Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.

The aphorism contrasts two forces that shape romantic experience. “Nature” supplies the basic material—instinct, desire, bodily attraction, and the social fact of pairing—like a blank canvas. What makes love feel vivid, unique, and narratively meaningful is “imagination”: the stories lovers tell themselves, the idealization of the beloved, and the symbolic embroidery of ordinary impulses into destiny, virtue, or transcendence. Read in a Voltairean key, it also carries a skeptical edge: much of what people call “love” is not pure natural truth but a humanly fabricated embellishment, beautiful yet potentially deceptive. The line thus praises love’s artistry while warning against mistaking ornament for reality.