The best line about love was written by a pilot
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry flew airmail routes over the Sahara and the Andes, crashed in the desert, and disappeared over the Mediterranean in 1944. “Looking outward together in the same direction” is not a romantic image — it is a cockpit, and it describes the only arrangement in which two people can be alongside each other for a very long time without the situation becoming about them. Almost every other line in this room is about what love feels like. His is about how it is survivable.
Shakespeare twice, and nothing has improved on him
Two of these fifteen are Shakespeare's, from 1605 and from Sonnet 116, and the room runs forward to 1988 without producing a stricter definition than his. Sonnet 116 sets a test almost nothing passes — whatever alters when it alteration finds is disqualified — and the four centuries of writing after it are mostly attempts to soften that without abandoning it.
Who said “love does not consist in gazing at each other”?
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French aviator and author of The Little Prince, in Wind, Sand and Stars (1939) — a memoir of flying mail routes across the Sahara and South America.
What is the best short love quote?
Audrey Hepburn’s “the best thing to hold onto in life is each other.” It is the plainest sentence in the room and the only one shaped like an instruction rather than a definition.
Did Lao Tzu say “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone dee…”?
No Chinese source exists. Its earliest known appearance is in Dean Koontz’s 1988 novel Lightning, where a character credits it to Lao Tzu without a source. It is filed here as attributed to Lao Tzu, which means widely credited and not traced to a primary source.