"Reason is not what decides love"
About this Quote
Moliere’s line lands like a polite slap to the Enlightenment ego before the Enlightenment even fully arrives. “Reason is not what decides love” isn’t a dreamy surrender; it’s a theatrical weapon. In his comedies, love repeatedly barges into rooms where “reasonable” people are busy arranging marriages like business deals, polishing reputations, and treating desire as an embarrassing accounting error. The sentence is short, clean, and absolute, which is part of its joke: reason loves qualifications, love doesn’t.
The intent is less to romanticize irrationality than to expose how “reason” often functions as a social mask. In Moliere’s world, the people who preach rational order are frequently the most absurd: misers, hypocrites, pedants, status-chasers. They invoke logic to defend vanity, control, and fear of scandal. So the subtext reads: don’t confuse your arguments with your motives. Love refuses to be governed not because it’s noble, but because it reveals the limits of self-command and the fraudulence of the tidy stories we tell ourselves.
Context matters: 17th-century France is a culture of salons, etiquette, and strategic marriage, where the heart is supposed to obey the household. Comedy becomes Moliere’s way of smuggling critique past polite society. He doesn’t deny that reason has its place; he denies its jurisdiction. Love, in his plays, is a disruptive force that tests whether a society built on appearances can tolerate genuine feeling - or whether it will keep calling coercion “common sense.”
The intent is less to romanticize irrationality than to expose how “reason” often functions as a social mask. In Moliere’s world, the people who preach rational order are frequently the most absurd: misers, hypocrites, pedants, status-chasers. They invoke logic to defend vanity, control, and fear of scandal. So the subtext reads: don’t confuse your arguments with your motives. Love refuses to be governed not because it’s noble, but because it reveals the limits of self-command and the fraudulence of the tidy stories we tell ourselves.
Context matters: 17th-century France is a culture of salons, etiquette, and strategic marriage, where the heart is supposed to obey the household. Comedy becomes Moliere’s way of smuggling critique past polite society. He doesn’t deny that reason has its place; he denies its jurisdiction. Love, in his plays, is a disruptive force that tests whether a society built on appearances can tolerate genuine feeling - or whether it will keep calling coercion “common sense.”
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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