Love & Passion Quote by Ben Hecht

Hecht’s line cuts romance down to its wiring, not its poetry: love is less a noble intention than a story we tell ourselves after the fact. The sting is in “nearly always” - a journalist’s qualifier that still lands like a verdict. He isn’t claiming lovers are liars so much as insisting they’re poor witnesses to their own motives. Desire, status, fear of loneliness, the thrill of pursuit, the need to be seen as a certain kind of person: the real drivers often sit backstage while the conscious mind takes bows.

The second sentence sharpens the knife. The lover is “full of secrets from himself,” a phrase that flips the usual romantic mystery. We like to imagine the beloved as the unknowable one, the locked room. Hecht argues the truer opacity is internal: we misread our own attachments, inventing “reasons” that flatter our self-image. That’s why the comparison works - the beloved’s hidden life becomes an alibi for our own blindness. If I can’t fully know you, I don’t have to fully know why I’m here.

Context matters: Hecht came up in the hard-boiled, modern urban world of newspapers, Broadway, and Hollywood, industries built on manufactured emotion and self-deception that still feels sincere while it’s happening. The quote carries that era’s cynicism and its fluency with performance. Love, in Hecht’s telling, isn’t less real because it’s partly misrecognized; it’s more dangerous, because it recruits your conscience as public relations.