Love Quote by Abraham Cowley

Lukewarmness is Cowley’s chosen villain because it pretends to be harmless. In a century defined by civil war, religious fracture, and ideological purity tests, indifference wasn’t a neutral position; it was a failure of nerve dressed up as moderation. Cowley fuses love and religion to make the charge sting: both are realms where people like to claim sincerity while keeping their options open. By calling lukewarmness a “sin,” he drags private emotion into moral accounting, turning halfhearted affection into a kind of spiritual fraud.

The line works because it weaponizes a familiar religious temperature check. “Lukewarm” carries biblical freight (the Laodiceans in Revelation, neither hot nor cold), an image of disgust more than disappointment. Cowley borrows that revulsion and applies it to romance: not just that tepid love hurts, but that it corrupts. It suggests the cowardice of wanting the benefits of devotion without its costs - intimacy without vulnerability, faith without surrender, belonging without risk.

There’s a pointed social subtext, too. As a courtly poet with a complicated political moment (Royalist sympathies, exile, eventual retreat), Cowley knew how often people survive by hedging. The quote reads like a refusal of that survival tactic. It’s less about demanding constant passion than about condemning performative commitment: the polite, safe version of belief or love that keeps the self intact and leaves everyone else paying for the coldness.