Love at first sight

Origin of: Love at first sight

Love at first sight

This was a familiar concept in ancient Greek and Roman literature in which the darts/arrows of Eros and Cupid played a catalytic role but it was not until Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598) that the expression made its first appearance in English in the now familiar form. “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?” Shakespeare famously pays tribute to Marlowe by quoting this same line in As You Like It, Act III, Scene V. “Dead shepherd! Now I find thy saw of might; ‘whoever loved that loved not at first sight?’”