Love Quote by Christopher Morley

Morley’s line flatters the reader into admitting something they’d rather treat as decorative: that beauty isn’t optional, it’s a stimulus. The “secret nerve” is a sly metaphor, halfway between romance and physiology. He’s not talking about taste as a social badge or beauty as a polite hobby; he’s describing an involuntary response, like a reflex you can deny in public but feel anyway. “Vibrations” makes it even more pointed. Beauty becomes frequency, not argument. You don’t reason with it. You resonate.

The intent is quietly democratic and quietly subversive. “Every man’s heart” risks sounding universal in that early-20th-century, male-default way, but the deeper move is anti-elitist: the capacity for being moved is not owned by critics, the cultured, or the devout. It’s wired in. That’s comforting if you’re anxious about not “getting” art; it’s also unsettling if you prefer to believe you’re too hardheaded for sentiment.

Context matters: Morley wrote as a journalist-novelist-essayist in a period when modernity was accelerating and aesthetic life was being renegotiated by mass media, advertising, and urban speed. His phrasing tries to rescue beauty from becoming just another consumer category. By making it bodily and secret, he suggests beauty is the one thing that can still bypass our defenses - private, uncredentialed, and difficult to fully monetize. The subtext: cynicism is performative; the nerve is real.