And burn
Into a sacred existence that defies –
That surpasses
Every description of ecstasy
And love.
– Hafiz, The Day Sky
In the morning
when I began to wake,
it happened again–
that feeling
that you, Beloved,
had stood over me all night
keeping watch,
that feeling
that as soon as I began to stir
you put your lips on my forehead
and lit the Holy Lamp
inside my heart.
– Hafiz, Keeping watch
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)
i am never without it (anywhere I go you go, my dear;
and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet)
i want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
– e.e. cummings
she asked,
“you are in love, what does love look like’
to which i replied,
“like everything i’ve ever lost come back to me.”
– Nayyirah Waheed
It’s all I have to bring today—
This, and my heart beside—
This, and my heart, and all the fields—
And all the meadows wide—
Be sure you count—should I forget
Someone the sum could tell—
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.
– Emily Dickinson
May these vows and this marriage be blessed.
May it be sweet milk,
this marriage, like wine and halvah.
May this marriage offer fruit and shade
like the date palm.
May this marriage be full of laughter,
our every day a day in paradise.
May this marriage be a sign of compassion,
a seal of happiness here and hereafter.
May this marriage have a fair face and a good name,
an omen as welcomes the moon in a clear blue sky.
I am out of words to describe
how spirit mingles in this marriage
– Rumi, This Marriage


Today, let this light bless you
With these friends let it bless you
With snow-scent and lavender bless you
Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly
Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears
Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes
Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you
Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days
– Jane Hirshfield, A Blessing for a Wedding
The moon has become a dancer
at this festival of love.
This dance of light,
This sacred blessing,
This divine love,
beckons us
to a world beyond
only lovers can see
with their eyes of fiery passion.
They are the chosen ones
who have surrendered.
Once they were particles of light
now they are the radiant sun.
They have left behind
the world of deceitful games.
They are the privileged lovers
who create a new world
with their eyes of fiery passion.
– Rumi, The Privileged Lovers
We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.
Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.
We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love’s light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.
– Maya Angelou, Touched by an Angel
I love your collection of poems. They are just what I was looking for to incorporate in my wedding ceremonies with brides and grooms. The words flow so easily I know that I will be using some of these selections for my wedding script. I am a Wedding Officiant and I love to tell the couples story with a little added flair and class! This has a given me exactly what I need, whether I use one piece of poetry alone or if I combine it with another, it flows so beautifully!
Thank you for providing such beautiful words on paper.
Anita Ruffin
Agape Weddings by Anita
Fort Worth, Texas
Hi Anita. We are thrilled that you found our collection of words about love, and that they will serve as a useful reference when creating the scripts for your couples’ ceremonies. Wishing you a very happy 2023 filled with love and laughter!
Warm wishes,
Jacqui