QuoteProject
To give and not expect return, that is what lies at the heart of love.
Oscar Wilde
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

True love involves selflessness, giving without expecting anything in return.

This quote by Oscar Wilde emphasizes that the essence of love is found in the act of giving without any expectations of receiving something back. It suggests that genuine love is rooted in selflessness and altruism, where one cares deeply for another's happiness and well-being without seeking personal rewards or acknowledgment in return.

Themes

LoveSelflessnessGivingRelationshipCare

In practice

Example use cases

During a wedding ceremony, to highlight the essence of true love.

More from Oscar Wilde

Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.
Oscar WildeRead
When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable.
Oscar WildeRead
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
Oscar WildeRead
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
Oscar WildeRead
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
Oscar WildeRead

Similar quotes

A good disposition is a virtue in itself, and it is lasting; the burden of the years cannot depress it, and love that is founded on it endures to the end.
OvidRead
Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.
Henri NouwenRead
So dear I love him, that with him, all deaths I could endure, without him, live no life.
John MiltonRead
'Lord you know that I love you...Lord, you know that I love you' (Jn 21:15-17). The Eucharist is, in a certain way, the culminating point of this answer. I wish to repeat it together with the whole Church to Him, who manifested His love by means of the Sacrament of His Body and Blood, remaining with us 'to the close of the age'
Pope John Paul IiRead
He knew that all things human are transitory and therefore that it must cease one day or another. He looked forward to that day with eager longing. Love was like a parasite in his heart, nourishing a hateful existence on his life's blood; it absorbed his existence so intensely that he could take pleasure in nothing else.
W. Somerset MaughamRead
I don’t understand the hatred and fear of gays and bisexuals and lesbians… it’s a concept I honestly cannot grasp. To me, it’s not who you love… a man, a woman, what have you… it’s the fact that you love. That is all that truly matters.
Al PacinoRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.