Marriage Quote by Francois Rabelais

Marriage, Rabelais suggests, is the one contract nobody else can sign for you. The line lands with a kind of mischievous severity: in an age thick with fathers arranging matches, priests policing sexuality, and communities treating wedlock as public infrastructure, he insists on a private court of appeal. “Everyone must be the judge” sounds like moral instruction, but the sharper move is the inward pivot: “take counsel from himself.” It’s not anti-marriage; it’s anti-herd.

Rabelais writes as a cleric who also made a career out of puncturing solemnity. That tension matters. Coming from the Church, the advice could easily have been obedience dressed as virtue. Instead, he smuggles in humanist self-trust under the respectable banner of conscience. The subtext is quietly rebellious: institutions can bless a marriage, families can pressure one into it, friends can forecast happiness, but none of them will live inside the daily consequences. Your “thoughts” become the real dowry.

The phrasing also exposes how marriage operates as social theater. People “undertake” it like a venture, a project with risk. Rabelais refuses the fantasy that there’s a universally correct spouse or a formula that authorities can administer. His intent is practical, almost modern: when the decision is irreversible and intimate, outsource it and you’ll spend the marriage litigating someone else’s priorities. The wit is that he delivers this individualism in the calm tone of duty, as if self-reliance were the most orthodox counsel imaginable.