Love & Passion Quote by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Sheridan’s line has the elegant sting of a drawing-room jab: it pretends to compliment “modesty” while quietly exposing it as a social prop that rarely survives contact with desire. The construction is the trick. “More praised... than liked” separates public virtue from private appetite, suggesting that what gets applauded in polite conversation is not what actually electrifies a romantic encounter. Modesty becomes less a moral trait than a performance women are expected to reward rhetorically, even if it bores them in practice.

As a Restoration-influenced playwright working in the late 18th century, Sheridan understood courtship as theater: a stage where reputations matter, and everyone knows the rules while pretending they don’t. The quote is less an accusation toward women than a diagnosis of the double bind they navigate. In a culture that polices female desire, praising modesty is a kind of insurance policy. It signals respectability, discipline, good taste. Liking, meanwhile, belongs to the unruly realm of attraction, where confidence, initiative, and a certain audacity read as more compelling than self-effacement.

The subtext is cynical but not cruel. Sheridan is mocking the gap between stated ideals and lived impulses, a gap widened by gendered expectations. “Modesty” here isn’t humility; it’s hesitation, a lover’s strategic restraint that wins social points but loses romantic momentum. The line flatters its audience’s sophistication: you’re meant to laugh because you recognize the hypocrisy, and maybe because you’ve participated in it.