Inside: A collection of Pablo Neruda love quotes and other quotes in English.
Pablo Neruda, winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature, was a celebrated poet and political activist. Gabriel García Márquez famously said that Neruda was,
"…the greatest poet of the 20th century—in any language."
His eloquence and sensuous poetry is simply unparalleled. Though these English translations of Pablo Neruda love quotes convey his brilliance with words, only the original quotes in Spanish do him justice.
It's important to acknowledge that Neruda's life and legacy is not without controversy. He admitted to sexual assault in his memoir, and abandoned his daughter born with hydrocephaly. As much as I love his written works, these stains on his legacy are serious and should be taken into consideration.
Read the collection of quotes and more, to see for yourself.
Pablo Neruda Quotes:
Pablo Neruda Love Quotes
Pablo Neruda Quotes About Life
More Meaningful Pablo Neruda Quotes
20 Pablo Neruda Love Quotes in English
1. “Love is so short and forgetting is so long.”
– Pablo Neruda
2. “In one kiss, you’ll know all I haven’t said.”
– Pablo Neruda
3. “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
– Pablo Neruda
4. “But I love your feet only because they walked upon the earth and upon the wind and upon the waters, until they found me.”
– Pablo Neruda
5. “I won't belong to anyone else, just you. Until my bones turn to ashes and my heart stops beating.”
– Pablo Neruda
6. “I loved her, and sometimes she loved me.”
– Pablo Neruda
7. “If nothing saves us from death, at least love should save us from life.”
– Pablo Neruda
8. “Love is born of memory, lives from intelligence and dies from forgetfulness.”
– Pablo Neruda
9. “Love is born of memory, lives from intelligence and dies from forgetfulness.”
– Pablo Neruda
10. “Do not do with love what a child does with his balloon; when he has it, he ignores it, and when he loses it, he cries.”
– Pablo Neruda
11. “Then you realize, it's not the one who moves you the ground beneath you, but the one who centers you. It's not the one who steals your heart, but the one who makes you feel as if you have it back.”
– Pablo Neruda
12. “The moon lives under your skin…”
– Pablo Neruda
13. “I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving.”
– Pablo Neruda
14. “Your wide eyes are the only light I know from extinguished constellations.”
– Pablo Neruda
15. “Does the one who always waits suffer more than the one who has never waited for anyone?”
– Pablo Neruda
16. “So I wait for you like a lonely house till you will see me again and live in me. Til then my windows ache.”
– Pablo Neruda
17. “At night I dream that you and I are two plants that grew together, roots entwined, and that you know the earth and the rain like my mouth, since we are made of earth and rain.”
– Pablo Neruda
18. “”I can write the saddest lines tonight. To think I don't have her. To feel I have lost her. To hear the vast night, vaster without her. The words fall on the soul like dew to the grass.”
– Pablo Neruda
19. “It was my destiny to love and say good-bye.”
– Pablo Neruda
20. “Love knew then that it was called love.
And when I raised my eyes to your name
all at once your heart set my path.”
– Pablo Neruda
21. “At night, beloved, tie your heart to mine, and let them defeat the darkness in their dreams.”
– Pablo Neruda
22. “Love knew then that it was called love.
AnLove! Love while the night collapses!”
– Pablo Neruda
23. “Y si no das más, tan solo encuentra lo que hay en tus manos, piensa que dar amor nunca es en vano.”
– Pablo Neruda
24. “How I'd know how to love you, woman– how I'd know how to love you, to love you as no one ever knew how! To die and still love you more.”
– Pablo Neruda
25. “And since then, I am because you are. Since then, you are, I am, and we are. And for love, I will be, you will be, we will be.”
– Pablo Neruda
26. “She – the one who loved me – died in the spring…and took the spring to heaven.”
– Pablo Neruda
27. “There are countries, there are rivers
in your eyes,
my homeland is in your eyes,
I walk through them…”
– Pablo Neruda
28. “Thirst for you haunts me during the hungry nights.”
– Pablo Neruda
29. “For my heart, your chest is enough.”
– Pablo Neruda
30. “I love you as certain dark things are loved”
– Pablo Neruda
10 Pablo Neruda Quotes About Life
1. “Laughter is the language of the soul.”
