quotations about marriage
A successful marriage is the result of falling in love often--with the same person.
CROFT M. PENTZ
The Complete Book of Zingers
A man in love is incomplete until he has married--then he's finished.
ZSA ZSA GABOR
Newsweek, March 28, 1960
Those marriages generally abound most with love and constancy that are preceded by a long courtship.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Spectator, December 29, 1711
There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.
MARTIN LUTHER
Table Talk
She is always married too soon, who gets a bad husband, and she is never married too late, who gets a good one.
DANIEL DEFOE
Moll Flanders
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
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
If you can hang in there through minor and major differences of opinion, through each other's big and little screwups, year after year, you come to understand that the person you married is really, terribly flawed. There isn't a human being you can hang out with, day in and day out, for over a decade and not come to the same inescapable realization.
KYRAN PITTMAN
Good Housekeeping, June 2011
According to a new survey, people who get divorced die early. People who stay married live longer. The difference is they just wish they were dead.
DAVID LETTERMAN
Late Show with David Letterman, January 11, 2012
A single life is doubtless preferable to a married one, where prudence and affection do not accompany the choice; but where they do, there is no terrestrial happiness equal to the married state.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
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
In a way, marriage is a cosmic joke; we [men and women] are so different from each other.
MARK GUNGOR
Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage
I'll suffer no daughter of mine to play the fool with her heart, indeed! She shall marry for the purpose for which matrimony was ordained amongst people of birth--that is, for the aggrandisement of her family, the extending of their political influence--for becoming, in short, the depository of their mutual interest. These are the only purposes for which persons of rank ever think of marriage.
SUSAN FERRIER
Marriage
All of us, at least unconsciously, marry in the hope of healing our wounds. Even if we do not have a traumatic background, we still have hurts and unfilled needs that we carry inside. We all suffer from feelings of self-doubt, unworthiness, and inadequacy. No matter how nurturing our parents were, we never received enough attention and love. So in marriage we look to our spouse to convince us that we are worthwhile and to heal our infirmities.
LESLIE L. PARROTT
Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts
When a girl marries, she exchanges the attentions of all the other men of her acquaintance for the inattention of just one.
HELEN ROWLAND
Reflections of a Bachelor Girl
Married people, for being so closely united, are but the apter to part; as knots the harder they are pulled, break the sooner.
ALEXANDER POPE
"Thoughts on Various Subjects"
Marriage is like life in this -- that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Virginibus Puerisque
I have always considered marriage as the most interesting event of one's life, the foundation of happiness or misery.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to Burwell Bassett, May 23, 1785
A marriage bound together by commitments to exploit the other for filling one's own needs (and I fear that most marriages are built on such a basis) can legitimately be described as a "tic on a dog" relationship. Just as a hungry tic clamps on to a nourishing host in anticipation of a meal, so each partner unites with the other in the expectation of finding what his or her personal nature demands. The rather frustrating dilemma, of course, is that in such a marriage there are two tics and no dog!
LARRY CRABB
The Marriage Builder