Love is among the most powerful emotions we as humans are privileged enough to experience, as it represents the deep and unbreakable bonds we form with those we cherish. But while love often leads to feelings of unmitigated joy, it can also manifest in incredible sorrow, especially when those we love are no longer with us. In those times when love causes raw and painful feelings, we must remember the words the great poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote in an elegy for his best friend: “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
The end of our physical relationships with people don’t mean our love for them has to fade away. In fact, we’d be doing a disservice to their memory if we ignored the love we once shared with them. While circumstances may change and people may drift apart, we need not forget or deny the deep connection that once existed and helped to shape us into the people we are today.
Here are 16 quotes from some of history’s wisest individuals that go to show the indelible impact love makes on all of our lives.
True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations; it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.Honoré de Balzac
Love is something eternal; the aspect may change, but not the essence.Vincent Van Gogh
What we have once enjoyed we can never lose … All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.Helen Keller
They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies.William Penn
Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.1 Corinthians 13:7
Love is energy: It can neither be created nor destroyed. It just is and always will be, giving meaning to life and direction to goodness.Bryce Courtney
The only way to have eternal love is to never let your heart forget what it’s like to live without it.Sherrilyn Kenyon
Life is eternal and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon, and a horizon is nothing, save the limit of our sight.Bede Jarrett
Time is / Too slow for those who wait, / Too swift for those who fear, / Too long for those who grieve, / Too short for those who rejoice; / But for those who love, / Time is not.Henry Van Dyke
The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface.Truman Capote
It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.E.M. Forster
What is grief, if not love persevering?Vision (Paul Bettany) in “WandaVision”
Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.Germaine de Staël
The story of love is not important — what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.Helen Hayes
If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.Sarah Mohr (Rochelle Davis) in “The Crow”
I still miss those I loved who are no longer with me but I find I am grateful for having loved them. The gratitude has finally conquered the loss.Rita Mae Brown
Featured image credit: John Downing/ Hulton Archive via Getty Images
