Daily Inspiration Quote by Desiderius Erasmus

A neat little trap disguised as a shrug: Erasmus compresses an entire cultural contradiction into a one-liner that sounds like common sense and lands like a smirk. The phrasing hinges on symmetry - "can't... can't..". - which mimics logical rigor while actually refusing to argue anything. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of washing one’s hands: women are framed as simultaneously unbearable and indispensable, and the speaker gets to enjoy the pleasures of dependence without admitting vulnerability or responsibility.

The subtext is less about women than about male anxiety in a world where relationships are not optional. "Without them" concedes need - for companionship, sex, heirs, domestic labor, social legitimacy - but the first clause ("can't live with them") reasserts dominance by casting that need as a burden. The joke lets the speaker complain while keeping the benefits. It is grievance dressed up as wisdom.

Context matters: Erasmus, the great Christian humanist, worked inside a late medieval/early modern Europe where marriage was a social institution more than a romantic project, and misogynistic commonplaces were intellectual currency. His writing often uses irony and classical-style aphorism to puncture hypocrisy, but this line also participates in the very reflex it pretends to observe: turning women into a category, a problem, a force of nature.

Why it still travels is its portability. It’s an alibi you can repeat at the tavern, in parliament, or in a sitcom writers’ room: timeless not because it’s true, but because it flatters the speaker’s ambivalence as insight.