If thou must love me, let it be for nought / Except for love’s sake only.
- Source
- Sonnet 14, Sonnets from the Portuguese, 1850
- Written
- 1850
About this quotation
In Sonnet 14 the speaker asks not to be loved for her smile, her look or her way of speaking, because such things can change and the love would change with them. She wants to be loved for love’s own sake, which would last. It belongs to the sequence she wrote to Robert Browning.