– Pablo Neruda
2. “Someday, somewhere – anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.”
– Pablo Neruda
3. “If you don't climb the mountain, you'll never enjoy the view.”
– Pablo Neruda
4. “To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life.”
– Pablo Neruda
5. “Happiness is internal, not external; it does not depend on what we have, but on what we are.”
– Pablo Neruda
6. “You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.6. “Happiness is internal, not external; it does not depend on what we have, but on what we are.”
– Pablo Neruda
7. “Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us.”
– Pablo Neruda
8. “Only with ardent patience will we conquer the splendid city that will give light, justice and dignity to all men. Thus poetry will not have sung in vain.”
– Pablo Neruda
9. “He who does not travel, who does not read,
who does not listen to music,
who does not find grace in himself,
dies slowly.”
– Pablo Neruda
10. “There are wounds that– instead of opening our skin– open our eyes.”
– Pablo Neruda
10 More Meaningful Pablo Neruda Quotes
– Pablo Neruda
2. “There is a certain pleasure in madness, which only the madman knows.”
– Pablo Neruda
3. “We poets hate hate, and we make war on war.”
– Pablo Neruda
4. “Shyness is a condition foreign to the heart, a category, a dimension that leads to loneliness.”
– Pablo Neruda
5. “My dog looked at me, with those eyes purer than mine, he wasted time but looked at me, with the look he reserved for me all his sweet, furry life, his silent life, close to me, never bothering me, and never asking me for anything.”
– Pablo Neruda
6. “If you ask me what my poetry is I must tell you I don't know; but if you ask my poetry, it will tell you who I am.”
– Pablo Neruda
7. “Luck is the excuse for failures.”
– Pablo Neruda
8. “Those who destroy their self-love, those who do not allow themselves to be helped, die slowly.”
– Pablo Neruda
9. “Take bread away from me, take away water if you wish; but never deny me your smile.”
– Pablo Neruda
10. “I was born in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, the rain took my voice, and like wood, it soaks into the forest.”
– Pablo Neruda
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Technically, yes, it wouldn't be wrong of you to expect these Jewish love quotes to arrive on the blog a little later in the year—around Tu B'Av, the modern-day Israeli sort-of-kind-of-equivalent to Valentine's Day. But being the hopeless romantic I am, I just can't help myself. I jump at every opportunity to celebrate love. And talk about love. And generally love on love. And reading Jewish love quotes is a very nice way of accomplishing all of those things at once. Heck, I'll probably wake up sometime in September and start reading Jewish love quotes.
Besides, I do love Valentine's Day. Unabashedly and wholeheartedly. And besides besides, if the past year taught us anything, it's that nothing is promised. And triple besides, if you've landed on a page titled “Jewish quotes about love,” then you, my friend, are probably just as hopeless a romantic as I.
Just saying.
Goodness. I really thought that last paragraph would end with more of a bang. Please excuse my brain; she isn't cooperating this morning.
In any event, I hope these Jewish love quotes inspire you, delight you, make you laugh, make you cry, and remind you why there's nothing in this world quite as sacred as the human heart. The tale of love, after all, is “the oldest story in the world,” Anita Diamant reminds us. “The only story.”
