Daily Inspiration Quote by Will Durant

Durant lands the punch with a historian's deadpan: the line reads like permissive romantic advice until it quietly swaps the sacred fuel of love for the practical fuel of money. "Hasty marriages" are usually framed as reckless, an impulsive leap over courtship and caution. Durant pretends to defend them, then adds the condition that makes the defense legible: an "adequate income". The wit is in the reversal. Passion is not denied; it's treated as a flame that can be "fanned" but only if the household has enough oxygen - rent paid, food on the table, time not devoured by survival.

The subtext is less cynical than surgical. Durant isn't saying affection is fake; he's saying it is fragile under stress, and that societies moralize romance while quietly running it on economics. "Mutual flame" signals reciprocity, not conquest. But "adequate income" is the real chaperone, the thing that makes the haste survivable. It's also a jab at the bourgeois ideal that marriage is pure feeling when, historically, it has been a contract shaped by property, labor, and status.

Context matters: Durant wrote across the early-to-mid 20th century, an era when love matches were celebrated, yet the Great Depression and war made the material stakes of domestic life impossible to ignore. As a historian, he sees patterns across centuries: people don't just marry each other, they marry conditions. The line works because it smuggles a social critique into a proverb-sized joke, leaving readers to notice how often "timing" is really "finances."