Love: a wildly misunderstood although highly desirable malfunction of the heart which weakens the brain, causes eyes to sparkle, cheeks to glow, blood pressure to rise and the lips to pucker.

This quip circulates widely in modern popular culture as an “anonymous” definition of love, typical of late-20th- to early-21st-century greeting-card, email-forward, and internet-quote compilations that frame emotions in mock-medical terms. Rather than arising from a traceable speech, letter, or literary work, it reads like a piece of light epigrammatic humor: a playful “dictionary entry” that borrows the language of physiology (blood pressure, sparkling eyes) and pathology (“malfunction”) to describe romantic infatuation. Its anonymity is characteristic of such folk-quotation ecosystems, where witty lines are repeated, slightly edited, and detached from any single verifiable origin.

The line treats love as both irresistible and irrational: “highly desirable” yet a “malfunction,” suggesting that what people most want can also disrupt judgment. By listing bodily symptoms—glowing cheeks, rising blood pressure, puckering lips—it comically reduces a complex emotion to observable side effects, echoing how infatuation feels like a physical takeover. The joke hinges on the tension between heart and brain: love “weakens the brain,” implying diminished reason, while simultaneously producing visible signs of vitality and attraction. The overall effect is affectionate satire: it pokes fun at love’s loss of control without denying its appeal.