Marriage Quote by Samuel Johnson

Johnson’s line lands like a courtroom argument delivered with a wink: adultery, or at least polygamy-by-remarriage, gets reframed as gratitude. The trick is the inversion. Instead of treating “a second wife” as a betrayal, he packages it as a medal pinned on the first marriage: evidence that matrimony worked so well the man wants a refill. It’s the kind of rhetorical jiu-jitsu Johnson loved, where the sentence’s logic is almost airtight while its morality is clearly suspect.

The intent isn’t to defend bigamy in any legal sense; it’s to expose how easily social sins can be laundered through language. Johnson, a master of moral seriousness, also enjoyed puncturing self-serving rationalizations. Here he performs one, almost too fluently, so we can hear the dishonesty in its elegance. The subtext: people don’t merely commit transgressions; they narrate them into acceptability. A man’s desire becomes a “compliment.” Harm gets translated into praise.

Context matters. In Johnson’s England, marriage was both sacred ideal and practical arrangement, with men afforded broader latitude to excuse appetite as principle. The line plays on that gendered asymmetry: only someone socially permitted to reframe his choices so audaciously could call replacement “homage.” It’s comedy with a moral edge, less about wives than about rhetoric itself - the human ability to turn contradiction into virtue, provided the sentence is polished enough.