Love & Passion Quote by Christian Nestell Bovee

Bovee slips a quiet blade into the smug rationalism of his century: the things we claim to value most are precisely the things we cannot verify. In an era drunk on industry, measurement, and visible progress, he argues that devotion - religious or romantic - runs on absence. Not on what we can point to, but on what we project, infer, and endlessly revise in our heads.

The line works because it flatters and indicts at the same time. Calling the invisible the object of our "profoundest worship" dignifies imagination as a higher faculty than eyesight. Yet it also hints at self-deception: worship thrives where evidence can’t interfere. The unseen becomes a blank screen for longing, fear, and idealization. That is why the lover "muses" on it. The beloved is right there, embodied and ordinary; the lover’s real obsession is the version that cannot be fully possessed - the private mythology of motives, depths, futures, and perfect understanding.

Bovee’s pairing of worship and love is doing subtextual work. He’s collapsing the sacred and the intimate into a single psychological mechanism: reverence is often a form of creative authorship. We adore what can’t talk back, because the invisible can’t contradict us. This is not anti-love so much as anti-naivete. He’s warning that the most intense attachments are frequently to what is missing, hidden, or not yet real - the aura around a person, not the person.

It’s a nineteenth-century sentiment that reads eerily current in an age of parasocial bonds and curated selves: we keep falling for the unseen, because it’s where our best stories live.