"The greatest thing you'll ever learn is to love and be loved, just to love and be loved"
About this Quote
The subtext is quietly radical for its era. Ahbez lived the bohemian, back-to-nature outsider life, suspicious of status, commerce, and the modern grind. Read in that context, the line is less Hallmark and more anti-industrial: the point of being alive isn’t achievement or accumulation, it’s reciprocity. Not conquest, not possession, not even the glamorous version of romance, but a simple two-way human exchange. The phrase "be loved" matters as much as "to love" because it denies the martyr fantasy; you don’t get moral points for pouring yourself out in private misery. You’re meant to receive, too.
It also works because it’s musically engineered. The sentence moves like a chorus, designed to be remembered and repeated until it feels true. By the time it ends, you’ve already sung it to yourself twice. That’s the trick: the message isn’t argued, it’s installed.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
|---|---|
| Source | "Nature Boy" (song), lyrics by Eden Ahbez, 1948 — commonly cited lyric: "The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return." (popularized by Nat King Cole's 1948 recording) |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Ahbez, Eden. (2026, January 16). The greatest thing you'll ever learn is to love and be loved, just to love and be loved. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-greatest-thing-youll-ever-learn-is-to-love-124663/
Chicago Style
Ahbez, Eden. "The greatest thing you'll ever learn is to love and be loved, just to love and be loved." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-greatest-thing-youll-ever-learn-is-to-love-124663/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The greatest thing you'll ever learn is to love and be loved, just to love and be loved." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-greatest-thing-youll-ever-learn-is-to-love-124663/. Accessed 16 Feb. 2026.








