Most Lao Tzu quotes about love circulating online aren’t his. The Tao Te Ching (道德經, Daodejing), compiled around the fourth to third century BCE, never discusses love between two people. The character usually translated “love”, 愛, appears five times in the book, and in three of those five places it’s a warning. What Laozi does name as his first treasure is 慈 (ci), the protective tenderness of a parent, and he says it is what makes courage possible: “With that gentleness I can be bold” (Tao Te Ching 67).
A note on translation, because it decides what you can trust. Where a pre-1930 English version exists I’ve used it rather than writing my own, since it’s out of copyright and you can look it up. Every rendering below is James Legge’s 1891 Tao Teh King, and each line says so. The Chinese can be checked against the original at the Chinese Text Project (ctext.org).
One thing worth knowing before you read further: Legge reaches for the word “love” in eight chapters, but only five of those correspond to 愛. In the others he is translating 親, closeness, or 好, fondness. English flattens three different words into one, which is how a book with almost nothing to say about love starts to look like a book about love.
Lao Tzu quotes about love at a glance
| Quote | Source | What it means |
| “With that gentleness I can be bold” | Tao Te Ching 67 | Tenderness is the root of courage, not its opposite |
| “The first is gentleness; the second is economy; and the third is shrinking from taking precedence of others” | Tao Te Ching 67 | He names three treasures and puts 慈 first |
| “He who would administer it with the love which he bears to his own person may be entrusted with it” | Tao Te Ching 13 | Care the world the way you care about your own skin |
| “To those who are not good (to me), I am also good” | Tao Te Ching 49 | Regard isn’t conditional on being treated well |
| “He deals with them all as his children” | Tao Te Ching 49 | The sage’s posture toward everyone, without exception |
| “He does not cast away any man” | Tao Te Ching 27 | Nothing and no one gets written off |
| “Who loves large stores / Gives up the richer state” | Tao Te Ching 44 | Clinging is expensive; it costs more than it holds |
| “Loves, but does not (appear to set a) value on, himself” | Tao Te Ching 72 | Self-regard without self-importance |
| “To recompense injury with kindness” | Tao Te Ching 63 | Return harm with good, and see the next chapter for the doubt |
| “It produces them and makes no claim to the possession of them” | Tao Te Ching 51 | The shape of real care: give, then let go of ownership |
What did Lao Tzu say about love?
Start with the awkward fact, which is that he didn’t say much, and what he did say was mostly a caution.
I counted the character myself in a public-domain text of the Daodejing rather than trusting the numbers that get repeated. 愛 turns up five times, in chapters 10, 13, 27, 44 and 72. Two of the five are about governing. One is about hoarding. One is about not prizing yourself. Only chapter 13 uses it in a way a modern reader would recognise as generous.
Why the Tao Te Ching has so little love in it
The reason isn’t that Laozi was cold. It’s that he thought love, announced as a virtue, was a symptom.
“When the Great Tao (Way or Method) ceased to be observed, benevolence and righteousness came into vogue.”
— Tao Te Ching 18 · 大道廢，有仁義 · trans. Legge, 1891
Read that literally, because it’s stranger than it sounds. Benevolence, 仁, the word Confucius made the centre of his teaching, is listed here as what shows up after the thing that mattered has already gone. It’s a fallback. Chapter 38 spells out the descent: the Way is lost, then virtue appears; virtue is lost, then benevolence appears; benevolence is lost, then righteousness; then propriety, which Laozi calls “the commencement of disorder”.
Chapter 19 goes further and says to throw it out.
“If we could renounce our benevolence and discard our righteousness, the people would again become filial and kindly.”
— Tao Te Ching 19 · 絕仁棄義，民復孝慈 · trans. Legge, 1891
And the most famous anti-love line in the book, which is the one people quote as evidence that Daoism is harsh:
“Heaven and earth do not act from (the impulse of) any wish to be benevolent; they deal with all things as the dogs of grass are dealt with.”
— Tao Te Ching 5 · 天地不仁，以萬物為芻狗 · trans. Legge, 1891
芻狗 were straw dogs, dressed up for a sacrifice and then thrown on the ground and walked over. Laozi’s point is not that the universe is cruel. It’s that the universe doesn’t have favourites, and that a love which has favourites isn’t the thing he’s after. He says so explicitly at the end of the book: “In the Way of Heaven, there is no partiality of love” (79).
So when you go looking for Lao Tzu love quotes, you’re asking a book that treats partial love as the problem. Everything interesting he says about the subject comes out of that constraint.
The first treasure: 慈, the tenderness that makes you brave
“But I have three precious things which I prize and hold fast. The first is gentleness; the second is economy; and the third is shrinking from taking precedence of others.”
