Love Quote by Alan Paton

Paton slips a paradox under the reader’s guard: love is “power completely” precisely because it refuses the usual machinery of power. The line turns on a shrewd psychological observation. Most power-seeking is a compensatory hunger, a bid to control outcomes, people, status. Love, in Paton’s framing, cancels that appetite. When you stop trying to dominate, you become strangely undominatable: less bribable, less manipulable, harder to frighten. The person who “seeks no power” can act without the anxious calculations that make authority brittle.

The subtext is political as much as intimate. Paton wrote as a South African novelist with a moral imagination forged against apartheid’s coercive state. In that world, “power” is a literal apparatus of law, police, racial hierarchy. Paton’s move is to argue that the most radical threat to a domination system isn’t a rival strongman; it’s a conscience that can’t be purchased by the system’s rewards or cowed by its punishments. Love becomes a kind of civil force: not sentimental, not soft, but destabilizing because it rewrites what counts as victory.

The intent is also quietly corrective. Paton doesn’t romanticize love as bliss; he treats it as a discipline that reorients desire away from possession. That’s why the sentence feels like a moral trapdoor: it tempts you with “power” and then insists the only way to earn it is to stop wanting it. In an age addicted to leverage, Paton proposes a more unsettling strength: the freedom of not needing to win.