Love Quote by Mortimer Adler

Adler’s line lands like a quiet rebuke to the transactional way modern life teaches us to measure feeling: I give, you give back. He insists on something older, sterner, and more unsettling - that love isn’t validated by reciprocity. It survives rejection, indifference, mismatch. In that survival sits the philosophical claim: love is, at its core, an act of will and perception before it’s a reward.

The wording is deliberately plain, almost austere. “We love” reads as descriptive, not aspirational, making it sound less like moral advice than a psychological fact about the human animal. Then comes the twist: “even when,” a small hinge that opens onto the hardest cases. Adler isn’t talking about love’s easy victories; he’s defining it by its refusal to collapse when it doesn’t get paid back. “Requited” carries a faintly economic tone, suggesting repayment, balance sheets, symmetry. By choosing that word, Adler exposes the bargain we secretly want love to be - and rejects it.

Context matters: Adler, the Great Books evangelist and public philosopher, spent a career defending “first principles” and durable human goods against fashionable cynicism. This sentence reads like his broader project in miniature: stripping sentimentality away to rescue love as a serious commitment. The subtext isn’t “keep chasing someone who doesn’t want you.” It’s sharper: if your care only exists when it’s mirrored, you’re not describing love; you’re describing a contract.