“Io ho quel che ho donato.”

Suggesting that what one gives becomes one’s most lasting possession · Personal motto and inscription associated with D’Annunzio

• Love
• Truth

“The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost.”

Suggesting that awareness of mortality can deepen love and gratitude · Prose work

• Love
• Mortality

“I joined the British army because I thought it was the only way I could fight for Ireland.”

Expressing the patriotic motive behind his decision to serve in the First World War · Reported explanation of his enlistment in the British Army

• Love
• War

“Morning without you is a dwindled Dawn.”

Expressing how absence alters the experience of ordinary beauty · Letter to Susan Dickinson, 1852

• Love
• Nature

“Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.”

Presenting love as a force beyond mortality · Letter to Mrs Henry Holland, 1876

• Love
• Mortality

“There is no greater force in the world than love.”

Affirming love as the strongest influence in human life · Prose writing, commonly attributed

• Hope
• Love

“To love Christ more is the only way to love all else better.”

Presenting spiritual love as the source of a fuller love for others · Religious prose, commonly attributed

• Faith
• Love

“Life is short, and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those travelling this dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind.”

A tender call to use limited time for love and kindness · Novel prose, commonly attributed to Stepping Heavenward

• Friendship
• Love
• Time

“The heart has no wrinkles.”

Suggesting that feeling and emotional vitality can outlast outward age · Prose writing

• Beauty
• Love
• Time

“That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say no in any of them.”

A sharp observation about charm, language and willpower · Conversation, referring to a celebrated linguist

• Love
• Truth

“I intend to say of her what has never been said of any woman.”

Expressing an ambition to honour idealised love through unprecedented praise · Prose memoir

• Beauty
• Love
• Poetry

“Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium!”

Capturing beauty as a force capable of inspiring overwhelming desire · Doctor Faustus, spoken by Faustus

• Beauty
• Love

“Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember me and be sad.”

This wording is widely circulated as a Rossetti quotation but is also associated with her poem Remember · Letter, commonly attributed

• Love
• Memory
• Sadness

“The point of all things is that they should be loved.”

Expressing a vision of love as the purpose and discipline of life · Theological prose

• Faith
• Love

“The act of love is an act of knowledge.”

Presenting love as a way of apprehending another person truly · Essay

• Love
• Truth

“Love is life. And if you miss love, you miss life.”

Presenting love as the central condition of a fully lived life · As commonly attributed; source not securely identified

• Life
• Love

“The heart that has once truly loved, never forgets.”

Expressing the enduring power of love and memory · Commonly attributed to Amelia Opie

• Love
• Memory

“On n'a pas deux cœurs, un pour les animaux et un pour les hommes. On a un cœur ou on n'en a pas.”

Expressing compassion as an indivisible moral principle · Public speech

• Love
• Truth

“Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”

Celebrating the emotional importance of seemingly small things · Prose, Winnie-the-Pooh

• Love
• Memory

“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.”

Expressing the depth of enduring friendship and love · Prose, Winnie-the-Pooh

• Friendship
• Love
• Time