Love Quote by William Makepeace Thackeray

Thackeray’s line lands like a neat pinprick to Victorian self-regard: the comforting story that our strongest feelings are earned, evidence-based, and therefore morally dignified. “People hate as they love” yokes two emotions we prefer to keep in different ethical rooms. Love gets dressed up as loyalty, taste, even virtue; hate gets framed as justice or clear-eyed realism. Thackeray collapses that distinction, implying they’re twin products of the same human machinery: projection, appetite, vanity, tribe.

The sting is in the adverb. “Unreasonably” isn’t a scold so much as a diagnosis. It suggests that the mind’s explanations are after-the-fact decorations, not causes. We don’t arrive at love and hate by argument; we recruit arguments to defend what we already feel. That’s a quietly brutal view of social life, especially for a novelist who specialized in exposing how status and self-image steer behavior while characters insist they’re guided by principle.

Context matters: Thackeray wrote in a culture enamored of respectability, where emotional excess was supposed to be managed by good breeding and correct opinion. His fiction, satirical and socially attentive, keeps showing how thin that management is. The line also anticipates a modern insight: the intensity of our attachments makes us irrational, and the irrationality is symmetrical. Devotion and disgust aren’t opposites; they’re rival forms of surrender.