Love Quote by Mary Astell

Astell makes devotion sound less like duty and more like the most sophisticated form of pleasure-seeking. In a culture that often treated religious feeling as fear management or moral bookkeeping, she rebrands it as the highest delight: not merely loving God, but savoring the self-awareness of that love, and the assurance of being loved back. The key word is “think.” This is not mystical rapture; it’s a rational, reflective joy, an interior proof that can’t be confiscated by social status, marriage, or money.

The subtext is quietly insurgent. Astell wrote in a world where women were trained to aim their affection and loyalty toward imperfect men and the institutions that protected them. By naming the “most amiable and best Being” as the proper object of love, she elevates women’s emotional life beyond the domestic economy of pleasing husbands and managing reputations. It’s a theological move with feminist consequences: if the highest pleasure is reciprocal love with a perfectly good Being, then no earthly relationship gets to claim absolute authority over a woman’s conscience.

Context matters. Astell is often called an early English feminist, but her feminism is braided with Anglican moral philosophy and a serious belief in reason’s capacity to guide the soul. The sentence works because it’s both intimate and absolute: “cannot be a higher pleasure” is a daring superlative, yet it arrives softened by “certainly,” as if she’s inviting the reader to recognize a truth they’ve been denied permission to desire.