Love Quote by Thomas Fuller

Love, Fuller implies, is a practice with two necessary pressures: distance and daily contact. The line is balanced like a proverb because it’s built on a clean, almost geometric contrast. “Absence” doesn’t merely test affection; it sharpens it, like a blade honed by friction. You remember selectively, you idealize, you turn the beloved into a concentrated image. The subtext is quietly skeptical about how our minds behave: deprivation intensifies desire not because the bond is purer, but because the imagination takes over when the senses can’t.

Then comes the second clause, which refuses the romantic fantasy that longing alone is enough. “Presence strengthens it” shifts love from hunger to habit. Being together supplies the unglamorous materials that make attachment durable: shared routines, witnessed vulnerabilities, small repairs after conflict. Strength isn’t heat; it’s structure. Fuller’s rhetoric works because it grants both states a virtue, making the saying feel less like a warning than a usable rule.

Context matters: as a 17th-century English clergyman living through civil war, exile, and political whiplash, Fuller wrote in an era where separation wasn’t a metaphor; it was policy, plague, travel, imprisonment. Protestant moral writing also prized moderation and discipline. This aphorism has that temperament: it domesticates passion into something governable. Love is neither a constant blaze nor a fragile flower. It’s an edge you hone in absence, and a beam you reinforce in presence.