10 Scriptures & Quotes About Love That Will Touch Your Heart & Soul
- Amy Blossom
- Feb 9, 2021
- 8 min read
Updated: 52 minutes ago
I have always been moved by beautiful words. Poetry, meaningful quotes, song lyrics, Scripture...sometimes a few carefully chosen words can express something our hearts have been trying to say all along.
And I will admit it. I am a hopeless romantic.
I love hearing people's stories about how they met, what made them fall in love, what has kept them together through the years, and the little things they still do that say, I choose you.
The older I get, the more I realize that love is about so much more than romance. Love is found in marriage, friendship, and families. Love is found in sacrifice, forgiveness, loyalty, compassion, and those quiet moments when someone simply stays.
Love celebrates with us, grieves with us, carries us through difficult seasons, and sometimes speaks most clearly without saying a word.
All 10 of these Scriptures and quotes are available in my "Beautiful Love Quotes" Collection, free printable wall art, sized 8x10 to fit a standard frame. Click below to jump down to the free download.
Maybe that is why we have spent centuries trying to describe it. Poets have written about it. Authors have built entire stories around it. Songs have been sung about it. And still some of the most beautiful words ever written about love are found in Scripture.
The Bible does not describe love as merely an emotion. Biblical love is active. It gives, serves, sacrifices, and remains.
So before we get to some of my favorite quotes about love, I want to begin where I believe every conversation about love should begin...with God.
10 Beautiful Scriptures & Quotes About Love
1. “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” - 1 Corinthians 13:13
First Corinthians 13 is probably the most recognized passage about love in the Bible, but it is much more than a beautiful passage read at weddings.
Paul describes a love that is patient and kind. One that is not jealous, proud, selfish, easily angered, or delighted by wrongdoing. This type of love bears, believes, hopes, and endures.
Then, after describing everything love is, Paul reminds us that faith, hope, and love remain, but the greatest of these is love.
Think about that for a moment. There are many things we spend our lives pursuing that will eventually disappear. Possessions wear out. Accomplishments are forgotten. Circumstances change. But love matters eternally.
Perhaps one of life's greatest lessons is realizing that some of the things we once thought were most important were never the most important things at all.
Love was.
2. “We love Him because He first loved us.” - 1 John 4:19 NKJV
This may be one of the shortest verses about love in the Bible, but it contains an enormous truth. Love begins with God.
We did not invent love. In fact, we do not have to earn God's love before receiving it. We are able to love because He loved us first. The more we understand God's love for us, the more it changes the way we love other people.
We become more willing to forgive because we have been forgiven. More willing to show grace because we have received grace. More willing to love imperfect people because God has loved us in all of our own imperfection.
Our love is a response to His.
3. “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.” - John 15:13
Jesus did not merely tell us what love looks like. He showed us. Love is not only spoken, it gives itself away.
Most of us will never literally be asked to lay down our lives for another person, but we are given opportunities every day to lay down something else...our time, our references, our comfort, our pride, and our need to be right.
You see, real love costs us something.
And no one demonstrated that kind of sacrificial love more perfectly than Jesus Christ.
4. “Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” Romans 13:10
This verse takes love out of the realm of simply feeling something and puts it into the way we actually live.
Biblical love considers the other person. It does not intentionally wound, tear down, manipulate, or seek its own way at someone else’s expense. Instead, this type of love asks us to treat people with kindness, compassion, patience, forgiveness, and grace.
Paul makes an extraordinary statement when he says that love is the fulfillment of the law. When we genuinely love God and love others, the way we live begins to reflect what God has wanted from His people all along.
Jesus expressed the same truth when He said that the greatest commandments are to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
Love is not merely something we say, it is something we choose to live out each day. When described this way, maybe some of the greatest expressions of love are found in the simplest decisions we make every day...to be kind instead of harsh, patient instead of frustrated, forgiving instead of resentful, and willing to put someone else's needs before our own.
This is love in action.
