Love Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce turns a warm, flattering word into a trapdoor. "Ardor" normally arrives perfumed with romance and virtue; in The Devil's Dictionary, it gets reclassified as a symptom. By defining it as "love without knowledge", he yanks passion away from destiny and plants it in ignorance. The joke is surgical: ardor isn’t elevated feeling, it’s what happens when you haven’t looked closely enough to be disenchanted.

The intent is double-edged. Bierce is mocking the cultural habit of treating intensity as proof of authenticity. If you feel it hard enough, we say, it must be real. His definition suggests the opposite: the less you know, the more room fantasy has to bloom. Knowledge here isn’t just facts about another person; it’s the abrasive contact with their full humanity - their contradictions, boredom, self-interest, and everyday pettiness. Ardor thrives in the spaces where those details haven’t arrived yet.

The subtext carries Bierce’s broader cynicism about sentimentality as a social performance. Victorian and post-Victorian public life prized moral language and romantic scripts; Bierce, a journalist shaped by war and political hypocrisy, made a career of puncturing them. He implies that ardor is not evidence of depth but of projection: you’re in love with the outline you’ve drawn, not the person who keeps moving.

It’s funny because it’s mean, and it’s durable because it’s recognizable. The line flatters the reader’s sophistication while quietly accusing them, too.