"Love is a strange master, and human nature is still stranger"
About this Quote
"Love is a strange master, and human nature is still stranger" lands like a pulpy aphorism with a knife in it: romantic feeling may boss us around, but the real twist is how eagerly we volunteer for the leash. Edgar Rice Burroughs, a writer who built whole worlds on primal impulse and civilized veneers, isn’t offering candlelit wisdom. He’s pointing to the engine under his adventure plots: desire doesn’t just disrupt plans, it rewrites identity.
Calling love a "master" frames it as authority, not partnership. That’s a deliberately bruising metaphor for an era that liked to dress romance in moral uplift. Burroughs flips it. Love is not ennobling by default; it’s coercive, irrational, sometimes humiliating. Yet the second clause is the more cynical one. Human nature is "still stranger" because we aren’t merely victims of passion; we’re complicit in our own contradictions. We rationalize the irrational, build ethics around cravings, and turn impulse into destiny after the fact.
The subtext fits Burroughs’ recurring fascination with people toggling between social polish and animal urgency. His heroes and heroines often discover that what they thought was character is really circumstance plus appetite. In that light, the line reads as a thesis statement for early 20th-century adventure fiction: the jungle isn’t only a setting, it’s a psychology. Love cracks the facade; human nature is what crawls out, surprising even the person who lives in it.
Calling love a "master" frames it as authority, not partnership. That’s a deliberately bruising metaphor for an era that liked to dress romance in moral uplift. Burroughs flips it. Love is not ennobling by default; it’s coercive, irrational, sometimes humiliating. Yet the second clause is the more cynical one. Human nature is "still stranger" because we aren’t merely victims of passion; we’re complicit in our own contradictions. We rationalize the irrational, build ethics around cravings, and turn impulse into destiny after the fact.
The subtext fits Burroughs’ recurring fascination with people toggling between social polish and animal urgency. His heroes and heroines often discover that what they thought was character is really circumstance plus appetite. In that light, the line reads as a thesis statement for early 20th-century adventure fiction: the jungle isn’t only a setting, it’s a psychology. Love cracks the facade; human nature is what crawls out, surprising even the person who lives in it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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