Wit & Attitude Quote by Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln’s line lands like a deadpan punch from a man who knew how to compress moral philosophy into a few plain words. Calling marriage “purgatory” refuses the two lazy stories people sell about it: the romantic postcard of “heaven” and the cynical barroom joke of “hell.” Purgatory is the third category - not a place of spectacle, but of duration. It’s where you stay, work, wait, and get reshaped.

That’s the subtext: marriage isn’t a mood, it’s a discipline. In Catholic theology, purgatory isn’t punishment for its own sake; it’s purification. Lincoln borrows the religious logic to reframe domestic life as a long middle state of compromise, endurance, and incremental moral accounting. The joke is that it sounds bleak, yet it smuggles in a kind of hope: purgatory implies progress. Hell doesn’t.

The intent also reads as self-protective candor. Lincoln’s public persona was built on gravity and restraint; humor was one of his few pressure valves. His marriage to Mary Todd Lincoln was famously strained by grief, ambition, and mental health crises. So “purgatory” works as coded autobiography without confession: a way to acknowledge hardship without indicting a spouse, and to admit ambivalence without sounding unmanly or unfit for office.

For a 19th-century leader, it’s also quietly political. It rejects the idealized household as a simple refuge and treats it as another arena where character is forged - which, for Lincoln, was never separate from governance.