Life & Wisdom Quote by Izaak Walton

A single line that smuggles an ethic inside a tactic: behave toward him as if love were real, even if the situation is transactional, strategic, or merely dutiful. Walton’s phrasing is disarmingly domestic - “use him” is blunt, almost utilitarian; “as though you loved him” softens it into a moral dare. The friction between those clauses is the point. He acknowledges that people do, in fact, use one another (for help, influence, labor, access), then insists that the only tolerable way to do it is to cloak power in care.

Walton writes as a 17th-century English Protestant with a keen interest in “practical piety” - the idea that virtue isn’t abstract but performed in everyday relations. The line reads like counsel to a superior dealing with an inferior (a servant, subordinate, debtor, dependent): you may benefit from him, but you must not treat him like a tool. “As though” matters; it suggests love can be adopted as a discipline, not just felt as a mood. That’s psychologically shrewd, because it shifts ethics from sincerity policing (“Do you really love him?”) to behavioral accountability (“Did you act lovingly?”).

Subtextually, it’s also a warning about corruption. When “use” goes untempered, it turns people into objects and power into entitlement. Walton’s sentence proposes a workaround that still feels modern: if your motives are mixed, let your conduct be clean. Love becomes less a confession and more a standard of care, a way to humanize necessity.