Love Quote by Philip Massinger

The imperative is tender and wary at once: love, but do it temperately. In early modern English, violent does not only denote bloodshed; it also means excessive, ungoverned, too much. The counsel is against the blaze that dazzles and then dies, and for the steady flame that gives lasting warmth. Passion that attacks like a storm tears up roots; passion held in measure lets the plant take hold.

This belongs to a long classical and Renaissance tradition that prized temperance as a virtue. Aristotle’s golden mean and the Stoics’ composure echo behind the line, and Massinger’s age traded in such wisdom. The stage repeatedly warns that extremes destroy themselves. Shakespeare’s Friar Lawrence voices the same logic in Romeo and Juliet: violent delights have violent ends. Massinger’s own dramas often punish overreach, whether it is greed, ambition, or lust; his moral world suggests that intensity without measure corrodes character and community alike.

Temperate love is not tepid love. It is commitment that can endure time and trial, a passion disciplined enough to become reliable. The image is more hearth than wildfire: less spectacle, more sustenance. In the social reality of the seventeenth century, where marriage bound families, fortunes, and reputations, such moderation was also practical wisdom. Frenzy might thrill, but it invites scandal, betrayal, and ruin; prudence protects both affection and the fragile structures that house it.

There is a psychological shrewdness here too. What burns at the highest pitch is difficult to maintain; the nervous system cannot live indefinitely at a scream. Pace is a technology of care. To love temperately is to pace desire so that it might keep company with patience, forgiveness, and responsibility. The line thus offers a counterweight to the cult of intensity: what lasts is not the loudest feeling but the most well-governed one, the love that can survive its own first fire.