Love Quote by Jacques Maritain

Maritain is smuggling a radical claim into a sentence that sounds like common sense: love is not an appraisal. In a culture that treats romance like a curated portfolio - personality traits, “green flags,” attachment styles, the endlessly ranked virtues of a dating profile - he insists that love is directed at a whole person, irreducible to a checklist. That move reflects his personalist, Thomist backdrop: a person is not a bundle of attributes but a singular being with an interior life and moral dignity. You can admire qualities; love targets the someone beneath them.

The sharpest twist is the line about defects. Maritain isn’t romanticizing harm or advising people to tolerate cruelty. He’s pointing to the way real intimacy collapses the clean separation between “what I like about you” and “what I put up with.” Defects become part of the story of this particular person: the stutter that makes the joke land differently, the anxious habit that reveals what they protect, the impatience that’s also the engine of their ambition. Love doesn’t require blindness; it requires a kind of attention that sees flaws without turning them into a verdict.

Subtext: if you only “love” what is lovable, you’re still loving yourself - your standards, your comfort, your self-image as a good chooser. Loving a person means accepting the unchosen, the inconvenient, the not-optimized, and still refusing to reduce them to their worst moments. It’s a rebuke to both consumer romance and moral perfectionism: love is not a trophy for the virtuous; it’s a commitment to the real.