You want to be loved because you do not love; but the moment you love, it is finished, you are no longer inquiring whether or not somebody loves you. As long as you demand to be loved, there is no love in you; and if you feel no love, you are ugly, brutish, so why should you be loved? Without love you are a dead thing; and when the dead thing asks for love, it is still dead. Whereas, if your heart is full of love, then you never ask to be loved, you never put out your begging bowl for someone to fill it.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things
And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again.… Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore.
—Anne Lamott
In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
—Christopher Morley
The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied, or reoccupied, by our real problems—the problems of life and of human relations.
—John Maynard Keynes
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
—Robert M. Pirsig
Only do what your heart tells you.
—Princess Diana
Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers' gardens.
—Douglas William Jerrold
Love is when you don't have to be with another person to touch their heart!
—Torquato Tasso
Whoever said it got easier with time was wrong, death never got easier. The pain dulls around your heart, numbing the spot the deceased inhabited in your chest—but it was never easier. Loss was still loss—a physical pain, a hurt that reaches deep inside you and smothers your soul, forever indenting their memory.
—Kelsie Leverich in The Valentine’s Arrangement
I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result, I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to this.
—George Steiner
The heart is forever inexperienced.
—Henry David Thoreau
A gentle heart is tied with an easy thread.
—George Herbert
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
—Zelda Fitzgerald
A kiss makes the heart young again and wipes out the years.
—Rupert Brooke
If it were not for hopes, the heart would break.
—Thomas Fuller