Daily Inspiration Quote by George Jean Nathan

Nathan’s line lands like a cocktail-party smile with a razor blade behind it: love isn’t rare as a feeling; it’s rare as a competent practice. By splitting “experienced” from “enjoyed,” he demotes romance from sacred destiny to mass-produced sensation, then quietly indicts our inability to live with it. Most people, he implies, catch the fever. Few manage the convalescence.

The intent is editorial in the old-school sense: a verdict delivered with urbanity. Nathan came up in an early-20th-century American culture that was simultaneously selling sentimentality (popular songs, stage melodrama, glossy moral uplift) and learning to distrust it. His New York milieu prized sophistication, and sophistication often meant treating earnestness as something to be punctured before it punctures you. The quote performs that puncture.

Subtextually, “enjoyed” is doing heavy work. Enjoyment suggests not just pleasure but agency, skill, even taste. Love, for Nathan, isn’t automatically fulfilling; it’s an emotion that frequently curdles into anxiety, possessiveness, performance, or boredom. The many feel it because the scripts are everywhere. The few enjoy it because they can resist the scripts: they can tolerate vulnerability without turning it into control, sustain desire without needing constant drama, and accept the ordinary without reading it as failure.

It’s cynicism with a moral edge. Nathan isn’t denying love’s power; he’s mocking our collective incompetence around it, and in that mockery sits a faint, bracing hope: if enjoyment is rare, it’s also learnable.