Meaning & Analysis
Intense love, when thwarted or betrayed, can transform into equally intense hatred.
Insights
Inverted passion
Affection and animosity share the same furnace of intensity; when devotion collapses, its heat is not extinguished but flips polarity, turning ardor into animus.
Betrayal wound
Hatred is amplified by intimacy: the closer the bond, the sharper the sense of violation, since expectations of loyalty and reciprocity were highest.
Identity entanglement
Lovers fuse selves; a rupture threatens one’s self-story. To defend identity, the psyche reinterprets former love as contempt, purging what now feels like self-endangering attachment.
Moral revulsion
When love is perceived as misjudgment, shame catalyzes hostility toward the former beloved, converting lost tenderness into punitive zeal.
Vinegar from wine
Lyly’s image—‘the best wine makes the sharpest vinegar’—captures a chemical allegory: refinement can sour most acutely, suggesting that the very qualities that made love exquisite prime it for acrid reversal.
Shakespearean echo
Shakespeare notes love turning ‘to the sourest and most deadly hate,’ dramatizing how stage tragedies often hinge on breached trust where intimacy supplies both motive and means for ferocity.
Attachment psychology
Attachment theory explains the flip: anxious or possessive bonds, when threatened, swing from approach to attack. Cognitive dissonance post-breakup is resolved by reevaluating the beloved as bad, justifying separation.
Cultural maxims
Across traditions we find parallel cautions—‘Love too hot turns to hate’—implying a classical ethics of measure: passions require tempering lest extremes breed their opposites.
Rhetorical Devices
Antithesis
Balances ‘greatest love’ against ‘greatest hate,’ sharpening the counter-turn and giving the claim aphoristic bite.
Hyperbole
The superlatives exaggerate to persuade, imprinting the danger of excess by presenting the extremest possible swing.
Causal paradox
Asserts that love itself begets hate, a counterintuitive causality that startles attention and invites reflection on passion’s volatility.
Metaphoric tradition
Resonates with the wine–vinegar trope: sweetness souring, a sensory metaphor that concretizes emotional reversal.
Transcription
Quotations
As the best wine doth make the sharpest vinaiger, so the deepest loue tourneth to the deadliest hate.
But who so loues, if he reiected be, His passing loue, to peeuish hate will turne.
Knowe you not that where is great love, from thence proceedeth great hate?
This I tell thee, that my scalding loue is turned to cooling hate.
Friends turn'd foes have lightly least remorse.
There bee other extreames of love which fall by degrees into mortall hate.
Love too hot, turns to hate.
No hatred is greater than that which proceeds from love.
Shakespeare Citations
Sweet love, I see, changing his property, Turns to the sourest and most deadly hate.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.