— Tao Te Ching 67 · 我有三寶，持而保之。一曰慈，二曰儉，三曰不敢為天下先 · trans. Legge, 1891
This is the passage every genuine Lao Tzu love quote traces back to, and it’s worth being precise about the first word.
慈 is the character for a mother’s feeling. It has 心, heart, at the bottom, and it’s the same 慈 that appears in 孝慈, the filial-and-kind relationship between parents and children. It is not romantic, and it isn’t generic goodwill either. It’s the regard someone has for something dependent on them.
Legge chose “gentleness”, which is defensible and slightly too soft. Twentieth-century translators often choose “love” or “compassion”, and you can see why. What matters is what he says it does.
“With that gentleness I can be bold; with that economy I can be liberal; shrinking from taking precedence of others, I can become a vessel of the highest honour.”
— Tao Te Ching 67 · 慈故能勇 · trans. Legge, 1891
慈故能勇. Four characters, and the structure is a claim about cause: tenderness is what produces courage, not what competes with it. Laozi is arguing against a whole tradition of thinking that says hardness is what makes someone brave. He thinks the person who has something to protect is the one who can act, and the person who doesn’t is only performing.
He puts it even more bluntly two lines later, talking about war: “Gentleness is sure to be victorious even in battle, and firmly to maintain its ground.” This is the chapter that gets folded into modern “love makes you brave” content, and you can see the family resemblance. It’s also where the resemblance ends, because Laozi isn’t talking about a feeling between two adults. He’s talking about a ruling disposition, the first of three, and it’s about as unromantic as a disposition can be.
Loving the world the way you love your own body
“Therefore he who would administer the kingdom, honouring it as he honours his own person, may be employed to govern it, and he who would administer it with the love which he bears to his own person may be entrusted with it.”
— Tao Te Ching 13 · 愛以身為天下，若可托天下 · trans. Legge, 1891
Chapter 13 is about favour and disgrace, and it opens with one of the strangest lines in the book: favour and disgrace should both alarm you. The logic runs through the body. The reason you can be hurt, Laozi says, is that you have a body; if you had no body, what could touch you?
Then this. The person fit to be handed the world is the person who cares about it the way they care about their own skin.
That’s the closest thing to a Lao Tzu quote about love in the ordinary sense, and it’s still not about two people. It’s about a ruler. But the mechanism is recognisable enough that it travels: love as extending self-concern outward until it covers more than yourself. It also happens to be the opposite of the self-sacrifice people expect from ancient wisdom. He doesn’t say forget yourself. He says start there and widen the circle.
Being good to people who aren’t good to you
“To those who are good (to me), I am good; and to those who are not good (to me), I am also good;–and thus (all) get to be good.”
— Tao Te Ching 49 · 善者，吾善之；不善者，吾亦善之；德善 · trans. Legge, 1891
The chapter opens with a line that sounds like self-effacement and isn’t: the sage has no fixed mind of his own, he makes the minds of the people his mind. Then this, and then the closing image.
“The people all keep their eyes and ears directed to him, and he deals with them all as his children.”
— Tao Te Ching 49 · 聖人皆孩之 · trans. Legge, 1891
聖人皆孩之. 孩 is the word for a child’s laugh, and used as a verb here it means treating someone as a child. It’s patronising if you squint and consoling if you don’t. Either way it’s unconditional, and that’s the point Laozi keeps making: the regard doesn’t adjust based on how the other person behaves.
Nobody gets thrown away
“In the same way the sage is always skilful at saving men, and so he does not cast away any man; he is always skilful at saving things, and so he does not cast away anything.”
— Tao Te Ching 27 · 是以聖人常善救人，故無棄人；常善救物，故無棄物 · trans. Legge, 1891
無棄人. No discarded person. The chapter is about a kind of skill that leaves no trace: the good traveller leaves no tracks, the good knot needs no rope. Then it applies the same idea to people. The sage’s competence consists partly in not writing anyone off.
Of everything in the book, this is the line I’d point someone to who wants Laozi on how to treat a person. Not because it’s warm, but because it’s structural. It’s a claim about what a competent life looks like, and discarding people doesn’t appear in the picture.
Where love becomes a warning
Two of the five 愛 occurrences are cold water, and they matter more than the generous ones, because they tell you what Laozi thought love does to a person who has it.
“Or fame or life, / Which do you hold more dear? … Who cleaves to fame / Rejects what is more great; / Who loves large stores / Gives up the richer state.”
— Tao Te Ching 44 · 甚愛必大費；多藏必厚亡 · trans. Legge, 1891
甚愛必大費. Deep love necessarily costs a great deal. 費 is expenditure, what gets spent. Laozi is doing arithmetic: attachment is not free, and the price is paid in the thing you were trying to keep. Note that he pairs it with 多藏必厚亡, hoarding guarantees heavy loss. The two are the same failure measured two ways.
