Daily Inspiration Quote by George Jean Nathan

Marriage gets treated here less like a vow than like a weak fence: nice to look at, easy to jump. George Jean Nathan, a born Broadway-era cynic with a critic's allergy to sentiment, builds the line as a comic escalation that doubles as a diagnosis of male self-deception. "I know many married men" establishes worldliness; "a few happily married men" concedes the exception just long enough to make the punch sharper. Then comes the trapdoor: even the "happy" ones, he implies, are one wink away from slapstick disaster.

The coal hole matters. It’s not just a period detail from the urban sidewalk; it’s a moral banana peel. Nathan’s married man isn’t a romantic hero tempted by fate. He’s a clown sprinting toward vanity and novelty, too distracted to notice the most obvious danger in front of him. The joke lands because it refuses the usual alibis (dead bedrooms, loveless unions, existential yearning). Desire is presented as reflex, not tragedy.

Contextually, Nathan wrote in a time when public respectability and private indulgence coexisted comfortably, especially for men with social latitude. The quote needlepoints that hypocrisy: the institution demands performance, while the culture quietly rewards wandering eyes. Its real target isn’t marriage so much as the smug confidence with which men claim immunity to temptation - right up until a stranger’s attention makes them forget where they’re walking.