Daily Inspiration Quote by Douglas Jerrold

Jerrold turns romance into epidemiology, and the insult is the point. By likening love to measles, he drags a supposedly ennobling feeling down into the realm of fever, rash, and bad timing. The simile works because it’s both absurd and uncomfortably apt: measles is common, contagious, and indiscriminate, and it arrives with a mix of misery and inevitability. Love, in Jerrold’s hands, isn’t a moral triumph; it’s something you catch.

The sting lands in the second clause: “all the worse when it comes late in life.” That’s not just ageism for a punchline. It’s a bleak little theory of human elasticity. Youth can afford delirium; it has time to recover, to reroute ambition, to turn heartbreak into a story you tell at parties. Late-life love, by contrast, threatens the architecture you’ve spent decades building: routines calcified into identity, reputations stabilized, losses already tallied. The older you are, the less “illness” you can metabolize without damage.

As a mid-19th-century playwright and satirist, Jerrold is also taking a swipe at sentimental culture that sells love as refinement. He implies the opposite: that passion is regression, a childish malady returning when you least want to look childish. The line flatters the audience’s cynicism while quietly admitting the fear underneath it: not that love is rare, but that it’s unstoppable, and that timing can turn even joy into a kind of complication.