Then chapter 72, where the object of the verb is yourself.
“Therefore the sage knows (these things) of himself, but does not parade (his knowledge); loves, but does not (appear to set a) value on, himself.”
— Tao Te Ching 72 · 是以聖人自知不自見；自愛不自貴 · trans. Legge, 1891
自知不自見，自愛不自貴. Knows himself but doesn’t display himself; cares for himself but doesn’t prize himself. This is the one place in early Chinese thought I know of where self-love is named and approved, and it’s approved only in a form that’s been separated from self-importance. 貴 is the word for expensive, for high rank. The sage refuses to put a price on himself.
That distinction is doing a lot of work, and most Lao Tzu love quotes quietly delete it.
And the instruction that the book itself seems to doubt
“(It is the way of the Tao) to act without (thinking of) acting; to conduct affairs without (feeling the) trouble of them; to taste without discerning any flavour; to consider what is small as great, and a few as many; and to recompense injury with kindness.”
— Tao Te Ching 63 · 報怨以德 · trans. Legge, 1891
報怨以德. Return injury with virtue, or with kindness. It’s four characters sitting in the middle of a list, and it’s the line that gets pulled out for wedding readings.
Here’s what nobody mentions. Chapter 63 isn’t the only place it appears, and the second appearance is not a repetition.
“When a reconciliation is effected (between two parties) after a great animosity, there is sure to be a grudge remaining (in the mind of the one who was wrong). And how can this be beneficial (to the other)?”
— Tao Te Ching 79 · 和大怨，必有餘怨；報怨以德，安可以為善？ · trans. Legge, 1891
Settle a great resentment, and a residue of resentment remains. The text asks, plainly, how returning injury with kindness can be considered good. Scholars have argued about whether 79 endorses the saying or dismantles it. I’ve read it both ways and I don’t think it resolves.
What I can report is that I tried chapter 63 once on a grievance I actually had, a friend who passed on something I’d asked her not to. It lasted about a week before I caught myself keeping a private ledger of how generous I was being, which is a fairly reliable sign that the kindness was a performance. Chapter 79 reads to me like someone who noticed the same thing.
What is Laozi’s kind of love actually for?
Every listicle stops at “be like water”. Go one step further and ask what the caring is for, and there’s an answer in the text, stated twice in almost identical words.
“It produces them and makes no claim to the possession of them; it carries them through their processes and does not vaunt its ability in doing so; it brings them to maturity and exercises no control over them;–this is called its mysterious operation.”
— Tao Te Ching 51 · 生而不有，為而不恃，長而不宰 · trans. Legge, 1891
生而不有，為而不恃，長而不宰. Produce without possessing, act without leaning on it, raise without ruling. It appears in chapter 10 as well, and it’s the cleanest statement in the book of what care looks like when it isn’t contaminated by ownership.
That’s the thesis, and it’s worth being blunt about how demanding it is. 有 is the ordinary verb for having. Laozi isn’t saying don’t be possessive in the jealous sense. He’s describing a mode of benefiting where the benefit doesn’t come with a claim attached, and he thinks this is what the Way does, so it’s what a person should do.
Chapter 8 makes the same point with water, and it’s the most quoted chapter in the whole text for good reason.
“The highest excellence is like (that of) water. The excellence of water appears in its benefiting all things, and in its occupying, without striving (to the contrary), the low place which all men dislike.”
— Tao Te Ching 8 · 上善若水 · trans. Legge, 1891
利萬物而不爭. Benefits the ten thousand things and doesn’t contend. The point isn’t that water is soft, which is how it usually gets retold. It’s that water does something useful and then takes the low position, and nobody thanks it.
Put 8 and 51 together and you get Laozi’s actual position on love, which no quote collection I’ve seen states: care is measured by whether the person being cared for ends up free. Not whether the feeling is intense. Not whether it’s returned. Whether the other party is in a position to be themselves.
This is also where Laozi and Confucius genuinely part company, and it’s a more interesting disagreement than the usual “Daoism is natural, Confucianism is social” summary. Confucius made 仁 the virtue of virtues and built it out of graded relationships, starting with the one between parent and child. Laozi watched that programme and wrote chapter 18: the moment you need to preach benevolence, you’ve already lost the thing it was supposed to replace.
You can read the Confucian side of that argument, and the Daoist one, and they don’t reconcile. There’s a third option in the same period that I find more appealing than either, which is Mozi’s 兼愛, care extended equally to everyone regardless of relationship — Laozi would have hated it, and I’m not sure he’d have been right.
Which Lao Tzu quotes about love are fake?
Search “Lao Tzu love” and the top results are quote farms running the same handful of lines. Four of the most repeated, checked against the text.
