Meaning & Analysis
Moderate both love and hate, since circumstances may change; conduct yourself now as if today’s friend could become an enemy and today’s enemy a friend.
Insights
Measured affections
Affection should be tempered with prudence: cherish without surrendering judgment, because excess attachment can blind and later embitter.
Reversible enmities
Hostility ought to be bounded; leave room for reconciliation so that future friendship is not foreclosed by present malice.
Guarded disclosure
Do not entrust secrets or leverage that could harm you if loyalties flip; intimacy requires discretion alongside warmth.
Political realism
Alliances and factions shift with fortune; officials and citizens should avoid absolute commitments that make tomorrow’s coalition impossible.
Temporal humility
Because time surprises—new information, altered character, changing needs—wise people hold attitudes provisionally rather than absolutely.
Erasmian and Greek pedigree
Erasmus preserves the maxim—“Ama tanquam osurus, oderis tanquam amaturus”—often credited to the Seven Sage Bias. Early English renderings echo it: ‘Love by measure… hate not overmuch,’ insisting on caution, not treachery.
Bacon’s gloss
Bacon explicitly construes the rule ‘not to any point of perfidiousness but only to caution and moderation’: the proverb curbs extremes without licensing double-dealing.
Ethic of reversibility
Torriano’s variant, ‘Converse with thy friend, as if he might one day become thine enemy,’ and the kin maxim ‘Trust no friend with that you need fear him if he were your enemy,’ sharpen the practical corollary: design relationships so they can survive a turn.
Psychology of affect
Hot emotions overpredict permanence; cognitive biases (projection, affective forecasting errors) make us assume today’s feeling is forever. The proverb disciplines this illusion by building future contingency into present conduct.
Civic and domestic prudence
From courtship to court politics, measured posture preserves paths back: a quarrel fought without humiliation is easier to heal; a policy dispute argued without venom enables later cooperation.
Moral tension
Taken too far, guardedness can impoverish trust and intimacy. The wisdom lies in proportion—sincere love and frank enmity, both bounded by the possibility of tomorrow’s change.
Rhetorical Devices
Antimetabole
The reversible pattern (‘love…hate / hate…love’) mirrors the counsel itself, embodying the potential flip of affections in the very syntax.
Chiasmus
Crossed order (love–hate / hate–love) creates a balanced X-structure that fixes the rule in memory.
Antithesis
Opposing passions are yoked and moderated, dramatizing the call to temper extremes.
Isocolon and parallelism
Two clause-length twins with matching cadence lend aphoristic snap and quotability.
Temporal conditionality
‘In time to come’ foregrounds futurity (kairos) as a check on present intensity, turning time into the proverb’s regulating agent.
Gnomical brevity
Compact, sententious phrasing grants the maxim the air of a timeless rule rather than situational advice.
Transcription
Quotations
Ama tanquam osurus, oderis tanquam amaturus.
A man shal loue his frende by mesure and not his enemye hate ouermoche.
Loue as thoughe thou shuldst in tyme commynge hate, and hate as thoughe thou shuldst in tyme commynge loue.
None ought at any time so to loue, that he should finde in his heart, at any time to hate.
We must loue, as looking one day to hate. We must hate as looking one day to loue.
So loue as thou maist hate, so hate as thou maist love.
That ancient precept of Bias, construed not to any point of perfidiousness but only to caution and moderation, Et ama tanquam inimicus futurus, et odi tanquam amaturus.
We must love, as looking one day to hate.
Converse with thy friend, as if he might one day become thine enemy.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.