"True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness"
About this Quote
Petrarch smuggles a thesis about human motivation into the language of confession: we don’t cling to life out of habit, but out of attachment. The pivot from “living” to “loving” isn’t a pretty chiasmus so much as a re-ranking of instincts. Survival looks like the baseline drive; Petrarch insists it’s derivative, a downstream effect of desire. Life, in this frame, isn’t a neutral given. It’s something we keep choosing because love keeps recruiting us back into the world.
That matters in Petrarch’s context: the early Renaissance poet who helped crystallize courtly love into a literary engine, endlessly circling Laura as both muse and wound. His work is obsessed with how longing distorts time, ethics, even theology. So when he calls love “madness,” he’s not diagnosing a cute irrationality; he’s describing the way passion breaks proportion. Love makes us act against prudence, against reputation, against the calm self-image we’d prefer to project.
The second line is the real trick: “there is also always some reason in madness.” Petrarch refuses to let madness be dismissed as meaningless. He’s suggesting that what looks like irrational obsession is often a coherent response to something real: absence, mortality, the fear that life without ardor is just duration. Subtext: the lover isn’t simply unwell; the lover has perceived a truth the “sane” manage to ignore. In a world where plague and political volatility made permanence feel laughable, love’s delirium becomes a kind of argument for being alive at all.
That matters in Petrarch’s context: the early Renaissance poet who helped crystallize courtly love into a literary engine, endlessly circling Laura as both muse and wound. His work is obsessed with how longing distorts time, ethics, even theology. So when he calls love “madness,” he’s not diagnosing a cute irrationality; he’s describing the way passion breaks proportion. Love makes us act against prudence, against reputation, against the calm self-image we’d prefer to project.
The second line is the real trick: “there is also always some reason in madness.” Petrarch refuses to let madness be dismissed as meaningless. He’s suggesting that what looks like irrational obsession is often a coherent response to something real: absence, mortality, the fear that life without ardor is just duration. Subtext: the lover isn’t simply unwell; the lover has perceived a truth the “sane” manage to ignore. In a world where plague and political volatility made permanence feel laughable, love’s delirium becomes a kind of argument for being alive at all.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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