Love Quote by Donald G. Mitchell

Vanity, Mitchell suggests, is less a sin than a posture: a way of standing on tiptoe inside your own mind and mistaking the height for superiority. The line skewers a familiar 19th-century type - the self-conscious striver who treats constant self-scrutiny as proof of refinement. That “long remove” is the key phrase. It’s spatial, almost architectural, turning psychology into social altitude: you’re not just different from “ordinary love,” you’re above it, distant enough to sneer at its warmth as if it were naive.

Mitchell’s intent is corrective, and a little surgical. He doesn’t attack love or “trustfulness”; he targets the ego’s need to disqualify them. The subtext is that self-consciousness can be addictive precisely because it feels like intelligence. It offers the pleasure of commentary over the vulnerability of participation. To be “simple and pure” is to risk being moved, fooled, dependent - all the things a self-aware persona tries to outsmart.

Context matters: Mitchell wrote in a moral-literary culture that prized sincerity, domestic virtue, and the ideal of an uncorrupted inner life, even as modernity was beginning to reward performance and status. His sentence reads like an early diagnosis of a very current condition: when identity becomes a project, affection starts to look like a lower class of experience. The irony is that the “remove” isn’t elevation at all; it’s exile. The heart he calls “ordinary” is doing something the vain self can’t manage: trusting without turning it into a mirror.