5. "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched, but just felt in the heart.” - Anne Sullivan, as recalled by Helen Keller
I have loved this thought for years because it reminds me how many of life's greatest treasures cannot be placed on a shelf or deposited into a bank account. The truth is, love cannot be held in your hand. Neither can hope, peace, compassion, joy, faith, or the comfort of knowing that someone truly understands you.
We live in a world that places so much value on what can be seen, measured, purchased, and accumulated. But often the things that make life richest are completely invisible.
You cannot photograph the feeling of being known. You cannot put a price tag on being loved. And you cannot measure what it means to have someone beside you when life becomes difficult.
The heart recognizes treasures the eyes cannot always see.
6. “Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.” -Vincent van Gogh
I love the idea of allowing love to become the motivation behind what we do. There is an enormous difference between doing something because we have to and doing something because we love.
Love changes ordinary work. For example, a meal prepared for someone you care about becomes more than food. A phone call becomes more than a conversation. Sitting beside someone who is hurting becomes more than simply occupying a chair.
Love gives meaning to seemingly small things. Perhaps that is one reason Scripture tells us:
“And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men.” Colossians 3:23 NKJV
When love becomes part of our motivation, even ordinary things can become acts of service.
7. “There is only one happiness in this life: to love and be loved.” - George Sand
There is something wonderfully simple about this quote. We spend so much of life chasing happiness because we think it will arrive with the next accomplishment, the next purchase, the next opportunity, or the next season.
But so many of our happiest memories have very little to do with any of those things; they simply involve people. Things like being gathered around a table, hearing someone laugh, holding a child's hand, sitting beside someone we love or remembering a person who mattered deeply to us are moments that make all the difference.
There is tremendous joy in being loved. But there is also tremendous joy in giving love freely.
Sometimes loving someone else becomes one of God's greatest gifts to us.
8. “Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes
This one touches me differently than it did when I was younger. For years, I thought of home primarily as a place. But eventually we learn that home is often much more about people than addresses.
There are homes we leave behind. Rooms we will never walk into again. Places that change after the people we loved are no longer there. And yet somehow those places remain inside us.
Maybe that is because home is connected to where we have loved and where we have been loved.
Jesus said in Matthew 6:21:
“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Our hearts have an extraordinary way of remembering where their treasures have been.
9. “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” - Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
There is something beautiful about being known deeply by another person. Not the polished version of ourselves or the version everyone else sees. The real one.
The person who knows your quirks, your history, your weaknesses, your strange habits, the things that make you laugh, and the things that can bring you to tears...and loves you anyway.
Marriage, as God designed it, creates an extraordinary kind of union. Mark 10:8 says:
“and the two shall become one flesh; so then they are no longer two, but one flesh.”
Two individual lives become intertwined. Two histories begin creating one shared story.
This does not mean we lose who we are. It means that over years of loving, serving, forgiving, growing, and walking through life together, another person's life becomes deeply woven into our own.
10. “Love is the only gold.” - Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Four words; and perhaps an entire lifetime of wisdom.
We spend a great deal of our lives collecting things. But eventually we begin to understand that the greatest riches were never things at all. They were people.
They were also conversations.
They were ordinary afternoons we did not realize would someday become precious memories. They were hugs we wish we could have one more time. They were laughter around a table. They were people who stayed and people we loved. And they were people who loved us. Love really is a kind of treasure unlike anything else we possess.
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What These Words About Love Remind Me
As I read these quotes together, I notice something. They all seem to point toward the same truth in different ways: Love changes what we value.
Love teaches us that home is more than a place, happiness is more than circumstances, riches are more than money, beauty is more than what we can see, and Scripture takes us even deeper.
The greatest love does not begin with us at all, it begins with God.
“We love Him because He first loved us." 1 John 4:19
Every imperfect way we love another human being is only a small reflection of the perfect love God has already shown us. And perhaps that is why love has such power.
We were created by a God who loves so much.
The most valuable things in life are often the things money could never buy.
So, love well, love generously, and never forget the One who loved you first.
Blessings,
Amy
