Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Richardson

The line lands like a raised eyebrow: romance, Richardson suggests, has a built-in expiration date, and polite society pretends not to notice. “Not nowadays” is the sly pivot. He is not claiming honeymoons never last; he’s insisting that modern life has sped up the decay. The old ideal of marital bliss is treated as a fashion that’s already gone out of style, replaced by something brisk, contractual, and impatient.

“Above a fortnight” is deliciously specific, the kind of measured cynicism that makes the sentiment feel observed rather than merely groused. Two weeks is long enough for the ceremonial glow to burn off, for logistics and temperament to reassert themselves, for people to stop performing and start living. The joke is that society has standardized even the timeline of disillusionment, as if disappointment comes with a calendar.

Richardson, a novelist obsessed with courtship, reputation, and the moral theater of domestic life, writes from an era when marriage was increasingly framed as both emotional choice and economic arrangement. His fiction (and his culture) fixates on the gap between public virtue and private friction. This quip compresses that whole tension into one domestic unit: the “honeymoon” as a sanctioned interval of fantasy before the real governance of marriage begins.

The subtext isn’t anti-love so much as anti-illusion. Richardson’s jab warns that sentiment, left unexamined, curdles quickly; the modern couple’s problem is not feeling too little, but expecting the performance to last forever.