Love Quote by John Dryden

Dryden’s line flatters love by demoting it. What looks like romantic advice is really a moral audit: if your affection is pulled by anything other than “grace and goodness,” you’re not loving a person so much as renting them for a purpose. The key word is “loadstone” - magnetism, not choice. Dryden assumes desire will attach itself to whatever promises advantage, pleasure, status, safety. His corrective is to re-train the instinct: let virtue, not utility, do the attracting.

The aphorism turns on a cool piece of logic: “love which hath ends” will “have an end.” Dryden’s wit is almost legalistic, like a contract clause exposed as a trap. Ends here aren’t just goals; they’re conditions. Love that depends on beauty, money, novelty, or social leverage is structurally temporary because those inputs expire. Virtue, by contrast, is framed as durable capital - the one asset that can outlast the market’s fluctuations.

Context matters. A late-17th-century poet moving through patronage networks, Dryden knew how relationships could be transactional, how quickly favor curdles when circumstances shift. Under the polished piety is a survival lesson: build attachments that won’t collapse with a change in fortune or fashion. It’s also an attempt to domesticate passion. By insisting love should be “founded” on virtue, Dryden makes desire answerable to ethics, not impulse.

The subtext is both stern and consoling: if your love keeps dying, the problem isn’t fate; it’s the foundation.