In English, love refers to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from pleasure ("I loved that meal") to interpersonal attraction ("I love my partner"). "Love" may refer specifically to the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love, to the sexual love of eros, to the emotional closeness of familial love, to the platonic love that defines friendship, or to the profound oneness or devotion of religious love. This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, compared to other emotional states.

Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts.

Love may be understood as part of the survival instinct, a function to keep human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species.

Verb

love

1. To praise.
2. To promise.

Love is the answer and you know that for sure. Love is a flower, you got to let it — you got to let it grow.

• John Lennon, in "Mind Games" on Mind Games (1973).

• I want you to make love, not war, I know you've heard it before.
  • John Lennon, in his final fading statement in "Mind Games" on Mind Games (1973).

• O, there is nothing holier, in this life of ours, than the first consciousness of love,—the first fluttering of its silken wings.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion (1839), Book III, Chapter VI.

• Ah, how skillful grows the hand That obeyeth Love's command! It is the heart, and not the brain, That to the highest doth attain, And he who followeth Love's behest Far excelleth all the rest!
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Building of the Ship" in Voices of the Night: The Seaside and the Fireside; and Other Poems (1846), p. 34.

• That was the first sound in the song of love! Scarce more than silence is, and yet a sound. Hands of invisible spirits touch the strings Of that mysterious instrument, the soul, And play the prelude of our fate. We hear The voice prophetic, and are not alone.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Spanish Student (1843), Act I, scene 3, line 109.

• I love thee, as the good love heaven.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Spanish Student (1843), Act I, scene 3, line 146.

• Love keeps the cold out better than a cloak. It serves for food and raiment.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Spanish Student (1843), Act I, scene 5, line 52.

• How can I tell the signals and the signs By which one heart another heart divines? How can I tell the many thousand ways By which it keeps the secret it betrays?
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863-1874), Part III. Student's Tale. Emma and Eginhard, line 75.