Love Quote by Francis Quarles

Pleasure, Quarles warns, isn’t the enemy; the appetite that outlives its own satisfactions is. The line works like a moral mousetrap: it begins with the reasonable suggestion of moderation, then snaps shut with a single Gothic noun, "satiety", framed as a brand burned into the heart. That image is doing more than sermonizing. It turns excess into a kind of spiritual vandalism, not because enjoyment is sinful, but because overindulgence corrodes the organ that’s meant to feel anything at all.

Quarles is writing from the pressure-cooker of early 17th-century England, where devotional poetry doubled as public guidance and private therapy. A poet in a Protestant culture of self-scrutiny, he’s suspicious of any pleasure that becomes self-sustaining - not ecstatic but automatic. "Temper" is kitchen language as much as ethical language; he’s telling you to season your joys so they remain palatable. Prudence isn’t killjoy discipline here, it’s preservation: the maintenance of sensitivity.

The subtext is psychologically sharp. Satiety isn’t just having enough; it’s the deadening that follows too much. You can hear an early modern version of our own fatigue culture: dopamine burnout, endless scroll exhaustion, the luxury of constant access turning into boredom with everything. Quarles’s real fear is not punishment from outside, but numbness from within - the moment when the heart stops registering delight and starts demanding more intensity just to feel normal. The warning lands because it frames moderation as a defense of pleasure, not a denial of it.