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Love Quote by Stanislaw Lec

"Don't trust the heart, it wants your blood"

About this Quote

A heart that wants your blood is romance rewritten as predation. Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, the Polish master of aphoristic barbs, compresses an entire philosophy of self-deception into a single anatomical pun: we romanticize the heart as a soft moral compass, but biologically it is a pump, indifferent and hungry. The line works because it weaponizes that mismatch. It doesn t argue against feeling; it exposes how quickly feeling recruits a flattering mythology to get what it wants.

The imperative "Don t trust" reads like streetwise counsel, not a sermon. Lec isn t warning that emotion is messy; he s saying it has an agenda. The heart "wants" something, and what it wants is not metaphorical: it takes. Blood becomes the cost of surrendering judgment, the price paid in consequence - exhausted bodies, compromised ethics, ruined sleep, and all the little self-betrayals we file under passion.

Context matters: Lec wrote under the long shadow of 20th-century Europe, where lofty slogans about love, nation, purity, and destiny routinely demanded actual blood. His work, especially in Unkempt Thoughts, distrusts any inner voice that presents itself as pure. The subtext is political as much as personal: beware the rhetoric that sanctifies sacrifice, especially when it starts inside your own chest. By making the heart both symbol and organ, Lec lands a cynical, precise reminder: your most intimate impulses can be the most extractive ones, and they rarely send an invoice in advance.

Quote Details

TopicDark Humor
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Do Not Trust the Heart, It Wants Your Blood - S. Lec
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About the Author

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Stanislaw Lec (March 6, 1909 - May 7, 1996) was a Poet from Poland.

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