Love Quote by Bessie Head

Discipline, for Bessie Head, isn’t a clenched jaw or a moral scoreboard. It’s a practiced orientation: love and reverence as something you train, not something you wait to “feel.” The phrasing is slyly corrective. By calling it “a discipline I have observed,” she dodges preachiness and positions herself as a reporter on human survival: this is what works, this is what holds.

The subtext is that love is not automatically virtuous; it can be sentimental, fickle, or even predatory when it’s untethered from restraint. Reverence tightens the idea. It implies a refusal to reduce people to functions, gossip, categories, or political symbols. In Head’s world, that refusal is labor. It’s also risk. To treat people with reverence when your life has taught you to expect rejection is not softness; it’s stamina.

Context sharpens the line’s moral charge. Head wrote out of exile and precarity, shaped by apartheid’s bureaucratic cruelty and the isolations of being “out of place” in southern Africa. Her work is full of communities that can be both sustaining and suffocating, where power travels through rumor, gender, and scarcity. Against that, “attitude” matters: it’s the internal posture that determines whether you become another instrument of harm.

The quote lands because it reframes ethics as craft. Love becomes a daily practice of attention and restraint - a chosen standard of seeing - and that’s why it reads less like uplift than like a hard-won method for staying human.