Top 120 Helen Fisher Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A world without love is a deadly place.”

— Helen Fisher

2. “Romantic love is an obsession. It possesses you. You lose your sense of self. You can’t stop thinking about another human being.”

— Helen Fisher

3. “Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere; some say the poorest in the world.”

— Helen Fisher

4. “When you massage someone, the levels of oxytocin go up in the brain, and oxytocin is one of the chemicals that drives attachment.”

— Helen Fisher

5. “Romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it’s going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it’s going poorly.”

— Helen Fisher

6. “Psychologists maintain that the dizzy feeling of intense romantic love lasts only about 18 months to-at best-three years.”

— Helen Fisher

Featured in: Romance Quotes

7. “Any kind of novelty or excitement drives up dopamine in the brain, and dopamine is associated with romantic love.”

— Helen Fisher

8. “Barriers tend to intensify romance. It’s called the ‘Romeo and Juliet effect.’ I call it ‘frustration attraction.’”

— Helen Fisher

Featured in: Romance Quotes

9. “There’s biology in everything, even when you’re feeling spiritual.”

— Helen Fisher

10. “Experiences shape the brain, but the brain shapes the way we view experiences, too.”

— Helen Fisher

11. “We’re apt to fall in love with those who are mysterious and challenging to us.”

— Helen Fisher

12. “It’s in our genes, we were built to wander.”

— Helen Fisher

13. “The Great Depression of the 1930s saw more American unmarried women working from nine to five, mostly in repetitive, boring, subordinate, dead-end jobs. But the number of working women doubled between 1870 and 1940. During World War II it doubled once again.”

— Helen Fisher

14. “Globalization requires taking a broad contextual and long-term view.”

— Helen Fisher

15. “A Rolex watch or an expensive car are the things guys often use to show status, wealth, and basic desirability.”

— Helen Fisher

16. “Women’s worst invention was the plow. With the beginning of plow agriculture, men’s roles became extremely powerful. Women lost their ancient jobs as collectors.”

— Helen Fisher

17. “Keep an open heart. We are wired to find love.”

— Helen Fisher

18. “We are lied to by our love songs.”

— Helen Fisher

19. “Touch is the mother of the senses. Not only are women more sensitive when they touch, but they’re also more sensitive to being touched.”

— Helen Fisher

20. “Saliva has testosterone and estrogen. When you kiss, you’re having a chemical experience.”

— Helen Fisher

21. “I was married and divorced at 23.”

— Helen Fisher

22. “Men and women are like two feet; they can help each other get ahead.”

— Helen Fisher

23. “Men don’t need linguistic talent; they just need courage and words.”

— Helen Fisher

24. “You don’t come home from the office to spend time with another job. Hopefully you come home to someone you can have a good time with.”

— Helen Fisher

25. “There are cognitive processes and limbic reactions associated with basic emotions. And you can change brain chemistry, but you’re still not going to change memories and experiences in a human being.”

— Helen Fisher

26. “For so many generations, a woman’s only career path was to marry well and to marry up. Those days have changed.”

— Helen Fisher

27. “I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one individual at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy.”

— Helen Fisher

28. “Hair that looks like it’s been naturally sun-bleached makes you seem youthful, like you spend a lot of time outdoors. And that appeals to most people.”

— Helen Fisher

29. “Along with our many human propensities, we evolved a huge cerebral cortex with which we make decisions.”

— Helen Fisher

30. “There were real reasons that you were attracted to somebody originally. The brain doesn’t pick willy-nilly. Unless you part ways hating each other for some reason, that mechanism could get triggered again. You can literally fall in love again.”

— Helen Fisher

31. “People have often asked me whether what I know about love has spoiled it for me. And I just simply say, ‘Hardly.’ You can know every single ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake, and then when you sit down and eat that cake, you can still feel that joy.”

— Helen Fisher

32. “Until recently, we regarded love as supernatural. We were willing to study the brain chemistry of fear and depression and anger but not love.”

— Helen Fisher

33. “It’s almost as if men who get tribal tattoos are trying to signal that they are dangerous, they’re to be respected, and they’re powerful.”

— Helen Fisher

34. “You have to choose between the past and the present, and there really is no choice, Faye, it’s a no-brainer. You can’t live in both, and if you don’t choose between the past and the present, then one day that choice may be made for you, and you may not like the way it goes.”

— Helen Fisher

35. “Both sexes like the exercise and challenge of sports, but for men it’s also a basic display behavior for impressing and winning a mate.”

— Helen Fisher

36. “If we remained perpetually infatuated, we couldn’t eat, sleep or work.”

— Helen Fisher

37. “People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. It’s one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.”

— Helen Fisher

38. “Jealousy can even be good for love. One partner may feel secretly flattered when the other is mildly jealous. And catching someone flirting with your beloved can spark the kind of lust and romance that reignites a relationship.”

— Helen Fisher

Featured in: Romance Quotes

39. “Nobody gets out of love alive. You turn into a menace or a pest when you’ve been rejected.”

— Helen Fisher

40. “Men want to think women don’t cheat, and women want men to think they don’t cheat, and therefore the sexes have been playing a little psychological game with each other.”

— Helen Fisher

41. “You know, when you’ve been dumped, the one thing you love to do is just forget about this human being, and then go on with your life – but no, you just love them harder.”

— Helen Fisher

42. “Kissing is not just kissing. It is a major escalation or de-escalation point in a powerful process of mate choice.”

— Helen Fisher

43. “Women are better at reading body language everywhere in the world. As a matter of fact, it’s associated with the female hormone estrogen. Women are better at figuring out of tone of voice, reading your face and posture and gesture.”

— Helen Fisher

44. “We evolved in a tropical climate where the smells of plants and flowers were all around us. We spent a lot of time in the trees with a lot of sunlight and no clothes.”

— Helen Fisher

45. “Blushing is thought to be linked to increased levels of norepinephrine in the brain, which may be associated with romantic feelings. It signals that we are interested and excited, which is attractive to men.”

— Helen Fisher

46. “Anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies. They’ve never found a society that did not have it.”

— Helen Fisher

47. “You size up someone physically in less than one second – too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, too old, too young, too stuffy, too scruffy.”

— Helen Fisher

48. “You fall in love with somebody who fits within what I call your ‘love map,’ an unconscious list of traits that you build in childhood as you grow up. And I also think that you gravitate to certain people, actually, with somewhat complementary brain systems.”

— Helen Fisher

49. “Why do we feel jealousy? Therapists often regard the demon as a scar of childhood trauma or a symptom of a psychological problem. And it’s true that people who feel inadequate, insecure, or overly dependent tend to be more jealous than others.”

— Helen Fisher

50. “Men are so visual, they see a woman who appeals to them physically, and it will trigger the romantic love system faster.”

— Helen Fisher