quotations about marriage
People who have found everything disappointing are surprised and pained when marriage proves no exception. Most of the complaints about ... matrimony arise not because it is worse than the rest of life, but because it is not incomparably better.
JOHN LEVY
attributed, Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts
We could probably date the conception of "modern" marriage at around 1850, with its gestation through the Gilded Age, and its birth about 1920. Not coincidentally, serenading that pregnancy and birth has been a steadily rising chorus of outcries about the death of marriage and the family. By the 1920s every third magazine article seemed to be titled "Will Modern Marriage Survive?" Of course, reports of marriage's death have been greatly exaggerated: even laying aside the peculiar 1950s (which none of "the family" doomsayers foresaw), marriage remains outrageously popular, divorce statistics and all.
E. J. GRAFF
What is Marriage for?
"Happy marriage" is a contradiction in terms.
DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS
The Lost Diary of Don Juan
Marriage follows on love as smoke on flame.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
Let your love advise before you choose, and your choice be fixed before you marry: Remember the happiness or misery of your life depends upon this one act, and ... nothing but death can dissolve the knot.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
A successful marriage is the result of falling in love often--with the same person.
CROFT M. PENTZ
The Complete Book of Zingers
A woman will always cherish the memory of the man who wanted to marry her. A man, of the woman who he didn't.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
If you have the least doubt about it, do not marry.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Use of Life
If sex is supposed to be satisfying and anxiety-free once we are safely ensconced in marriage, how come that's when many of us stop wanting it?
DAVID MORRIS SCHNARCH
Passionate Marriage
Maybe marriages were made in heaven, but we believe in giving the old-fashioned porch-swing some credit.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
I fall in love easily. I love the marriage ceremony. I love the honeymoon phase. I just don't want to be married. I'm not marriage material, but I am a very good honeymooner.
FERN MICHAELS
The Marriage Game
Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The Scarlet Letter
Love and fairytales are nice, but marriage is technically a contract, and it's worth reading the fine-print before signing your name.
MAUREEN SHAW
"The Sexist and Racist History of Marriage That No One Talks About", Teen Vogue, November 28, 2017
A man and a woman who, in their young days, agree to have done with sentimental life thereby renounce the search for adventure, the intoxication of new encounters, and the amazing refreshment produced by falling in love again. Their most vital source of energy is cut off; they are doomed to premature insensibility. Their life, scarcely begun, is finished. Nothing can break the monotony of an existence made up of burdens and duties. No further hope, no surprises, no conquests. Their one love will soon be tainted by the cares of housekeeping and the children's education. They will reach old age without ever having known the joys of youth. Marriage destroys romantic love which alone could justify it.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
An Art of Living
Marriage that daily doom.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit is Rich
When a match has equal partners, then I fear not.
AESCHYLUS
Prometheus Bound
It will perhaps appear extraordinary that in speaking of marriage we have touched upon so many subjects; but marriage is not only the whole of human life, it is the whole of two human lives. Now just as the addition of a figure to the drawing of a lottery multiplies the chances a hundredfold, so one single life united to another life multiplies by a startling progression the risks of human life, which are in any case so manifold.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Marriage, rightly concluded, is an incarnation of love--poetry expressed in action--a sweet embellishment of an otherwise prosaic existence.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Well-married, a man is winged--ill-matched, he is shackled.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
'Tis safest in matrimony to begin with a little aversion.
RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN
The Rivals