Did Lao Tzu say “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage”?
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
— Not Lao Tzu.
This is the single most reproduced Lao Tzu love quote on the internet, and there is no passage in the Tao Te Ching that corresponds to it. No Chinese source has ever been produced for it. The wording is doing something classical Chinese doesn’t do: it’s a balanced antithesis about two interior states, and its whole shape belongs to modern inspirational English.
You can see where it came from, though. 慈故能勇 in chapter 67 really does connect being tender with being brave. Somebody at some point turned that into a sentence about loving and being loved, and it spread because it’s a better sentence than the original. It just isn’t his.
Did Lao Tzu say “Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses”?
“Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.”
— Not Lao Tzu.
Unverified, and the structure gives it away. Head, heart and senses as a triad is Western faculty psychology, the division of a person into reason, emotion and appetite. Chinese thought of the period doesn’t carve people up that way; it works with 心, the heart-mind, which does all three jobs at once. Even the verb “attacks” is wrong for him, since Laozi’s whole method is to stop things being attacked, including the self.
Quotery, which is one of the few databases that bothers to check, files it under source unknown and notes that it reads like a later Western moral maxim.
Did Lao Tzu say “Because of a great love, one is courageous”?
“Because of a great love, one is courageous.”
— Not a quotation, but it is his idea.
This one is the exception, and it’s worth separating from the others. It isn’t a translation of anything in the Tao Te Ching, and you shouldn’t put quotation marks around it. But 慈故能勇 says close to the same thing, and whoever wrote the English was working from a real passage.
I’d call it a paraphrase that survived without attribution, which is how a lot of bad quotations get started. It’s the only item on this list with a genuine ancestor.
Did Lao Tzu say “Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love”?
“Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.”
— Not Lao Tzu.
Three beats, three abstractions, a tidy escalation from speech to thought to action. Nothing like it in the text. Laozi is suspicious of exactly this kind of formulation: chapter 38’s descent from the Way to propriety is a description of virtue that has become a slogan, and a line this neat is what he was warning about.
There’s a real passage it gets confused with, chapter 81’s 信言不美，美言不信 — truthful words aren’t beautiful, beautiful words aren’t true. That’s about language, not kindness, and it’s colder.
How to read Laozi on love without sentimentalising him
Three things I’d take from the text, and one I’d leave.
Take 慈故能勇. Courage that comes from caring about something is a different substance from courage that comes from not caring, and it lasts longer.
Take 生而不有. Care that quietly converts into ownership is the failure mode Laozi was describing in chapter 44, and it’s recognisable in ordinary life: the person who reminds you what they did for you has told you the price was never paid off.
Take 自愛不自貴. Caring for yourself is in the text and approved. Caring about your rank isn’t. Those are different activities even though they feel the same from the inside.
Leave the idea that Laozi was a soft romantic. He wrote that heaven and earth treat everything like straw dogs, he listed benevolence as a symptom of decline, and he said to renounce it. The tenderness in chapter 67 sits inside a book that spends most of its energy on power, governance and not being pushed around. That’s what makes it worth reading. A Laozi who only said comforting things about love wouldn’t be worth checking.
“In the Way of Heaven, there is no partiality of love; it is always on the side of the good man.”
— Tao Te Ching 79 · 天道無親，常與善人 · trans. Legge, 1891
Everything in this article can be checked against the Tao Te Ching text, and Laozi’s other attributed sayings are collected on his author page.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most famous Lao Tzu quote about love?
Online, it’s “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage,” and Laozi didn’t say it. In the actual text, the passage that comes closest to a statement about love is chapter 67: of three treasures, the first is 慈, and it is what makes boldness possible.
Does the Tao Te Ching mention love at all?
Barely. The character 愛 appears five times, in chapters 10, 13, 27, 44 and 72, and three of those are warnings about attachment. The word Laozi uses positively is 慈, a parent’s protective tenderness, which appears in chapters 18, 19 and 67.
What does 慈 mean in Taoism?
It’s the tenderness a parent has for something dependent on them, and Laozi names it his first treasure in chapter 67. Unlike Confucian 仁, which is built up through graded relationships and deliberate cultivation, 慈 is presented as something closer to a natural disposition that you protect rather than construct.
Did Lao Tzu believe in loving your enemies?
Chapter 63 lists “recompense injury with kindness” among the ways of the Tao, so the instruction is in the text. Chapter 79 then appears to question whether it can work, since settling a great resentment always leaves a residue. Both passages are genuine; they don’t agree.
Where do the fake Lao Tzu love quotes come from?
Mostly twentieth-century English collections that needed an ancient name to attach to an inspirational line. The Tao Te Ching is short, aphoristic and famous, which makes it the easiest book in world literature to forge a quotation from.
