Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.

Nathan’s aphorism draws a sharp line between feeling and fulfillment. “Experienced by the many” suggests that romantic longing, attraction, and the idea of love are nearly universal—common emotional weather in human life. But “enjoyed by the few” implies that love’s pleasures (mutuality, stability, understanding, and the daily satisfactions of intimacy) are rarer, either because relationships fail to sustain the initial emotion or because social expectations and self-deception distort it. The tone is characteristically Nathan: skeptical, epigrammatic, and slightly cynical, treating love less as a moral ideal than as a phenomenon whose promise often exceeds its lived rewards.