Love Quote by Jonathan Swift

Swift slices romance open like a surgeon who’s also a misanthrope: love, on its own, is a mood swing; esteem, on its own, is a polite freeze. The sentence works because it refuses the comforting story that affection is self-justifying. Love isn’t sanctified here. It’s “capricious and volatile,” the language of weather and chemicals, suggesting impulse masquerading as devotion. Swift’s jab is that passion without judgment becomes a kind of moral ADHD: intense, sincere in the moment, and reliably unstable.

Then he turns the blade. Esteem without love is “languid and cold,” a phrase that conjures a drawing-room virtue: correct, respectable, dead on arrival. Esteem is the social currency of Swift’s world - reputations, rank, propriety - and he knew how easily it slides into performance. Stripped of warmth, admiration becomes condescension; respect becomes a way to keep someone at arm’s length while congratulating yourself for being fair.

The subtext is a demand for integration: feeling must be disciplined by discernment, and discernment must be humanized by feeling. That tension fits Swift’s larger project as a satirist steeped in the hypocrisies of early 18th-century Anglo-Irish society, where marriage was often contract, love often scandal, and “esteem” a mask worn in public. He isn’t offering a Valentine; he’s offering a diagnostic. If you’re chasing intensity without regard, or practicing respect without tenderness, you’re not virtuous - you’re just predictable.