Love Quote by Jeremy Taylor

Taylor’s image is almost indecently tactile for a clergyman: a fly sunk into an apple’s core, bathing in sugar while quietly rotting in place. The line is a miniature sermon against the seductive logic of self-denial when it curdles into self-enclosure. Celibacy, in his telling, can feel like moral luxury - “perpetual sweetness” suggests not just pleasure but the steady reassurance of being untempted, unentangled, unbothered by domestic compromise. The apple reads as both comfort and symbol: Eden repurposed as a private pantry.

The cruelty is in the turn. The fly doesn’t feast heroically; it’s trapped by what it consumes. “Sits alone” and “confined” strip the spiritual gloss off solitude and reframe it as a kind of slow suffocation. Taylor’s subtext is social as much as theological: a life sealed off from ordinary bonds risks becoming spiritually narcissistic, a closed system where the self congratulates the self. The warning isn’t that celibacy is sinful; it’s that it can be self-administered anesthesia.

Context matters. Writing in 17th-century England, Taylor is a Protestant divine in a culture that had recently defined itself against Catholic clerical celibacy, while also valuing household order as a moral technology. Marriage isn’t merely companionship here; it’s discipline, community, legacy. The metaphor weaponizes that worldview: sweetness without relation becomes sterility, and sterility becomes a lonely death - “singularity” as both isolation and an indictment of being irreducibly, stubbornly one.