“Love transforms us. It makes us beautiful in the eyes of those who love us. It makes us real.” —Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Z”L
“We are not mad. We are human.We want to love, and someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love, for the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey.” —Leonard Cohen
“It is not good for man to be alone.” Genesis 2:18
“Love is the gravity that pulls the universe together. Hatred is the anti-matter that rips it apart.” —Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
“I have loved you with an everlasting love.” —Yirmeyahu (Jeremiah) 31:3
"Never say love is ‘like’ anything… It isn’t." —Michael Chabon
“Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.” —Albert Einstein
“Be careful to honor your wife, for blessing enters the house only because of the wife.” —Talmud, Bava Metzia 59a
“This is love, she thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?” —Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
“Ani l'dodi, v'dodi li; I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine.” —Song of Songs 2:16
“I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because 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.” —Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally
"I like the way he danced. And then I like the way we danced together." ―Anita Diamant, Good Harbor
“If a person has known love, has felt and given love, that person's life has made a difference.” ―Harold S. Kushner, Living a Life That Matters
“Our sages recommended that a father should spend less than his means on food, up to his means on dress, and beyond his means for his wife and children.” —Maimonides
“To be in love is to be all in, which allows room for doubt. To be in love is to be in the same room as love, which acknowledges that fear and all of fear’s expressions—doubt, ambivalence, confusion, irritation, cringing, intrusive thoughts, projections—live in this room. To be in love is to hold hands with your safe, available partner and say, ‘I’m in. I’m in this thing called love with you. I might not always feel like I’m in, but when fear isn’t in the driver’s seat, I’m all in.'” —Sheryl Paul
“You can’t force anyone to love you or lend you money.” —Jewish Proverb
“Love is stronger than death.” —Song of Songs 8:6
“To love God truly, you must first love man. And if anyone tells you that he loves God but does not love his fellow man, he is lying.” —Hasidic proverb
“There are two things that cannot be achieved in life unless you close your eyes a little bit. And that's love and peace. If you want perfection you won't obtain either of them.” —Shimon Peres
“No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.” —Marcel Proust
“You have captured my heart, my own one, my bride. You have captured my heart, with one glance of your eyes, with one look at your décolletage. How sweet is your love, how much more delightful than wine!” —Song of Songs 4:9-10
“The story it told was unremarkable: a tale of love found and lost—the oldest story in the world. The only story.” —Anita Diamant, The Red Tent
“‘Love makes the world go round'—that is Jewish wisdom. According to Kabbalah, God created the world because love needs another to love. Three times a day, traditional Jews say in the Ashrei prayer: ‘God is good to all [in the world because] God’s mother love extends to all God’s creatures' (Psalms 145:9). So consuming is God’s love that Hashem brings a flood to wash out evil and start again. But Hashem also promises never to do that again and instead enters into a covenant to accept humans as they are. With all of their flaws, God partners with humans to build a perfect world (tikkun olam). We are called to return God’s love. Says the Torah: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might.' All commandments and rituals are meant to express our love for Hashem. In the Jewish ideal, every person finds the unique one destined for him/her to love totally (body, emotion, mind) to become fully human and together create and nurture more life. Such a love can mature through life—and beyond. ‘Love is stronger than death' (Song of Songs 8:6).” —Rabbi Yitz Greenberg
“A husband and wife are one soul, separated only through their descent to this world. When they are married, they are reunited again.” —Zohar I91b
“Of all life's pleasures, only love owes no debt to death.” —Anita Diamant, The Red Tent
“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine.” —Song of Songs 1:2
“To love is to have our hearts broken. We know this. We know this—and yet.” —Dani Shapiro
“What is chessed? It is usually translated as ‘kindness’ but is also means ‘love’—not love as emotion or passion, but love expressed as deed." —Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Z”L
“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.” —Marcel Proust
“There can be lunacy without love, but is there any great love without a little lunacy?” —Yochanan Tversky
“Love is many things, none of them logical.” —William Goldman, The Princess Bride
“The truth—that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.” —Viktor Frankl
“Any love that depends on a specific cause, when that cause is gone, the love is gone; but if it does not depend on a specific cause, it will never cease.” —Pirkei Avot 5:19
“A person should always be careful about the honor of his wife, for blessing is found in a person’s home only due to his wife…” —Talmud, Bava Metziz 59a
“Love is what redeems us from the prison cell of the self and all the sickness to which the narcissistic self is prone—from empty pride to deep depression to a sense of nihilism and the abyss.” —Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Z”L
“I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them.” ―Nora Ephron
