Daily Inspiration Quote by Sacha Guitry

Marriage, in Sacha Guitry's hands, becomes less a vow than a transaction wrapped in a punchline. The line lands because it flips the sentimental logic of marrying for love into a brutally practical calculation: choose a wife the way you’d choose a commodity with resale value. Pretty isn’t praised as beauty; it’s framed as liquidity.

Guitry’s intent isn’t to give advice so much as to expose the selfishness hiding inside certain romantic scripts. The joke relies on a double betrayal: first of the wife, treated as an object to be “taken off his hands,” and second of the husband, who implicitly expects to tire of her and preplans his exit. That cynicism is precisely the point. It’s boulevard wit: urbane, fast, and faintly cruel, making the audience laugh while also implicating them in the worldview that makes the joke legible.

Subtextually, it’s about masculine anxiety and control. The speaker wants insurance against his own boredom and moral failure, imagining the wife’s value primarily through other men’s desire. Her desirability becomes his escape route. In a culture where marriage was often an economic and social arrangement, the line skewers the polite fictions that pretend otherwise.

Context matters: Guitry, a celebrated playwright-director with a notorious romantic life, built a career on sophisticated misanthropy and marital farce. This reads like self-parody and social satire at once, a reminder that the “happy couple” story can be just another stage set, expertly lit, and ready for the next scene change.