Love Quote by Alexander Borodin

Borodin’s line lands like a perfectly timed eyebrow raise from a man who knew, firsthand, how politely society could choke the life out of art. “Respectable” is the barb: not a moral standard but a social costume, starched and approved. By pairing “write music” with “make love,” he yokes the two activities Victorian culture treated as equally suspect when pursued openly, with appetite, and without apology. The joke isn’t that music is indecent; it’s that treating either music or intimacy as labor exposes how bourgeois respectability prefers its pleasures unspoken, its passions relegated to hobby, secrecy, or sanctioned domesticity.

The phrase “as a career” sharpens the critique. A career implies ambition, public recognition, payment - the marketplace. Borodin is needling the idea that the only “proper” work is what can be framed as sober utility. That sting has biographical teeth: he famously juggled composing with a serious scientific life in chemistry and medicine, part of the Russian intelligentsia where “real” professions conferred legitimacy. In that world, the artist was tolerated as an ornament, not endorsed as a vocation.

Subtextually, it’s also a defense mechanism. If the culture insists art isn’t respectable work, the artist can flip the insult into swagger: fine, then let respectability keep its clean hands and smaller life. The line’s wit works because it exposes the hypocrisy of a society that consumes music and romance ravenously, yet mistrusts the people bold enough to devote themselves to producing either.