Daily Inspiration Quote by William Shakespeare

Shakespeare lands a whole social economy in one barb: desire as a moving target, marriage as both prize and trap. The line sounds like a cranky joke at women’s expense, but its real bite is aimed at the institution that makes “husband” the only respectable form of security a young woman can publicly pursue. In a world where property, status, and legal power flow through men, wanting “nothing but husbands” isn’t flighty romance; it’s rational strategy. The comedy is that the strategy is sold as love.

The pivot - “and when they have them, they want everything” - is where the subtext sharpens. Once a woman is married, she’s allowed to want things she was trained to pretend she didn’t: comfort, attention, influence, pleasure, spending power, a household run to her taste. “Everything” reads like greed, yet it also signals a backlog of denied agency finally finding a sanctioned outlet. Shakespeare’s wit works because it doubles as diagnosis: constrain a person’s options long enough and their desires will surge the moment the door cracks open.

Onstage, this kind of line typically comes from a male speaker trafficking in worldly “truths” about women. That framing matters. Shakespeare often puts sexism in circulation while letting the audience clock its function: a mask for male anxiety about control, inheritance, and being needed for more than affection. The joke flatters the cynic, but the scene underneath is about how marriage turns human longing into a negotiation over power.