Love Quote by Philip Massinger

“Let us love temperately” lands like a stage whisper meant to be overheard: intimacy framed as strategy. Massinger, a Jacobean playwright working in a culture that distrusted excess almost as much as it craved spectacle, turns romance into a warning about volatility. The line isn’t anti-love. It’s anti-drama-the-kind that burns bright, demands proof, and collapses under its own performance.

The phrasing is brisk, almost legalistic. “Let us” recruits a partner into a pact; “temperately” reads like counsel from someone who’s seen passion curdle into coercion. Then the clincher: “things violent last not.” The sentence widens from lovers to a worldview. Violence isn’t only physical force; it’s any intensity that tries to skip the slow work of trust. In a theater era obsessed with sudden reversals, duels, revenge plots, and rash vows, Massinger offers a counter-aesthetic: durability over display.

Subtextually, it’s also about power. “Violent” love tends to be unilateral, possessive, hungry for control. Temperate love implies boundaries, proportion, and the humility to accept change. That’s a risky message in a period when love onstage often functioned as a pretext for conquest or catastrophe, especially for women who paid the price for men’s “passion.”

The line’s brilliance is its coolness. It doesn’t plead. It proposes. In a world that rewards extremes with attention, Massinger argues that the most radical romance might be the kind that refuses to combust.