Love Quote by George Chapman

Chapman builds a trap for anyone addicted to moral certainty: push any human force far enough and it flips into its opposite. The sentence moves like a courtroom brief disguised as poetry, stacking pair after pair - heat/cold, love/hatred, rigor/license - until the pattern feels less like opinion than a law of physics. That’s the intent: to puncture the comforting belief that virtue is simply "more" of the right thing. He’s warning that intensity itself can be corrosive, no matter which banner it marches under.

The subtext is political as much as personal. In an early modern England anxious about religious zeal, sexual control, and social order, "too violent rigor" reads like the Puritan impulse to police desire into extinction, while "too much license" nods to courtly indulgence and the fear of decadence. Chapman isn’t offering a middle-of-the-road temperament because moderation is cute; he’s diagnosing backlash. Overbearing discipline doesn’t eradicate temptation, it manufactures it, turning chastity into a dare. Excessive permissiveness doesn’t liberate love, it exhausts it into boredom.

What makes the line work is its symmetry and its sting. By yoking "extreme love" to "satiety" - a word from appetite and consumption - Chapman demystifies romance as something that can be overeaten. Hatred, too, curdles into fatigue. The couplet logic doesn’t moralize; it equalizes. Every passion, once maxed out, becomes self-defeating. In a culture that loved absolutes, Chapman offers a cooler heresy: the danger isn’t which extreme you choose, it’s believing extremes can save you.