Love Quote by Edmund Waller

Waller dresses a social reprimand in velvet. “Could we forbear dispute” isn’t a neutral plea for calm; it’s a pointed diagnosis of a culture addicted to quarrel as sport. Writing across England’s most argumentative century - civil war, regicide, restoration - Waller understood that “dispute” was rarely just intellectual disagreement. It was faction, survival, and status. The line asks what kind of people we become when every conversation is a skirmish.

The move that makes it work is the conditional mood. “Could we” admits, with courtly politeness, that we probably can’t. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of a raised eyebrow: imagine if humans were capable of the restraint they constantly claim to value. Then he pivots to “practise love,” a phrase that refuses to romanticize virtue. Love here is not a feeling but a discipline, something you rehearse against your worse impulses. The subtext is stern: harmony is not achieved by being right; it’s achieved by choosing not to litigate everything.

The angel comparison could read as pious ornament, but it’s doing political labor. Angels “agree” because they aren’t competing for airtime, patronage, or moral dominance. Waller’s heaven is less theology than satire of earthly talk: we argue not because truth demands it, but because ego does.

He offers a fantasy of consensus while quietly exposing why consensus fails: our disputes are often the point.