quotations about marriage
Before marriage a woman may procure some éclat by pretending to believe in the fiction of her ascendancy; but after marriage, the worshipped beauty becomes a very plain every-day sort of person, and the poetry of the sex's power is at an end for ever!
ROBERT BELL
Marriage: A Comedy in Five Acts
Getting married is like permanently grafting your hand to the cookie jar. No matter how sweet those cookies may taste, you can't help but wonder what would have happened if you'd chosen some other dessert--brownies, for instance, or frozen yogurt ... or maybe chocolate strudel.
JEROME P. CRABB
Marriage Quotes and Quibbles
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
The concerts you enjoy together
Neighbors you annoy together
Children you destroy together
That make a marriage a joy.
STEPHEN SONDHEIM
Company
Marriage is a land mine. A really intimate land mine. Adultery to kitchen fires. Never a dull [moment].
NORA ROBERTS
Blue Smoke
Marriage is a language of love, equality, and inclusion.
EVAN WOLFSON
Why Marriage Matters
There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
DORIS LESSING
The Grass Is Singing
Husband and wife are like the two equal parts of a soybean. If the two parts are put under the earth separately, they will not grow. The soybean will grow only when the parts are covered by the skin. Marriage is the skin which covers each of them and makes them one.
BABA HARI DASS
attributed, Sunbeams: A Book of Quotations
It was crazy: marriage. You gave your whole life, your whole happiness, over to one other human being, even the best of them inept at times, prone to reach for some other fulfillment, some other pleasure.
ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING
Marriage: A Duet
One way to describe the new vision of twenty-first-century marriage is that we have grafted onto the companionship marriage of the previous century the expectations and mores of a lover relationship--the kind of passion, attention, and emotional closeness that we most commonly associate with youth, and with the early stages of a relationship. The common thread running through both of these times is that the couple is principally concerned with itself. I call this nose-to-nose energy. But sooner or later--and certainly with the advent of those things that won't go away--healthy couples turn to side-by-side energy. No longer principally wrapped up in each other, the partners stand in harness together shoulder to shoulder, facing out toward the life they are building.
TERRENCE REAL
The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work
A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other. Any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection, would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
notes, Queen Mab
When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindu, his best friends hear no more of him.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
letter to Leigh Hunt
Were the husband as blind to the faults of the wife, as the lover to the faults of the maiden, few unhappy marriages would follow happy courtships.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends
HOMER
The Odyssey
Probably the institution of marriage had its origin in love of property. Both men and women were united in this--that whatever they loved best, they wished to possess. The usual theory holds that the communal system would not permit the gratification of this desire at the expense of communal rights, and that therefore men were driven to gratify their passion by purchasing or by capturing women from neighboring and hostile tribes.
HENRY ADAMS
Historical Essays
A bride at her second marriage does not wear a veil. She wants to see what she is getting.
HELEN ROWLAND
A Guide to Men
The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life's struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character. If motherhood is the highest fulfillment of woman's nature, what other protection does it need, save love and freedom? Marriage but defiles, outrages, and corrupts her fulfillment. Does it not say to woman, Only when you follow me shall you bring forth life? Does it not condemn her to the block, does it not degrade and shame her if she refuses to buy her right to motherhood by selling herself? Does not marriage only sanction motherhood, even though conceived in hatred, in compulsion? Yet, if motherhood be of free choice, of love, of ecstasy, of defiant passion, does it not place a crown of thorns upon an innocent head and carve in letters of blood the hideous epithet, Bastard? Were marriage to contain all the virtues claimed for it, its crimes against motherhood would exclude it forever from the realm of love.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"Marriage and Love", Anarchism and Other Essays
Some women marry for love, some for money, and some for a home. It is not known why men marry.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
Upon marrying, we need most to pray for one of two things in our partners--the love that blinds, or the good-nature that excuses.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Marriage is one thing, and love is another... You need to have a solid canvas; nobody stops you to weave the arabesques.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
Climats