Love Quote by Henry Fielding

Swear an oath to the devil and you can suddenly afford to be tender. Fielding’s line is doing two things at once: performing sincerity while mocking the social theater that usually surrounds it. “The devil take me” is a comic overbid, the sort of profane flourish a Restoration-leaning Englishman uses when he wants to sound franker than the room will allow. It’s a little verbal stagecraft that signals, Don’t mistake me for a sentimentalist; I’m still a man of the world. Then he pivots into what looks like pure devotion: nothing but love itself should be “the object of love.”

The phrasing matters. He doesn’t say the beloved is the object; he says “love” is. That abstraction quietly indicts a culture where courtship is rarely about affection alone. In Fielding’s England, marriage is property law in formalwear, and “love” is often the polite story people tell while pursuing money, status, security, or conquest. So the sentence reads like a moral claim and a self-defense: if I love, I want the only payoff to be love returned, not access, not advantage, not leverage.

There’s also a sly narcissism embedded in the ideal. Wanting “love” rather than a person can sound elevated, but it can also hint at loving the feeling, the narrative, the performance of being in love. Fielding, a novelist with a satirist’s ear, lets that ambiguity hang: a credo that doubles as a wink at how easily virtue can become another form of appetite.