Translation of "Love makes it grow" in Latin for my tattoo

Question

Thank you very much for all your replies. However the answers do not exactly match the meaning.

"Love makes [anything] grow." — This anything can be anything — a person, work, condition, anything you can think of. Whatever love touches, it makes it grow. I'd prefer ambiguity and mystery for the "anything" part. What "anything" is determined by the imagination of the reader.

The subject is "love", the verb is "make grow". Two words for an ambiguous "anything".

I am looking for a Latin translation of "love makes it grow" or "love makes things grow" or an appropriate word in Latin for "grow". This is for a tattoo which will be on the outer side of the arm between elbow and wrist.

I have only tried automatic Google Translation.

A Latin tutor suggested "Amor crescere fecit" for the translation of "Love makes [anything] grow". Can I have your opinions on this translation?

Answer 1

To offer a variant to the great suggestions by Nickimite:

Amore crescit.
[It] grows with love.

There is an implicit noun or pronoun of some kind, but you don't have to spell it out and it can vary. It could be life, faith, love itself, a child, or anything else that could be referred to as it, he, or she.

Adding an explicit subject vita (life) as Nickimite did makes the sentence more complete, but if you are willing to leave it more open, you can.

As an alternative, you could say:

Crescit amando.
[It] grows by loving.

The choice depends on whether you prefer "love" as a noun or a verb.

These suggestions are very general and work in many contexts. However, if you have a more specific message in mind, something else might be better. Context matters.

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Based on the updated question, here are updated thoughts. There are ways to say "to make something do something" in Latin, but they tend to be clumsier than the English counterpart. The translation amore crescere fecit tries to emulate English too closely and does not quite work. It means "with love [it] made to grow" and is not really grammatical.

Therefore I suggest rephrasing "love makes everything grow" as "everything grows with/because/for love". This only requires a small update to my previous suggestion:

Omnia amore crescunt.
Everything grows with love.

You may want to compare this with the expression res parvae concordia crescunt, "little things grow with agreement". I find this the most idiomatic way to phrase this in Latin.

Answer 2

I don't like having "things" in the predicate. I like one of these translations:

Vita crescit amore. "Life grows (taller) with love"

Vita per amorem nascitur. "Life is born through love"

Caput vitae alet amoris fundamentum. "The beginning of life will grow the foundation of love." OR "A foundation of love will grow the beginning of life"

The last translation is my favorite because it utilizes an ambiguity that makes love and life paradoxically linked. Plus, it has a symmetrical structure much liked by the Romans. But, since this is a tattoo, I'd understand using the first translation because it's much shorter.

Answer 3

These are all good suggestions but how about just "alma caritas", or "almus amor" depending on the kind of love? I prefer the former.

Almus means "nurturing" or "nourishing" as in the well-known expression "alma mater". If something is nurturing then it makes things grow.

Caritas is the kind of love you have for humankind, amor for your boyfriend or girlfriend.

The phrase "alma Venus" is used a few in times in Latin poetry to refer to Venus, who is actually the goddess of Love, but the usage there has more to do with the tradition that Venus was the mother of the Roman people. So on a tattoo the meaning would start to drift towards Roman patriotism.