"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence"
About this Quote
Mencken isn’t romanticizing love so much as diagnosing it with a smirk. Calling love a “triumph” sounds celebratory, but in Mencken’s hands it’s a backhanded compliment: a victory of the mind’s special-effects department over its fact-checking desk. “Imagination” here isn’t poetic sensitivity; it’s projection, the ability to build a compelling narrative out of scant evidence and then live inside it. “Intelligence” isn’t coldness; it’s the unglamorous capacity to notice patterns, probabilities, and self-deception. Love wins because it makes a better story.
The line works because it flatters both sides of the reader’s ego. If you’ve been in love, you get to feel human rather than foolish: your brain didn’t fail, it chose a higher-order fiction. If you haven’t, or if you’re licking wounds, you get Mencken’s familiar consolation prize: superiority. The quote invites you to watch your own sentimentality from the balcony, cocktail in hand.
Context matters. Mencken, a caustic observer of American pieties, distrusted institutions that demanded reverence: politics, religion, respectability. Romance, for him, belongs in that same category of socially sanctioned illusions. By framing love as an imaginative conquest of intelligence, he treats it like mass culture at the personal scale: a self-administered myth that people prefer to truth because truth is rarely tolerable, and never as entertaining.
The subtext is less “love is irrational” than “irrationality is adaptive.” We don’t fall in love despite our minds; we do it with them, weaponizing creativity to make another person feel inevitable.
The line works because it flatters both sides of the reader’s ego. If you’ve been in love, you get to feel human rather than foolish: your brain didn’t fail, it chose a higher-order fiction. If you haven’t, or if you’re licking wounds, you get Mencken’s familiar consolation prize: superiority. The quote invites you to watch your own sentimentality from the balcony, cocktail in hand.
Context matters. Mencken, a caustic observer of American pieties, distrusted institutions that demanded reverence: politics, religion, respectability. Romance, for him, belongs in that same category of socially sanctioned illusions. By framing love as an imaginative conquest of intelligence, he treats it like mass culture at the personal scale: a self-administered myth that people prefer to truth because truth is rarely tolerable, and never as entertaining.
The subtext is less “love is irrational” than “irrationality is adaptive.” We don’t fall in love despite our minds; we do it with them, weaponizing creativity to make another person feel inevitable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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