quotations about marriage
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
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
Marriage is the agreement to let a family happen.
BETTY JANE WYLIE
Family: An Exploration
You shouldn't marry anyone you have to try hard for.
RACHEL RAY
Good Housekeeping, July 2010
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
Marriage cures nothing--and least of all does it solve anyone's emotional problems.
SMILEY BLANTON
Love or Perish
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
Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow in both cases, excludes us from all enquiry.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
notes, Queen Mab
Not everyone believes that marriage transforms miserable and immature single people into paragons of maturity and bliss.
BELLA DEPAULO
Singled Out
Marrying to increase love is like gaming to become rich; alas, you only lose what little stock you had before.
WILLIAM WYCHERLEY
The Country Wife
A good marriage is good for you. That isn't just a platitude. Mounting research shows that it is the literal truth. When your marriage is healthy, your body and mind are healthier.
CLIFF ISAACSON
The Good-for-You Marriage
How you end something as profound and important as a marriage is a reflection of how you live your life--financially, emotionally, and spiritually.
SUZE ORMAN
The Road to Wealth
A little weeping, a little wheedling, a little self-degradation, a little careful use of our advantages, and then some man will say--"Come, be my wife!" With good looks and youth marriage is easy to attain. There are men enough; but a woman who has sold herself, even for a ring and a new name, need hold her skirt aside for no creature in the street. They both earn their bread in one way. Marriage for love is the beautifullest external symbol of the union of souls; marriage without it is the uncleanliest traffic that defiles the world.
OLIVE SCHREINER
The Story of an African Farm
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
The present marriage laws are very propitious towards making Cuckoldom the normal state of men.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.
G. K. CHESTERTON
What's Wrong with the World
The secret to a good marriage, as far as I am concerned, is a joke I make: Keep the fights clean and the sex dirty.
MICHAEL J. FOX
Good Housekeeping, April 2009
When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindu, his best friends hear no more of him.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
letter to Leigh Hunt
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
Marriage is a land mine. A really intimate land mine. Adultery to kitchen fires. Never a dull [moment].
NORA ROBERTS
Blue Smoke