Marriage Quote by Moliere

Moliere’s line lands like a drawing-room grenade: polite on the surface, socially radioactive underneath. “Books and marriage go ill together” isn’t a neat anti-reading slogan; it’s a provocation aimed at a 17th-century institution built on property, lineage, and roles so rigid they barely left oxygen for a private mind. In Moliere’s world, marriage is less romance than contract, and books are not “hobbies” but gateways to skepticism, desire, and self-authorship. Put them in the same house and something has to give.

The wit works because it reverses the pieties of bourgeois virtue. Marriage is supposed to steady you; books are supposed to improve you. Moliere suggests the improvement is precisely the problem. Reading cultivates interiority and comparison, the two great threats to domestic obedience: once you’ve encountered other lives and arguments, you’re harder to manage, harder to flatter, harder to lock into a single script. A spouse who reads becomes a spouse who evaluates.

There’s also a class and gender sting. “Books” evokes the salon culture and the pretensions of the learned, which Moliere famously skewers. But it also hints at women’s literacy as a kind of insurgency: if a wife reads, she might want more than being a well-kept asset. The line flatters conservatives who fear that, while letting the audience enjoy the taboo pleasure of admitting it out loud.

So the sentence plays double agent: a joke that can pass as traditionalism, and a critique of how threatened marriage can be by genuine intellectual freedom.