Love Quote by George Farquhar

Farquhar slips a velvet knife into the polite idea that we’re persuaded by principle. In two brisk lines, he reframes conversion - moral, religious, even political - as theater: the audience doesn’t fall for the sermon, they fall for the performer. The word “charming” does heavy lifting. It’s not virtue; it’s social power, charisma, flirtation, the kind of embodied persuasion that bypasses argument. “True converts” sounds earnest, almost devotional, but Farquhar undercuts it by implying the conversion is less about truth than about appetite.

The couplet’s wit comes from its neat inversion of Enlightenment self-image. People like to imagine they adopt “precepts” because they’re rational and correct. Farquhar suggests the opposite: we retrofit our ethics to match our desires, then call the result conviction. That’s the subtextual jab at hypocrisy, and it lands because it’s delivered in the clean, epigrammatic snap of Restoration-and-after comedy, where manners are a currency and sincerity is often just a costume with better tailoring.

Context matters: Farquhar wrote for a stage crowded with rakes, coquettes, and social climbers, in a culture newly attuned to reputation, performance, and the politics of charm. His line also encodes the era’s gendered dynamics: women’s sanctioned leverage is “charm,” and men’s susceptibility gets dressed up as admiration for “precepts.” It’s not a romantic compliment so much as a diagnostic - a reminder that persuasion is rarely disembodied, and that the “teacher” often matters more than the lesson.