Daily Inspiration Quote by Moliere

A neat little grenade disguised as a proverb: Moliere flips the expected script that marriage is the natural outcome of love. By calling love the "fruit" of marriage, he treats romance less as a prerequisite than as a byproduct - something that can ripen after the legal and social machinery has already locked two people together. It is both funny and faintly alarming, which is exactly his territory.

The intent is corrective, almost surgical. In a 17th-century France where marriages were routinely arranged, property-minded, and policed by family honor, insisting that love must precede marriage is a luxury belief. Moliere, ever the anatomist of social performance, suggests that affection can be manufactured - or at least cultivated - by proximity, habit, shared stakes. The line flatters the institution just enough to pass as respectable while smuggling in a sharper idea: what society calls "love" is often retroactive storytelling.

The subtext is less romantic than strategic. If love can grow after the fact, then the grand passion everyone claims to worship becomes negotiable, even interchangeable. That undercuts the melodramatic self-mythology of lovers and exposes marriage as a kind of stagecraft where people learn their lines, then convince themselves the play is real.

In Moliere's world, feeling is never pure; it's social, rehearsed, and responsive to incentives. The joke lands because it's plausible, and it stings because it's true often enough to make sincerity feel like just another role.