“When a man buys his wife fine clothes and jewelry, he should have in mind that he is beautifying the Divine Presence, represented in this world by none other than his wife.” —Rabbi Yeshaya Horowitz
"All future events are merely a reproduction of the first moment of Love, giving birth to itself from an inner womb that continuously fertilizes itself. Love carries in itself its everlasting renewed beginning.” ―Franz Rosenzweig
“He who is full of joy is full of love.” —Baal Shem Tov
“Everyone has a right to love and be loved, and nobody on this Earth has the right to tell anyone that their love for another human being is morally wrong.” — Barbra Streisand
“The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and let it come in.” —Morrie Schwartz
“And so our rabbis decreed that a man should honor his wife more than himself, and love her as much as he loves himself.” —Maimonides
“Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-children's will be. But we learn to live with that love.” —Jonathan Safran Foer
“Egypt loved the lotus because it never dies. It is the same for people who are loved.” —Anita Diamant, The Red Tent
“I said, I want to tell you something. She said, you can tell me tomorrow. I had never told her how much I loved her. She was my sister. We slept in the same bed. There was never a right time to say it. It was always unnecessary. I thought about waking her. But it was unnecessary. There would be other nights. And how can you say I love you to someone you love? I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her. Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you… It's always necessary.” —Jonathan Safran Foer
“I married him against all evidence. I married him believing that marriage doesn't work, that love dies, that passion fades, and in so doing I became the kind of romantic only a cynic is truly capable of being.” —Nora Ephron
“Love is space and time measured by the heart.” —Marcel Proust
“Behold my beloved, here he comes. He is leaping over the mountains, bounding through the hills. He is like a gazelle, a young stag … and he calls to me: "Arise my darling, my perfect one, come away with me!” —Song of Songs 2:8-10
"To be a husband or wife, to be a parent, is inevitably to be aware of so many disappointing, exasperating things about your mate or child, but at the same time to see those people in depth, to see them with both eyes, and to be reminded of why you still love them." —Harold S. Kushner, Overcoming Life's Disappointments
“Mighty waters cannot quench love, rivers cannot sweep it away.” —Song of Songs 8:7
“My heart is a ladle of sweet water, brimming over.” —Anita Diamant, The Red Tent
“Love brings to life whatever is dead around us.” —Franz Rosenzweig
“Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.” —Rose Franken
“Sometimes love is stronger than a man's convictions.” —Isaac Bashevis Singer
“How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.” —Sigmund Freud
"We are so lightly here. It is in love that we are made. In love we disappear.” —Leonard Cohen
“Well, it was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, they meant we were supposed to be together… and I knew it. I knew it the very first time I touched her. It was like coming home… only to no home I'd ever known… I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car and I knew. It was like… magic.” —Nora Ephron, Sleepless in Seattle
“Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.' Mature love says, ‘I need you because I love you.'” —Erich Fromm
“Because loss exists, love is a risk. Whether it’s a friend, a partner, a child, a family member, or a pet, when we love deeply we open ourselves to the risk of loss that accompanies love… Ah, but the joy of loving… It is unparalleled! We must love if we are to be fully alive… Why do we take this unimaginably scary risk? Because to do anything less is to live a half-hearted life, one that is almost not worth living. Loving is the life force that keeps our hearts beating. It is the elixir that juices our life with meaning. It is why we wake up each morning and why we offer gratitude each night.” —Sheryl Paul
“Only love gives us the taste of eternity.” —Jewish Proverb
“For life to have personal meaning, there must be people who matter to us, and for whom we matter, unconditionally and non-substitutably.” —Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Z”L
“Love is homesickness.” —Nora Ephron
“There is no love without total faith.” —No’am Hamiddot
“Every human character appears only once in the history of human beings. And so does every event of love.” —Isaac Bashevis Singer, Love and Exile
“Both love and true friendship are more than a way of knowing that we matter to someone else. They are a way of mattering to the world, bringing God into a world that would otherwise be a vale of selfishness and loneliness." —Harold S. Kushner, Living a Life That Matters: Resolving the Conflict Between Conscience and Success
“One who has found a wife has found goodness, and has brought forth favor from God.” —
“Love is a covenant. Our entire Jewish tradition is about covenantal love — God created the world, so that God would enter into a relationship of love with the Jewish people, God redeemed us from Egypt because God loved our ancestors, God brought us to the Mountain of Sinai and revealedthe Torah, another covenantal contract of love. When the Torah commands us to love, we are commanded to be more than just kind. It involves two parties, a relationship, a covenant of how people in relationship should act towards one another. And it is intentional. It requires that both parties must consciously choose to act with chesed, with love towards those we encounter regularly. Olam Chesed Yibaneh. We must build this world from love.” —Rabbi Amanda Greene
P.S. If you loved these Jewish love quotes, you'll probably love the rest of my Valentine's Day and Tu B'Av ideas! Right this way.