"Love never reasons, but profusely gives; it gives like a thoughtless prodigal its all, and then trembles least it has done to little"
About this Quote
Love, in Hannah More's framing, is not a tidy moral ledger but a beautiful liability. The line refuses the Enlightenment-era fantasy that virtue is chiefly a matter of calculation. "Love never reasons" lands as both compliment and warning: love's authority comes from its irrationality, from acting before it can justify itself to the mind. That refusal to "reason" is also a rebuke to social pieties that demand proof of deservingness before generosity is granted.
The engine of the sentence is its paradoxical portrait of abundance. Love "profusely gives" like a "thoughtless prodigal" - a phrase that deliberately courts scandal. "Prodigal" evokes waste, biblical misadventure, money thrown away. More borrows the vocabulary of sin to dignify a kind of holy excess, insisting that real care is embarrassing in its lack of moderation. It's a clever rhetorical move for a late-18th-century British moralist navigating a culture that prized restraint: she smuggles radical generosity in under the cover of familiar religious language.
Then she twists the knife: after giving "its all", love "trembles least it has done too little". The subtext is that love's standard is infinite, and therefore permanently anxious. It isn't satisfied by its own sacrifice; it suspects its own insufficiency. That tremble is where the quote becomes psychologically modern: affection isn't just action, it's a self-interrogation that never closes the case. More is describing love as moral energy that cannot be domesticated - not by reason, not by respectability, not even by its own good deeds.
The engine of the sentence is its paradoxical portrait of abundance. Love "profusely gives" like a "thoughtless prodigal" - a phrase that deliberately courts scandal. "Prodigal" evokes waste, biblical misadventure, money thrown away. More borrows the vocabulary of sin to dignify a kind of holy excess, insisting that real care is embarrassing in its lack of moderation. It's a clever rhetorical move for a late-18th-century British moralist navigating a culture that prized restraint: she smuggles radical generosity in under the cover of familiar religious language.
Then she twists the knife: after giving "its all", love "trembles least it has done too little". The subtext is that love's standard is infinite, and therefore permanently anxious. It isn't satisfied by its own sacrifice; it suspects its own insufficiency. That tremble is where the quote becomes psychologically modern: affection isn't just action, it's a self-interrogation that never closes the case. More is describing love as moral energy that cannot be domesticated - not by reason, not by respectability, not even by its own good deeds.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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