Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache.

In this wry inversion of the sentimental maxim “love conquers all,” Mae West punctures romantic idealism with the blunt realities of bodily pain and economic hardship. The joke depends on the collision between a lofty, universal claim and two stubbornly material exceptions: poverty (a social condition love alone cannot remedy) and toothache (a visceral, immediate suffering that overwhelms mood and rhetoric). The line exemplifies West’s persona—worldly, unsentimental, and comic—using epigrammatic humor to suggest that affection and desire may be powerful, but they do not substitute for money, medicine, or practical solutions.