Love Quote by Oscar Hammerstein II

Romance gets caught in a feedback loop here, and Hammerstein turns it into a clean, devastating question. On the surface it sounds like flirtation - the kind of line you can sing with a smile. Underneath, it’s an anxious audit of value: what exactly is being loved, and how fragile is it?

The brilliance is that it refuses a stable answer. If beauty is the cause of love, the speaker is renting affection on a short lease, one illness or year away from eviction. If love is the cause of beauty, then attraction becomes an act of perception, almost a moral choice: you make me lovely by how you see me. That’s tender, but it’s also terrifying, because it places your self-image in someone else’s hands. Either way, the speaker is asking for reassurance while admitting the fear that reassurance might be impossible.

Context matters: this comes from Cinderella, a story literally obsessed with transformation, gazes, and social sorting by appearance. Hammerstein weaponizes the fairy tale’s central mechanism - the makeover - and asks whether the magic is fabric and glass or simply being chosen. As a mid-century musical-theater lyricist, he’s doing what the form does best: smuggling adult doubt into a melody you can hum. The line lands because it’s not a puzzle to solve; it’s a dilemma to live with, especially in a culture where women are trained to treat beauty as proof they deserve love, and love as proof they’re beautiful.