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“If music be the food of love, play on.”
Voice: Fictional character · Duke Orsino
Love is treated as an appetite that can be intensified through beauty, sensation, and repeated emotional stimulation.
Source note: Act 1, Scene 1; Orsino opens the play by comparing music and appetite.
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“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
The question opens a deliberate accounting of love, suggesting that affection becomes clearer when its different forms, depths, and expressions are named.
Source note: Sonnet 43 from Sonnets from the Portuguese; the poem proceeds by describing multiple dimensions of love.
Source identified
“She walks in beauty, like the night.”
Byron begins with a comparison that makes beauty a balance of light and darkness rather than a catalog of physical features.
Source note: “She Walks in Beauty,” first stanza, in Hebrew Melodies.
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“Fair as a star, when only one is shining in the sky.”
Wordsworth makes beauty quiet and easily overlooked: Lucy is compared not to spectacle but to a single star whose isolation makes it more noticeable.
Source note: “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways,” second stanza.
Source identified
“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”
Voice: Fictional character · George Knightley
The difficulty of speaking is used as evidence of emotional depth, contrasting sincere feeling with polished or excessive declaration.
Source note: Chapter 49; Mr. Knightley struggles to express the depth of his feeling to Emma.
Source identified
“Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection.”
Affection can call forth capacities that remain dormant in isolation; Emerson illustrates the claim with a writer who suddenly finds thoughts and words when writing to a friend.
Source note: Essays: First Series, “Friendship,” Project Gutenberg #2944. Emerson follows the sentence with the example of a scholar who cannot write abstractly but finds language when composing a letter to a friend.