Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind…

Helena speaks the lines at the end of Act I, scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Hermia and Lysander have just confided their plan to flee Athens the next night, and gone. Left alone, Helena wonders how “happy some o’er other some can be”: Athens thinks her as fair as Hermia, but Demetrius, who once “hail’d down oaths that he was only mine”, now dotes on Hermia’s eyes. Love, she concludes, can give “form and dignity” to things “base and vile”; hence the line and its gloss: Cupid is painted blind because love has no judgement. She resolves to tell Demetrius of the flight, so that she can follow him to the wood.

Shakespeare wrote the comedy in the mid-1590s; it was printed in 1600. Blind Cupid was a Renaissance commonplace, but Helena’s version, spoken by a woman who knows she loves against all reason, is the one that survived.

The line is often quoted as praise of a love that sees inner qualities; in the play it explains why lovers cannot see straight.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act I, scene 1 (Helena), 1595

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work