Dickinson isn't offering platitudes about love's supremacy—she's acknowledging something harder: we know love only through its manifestations, never its essence. It's a quietly radical admission that we can't step outside experience to examine love objectively; we're always already inside it, defining it by what we feel and do rather than by some hidden truth. When you've held someone's hand through illness or rage, you learn that love *is* those small, imperfect gestures—not some abstract ideal waiting to be discovered. The quote matters because it frees us from chasing an imaginary purer version of feeling and asks us to recognize the love we're already living as the real thing.