Love Quote by Marie de France

Love here is not a lightning bolt but a contraband good: it moves "sweetly and discreetly", slipping past gatekeepers, reputations, and the surveillance of polite society. Marie de France, writing in the 12th century courtly milieu, knew that desire was rarely just personal. It was political, economic, and religiously policed. To love openly could mean scandal; to love at all could mean defying a marriage arranged to consolidate land and lineage. So the line praises not coyness for its own sake, but a strategy for making feeling survive inside a world that punishes it.

The phrasing is deceptively gentle. "Passes" suggests circulation, not possession; love is something you transmit, not hoard. That undercuts the feudal logic of ownership that governed bodies as much as property. "From person to person, from heart to heart" narrows the route: love must travel along an intimate, human channel, not through status or spectacle. Marie is drawing a boundary between genuine affect and public performance, between attachment that changes you and the ornamental romance a court might applaud.

Then comes the blade: "or it is nothing worth". No moral sermon, just a valuation. Love that can't move - that can't be carried, returned, risked, and reciprocated - is reduced to vanity or fantasy. Discretion isn't a denial of passion; it's the condition that lets passion remain real, shared, and therefore consequential. In an era of rigid hierarchies, Marie smuggles in a radical premise: love's legitimacy comes from mutual exchange, not permission.