Love Quote by Francis Quarles

A 17th-century poet manages, in two neat turns, to make appetite feel both ridiculous and terrifying. Quarles starts with a physical downshift: the heart is "a small thing". Not the grand, romantic emblem we paste on greeting cards, but a little organ, almost pitiable in its scale. Then he snaps the trap shut: that smallness doesn’t limit it; it intensifies it. The heart "desireth great matters" not because it’s noble, but because it’s chronically under-satisfied.

The kite image is a brutal joke. A kite (the bird) doesn’t need much to eat; its dinner is modest, practical, bounded by biology. The heart, by contrast, isn’t even "sufficient" for that minimal demand, yet it expects more than the world can supply. Quarles is staging a moral paradox: our interior cravings are simultaneously too weak to sustain the simplest contentment and too expansive to be met by anything external. It’s a devotional diagnosis in the Puritan-adjacent key: desire, left to itself, is a spiritual engine that misfires, reaching for the infinite in finite objects.

The subtext isn’t "wanting is bad" so much as "wanting is structurally misaligned". Quarles writes in a culture steeped in memento mori and religious discipline, where the heart is suspect, not sacred. His line lands because it refuses sentimentality: it treats longing as a kind of cosmic category error. You can feed a bird. You cannot feed a soul with the world.