MARRIAGE QUOTES XIII

quotations about marriage

Until we have a natural, that is, a conscientious world, it cannot be known by experience what natural law will do for the gratification of a supreme affection; but, if you will give me that world, there will be in it very few not called to marriage, provided society allows proper opportunities for acquaintance between marriageable persons.

JOSEPH COOK

Marriage: With Preludes on Current Events

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Marriage may be polygamic, monogamic, polyandric, complex according to the Oneida pattern, or other, and is true marriage (I do not say perfect marriage) so long as it promotes the happiness of the persons married, and the procreation, support, and education of children, and so long as it is founded on the joint free contract of the persons married, and remains under the sanction of the organic society of which those persons are members.

WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE

Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic, and Financial Fragments

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Society is built on marriage ... marriage and its consequences.

JOHN GALSWORTHY

The Forsyte Saga

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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

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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

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Many people marry first, and have to learn afterwards the duty of a married state, and the comforts and inconveniences that attend it; and it is not uncommon to meet with persons whose depraved judgments encourage them to think it immaterial, whether or not love proceeds tying the matrimonial knot, looking upon it as a matter of future expectation.

WELLINS CALCOTT

Thoughts Moral and Divine

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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

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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

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Love is one long sweet dream, and marriage is the alarm clock.

DAVID MINKOFF

Oy!


Marriage is for woman the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Marriage and Morals


If society will adopt the rule of nature, and justify no marriage without a supreme affection, the evils of marriage without love will be sufficiently cured. Those who marry without the consent of Nature may securely expect trouble.

JOSEPH COOK

Marriage: With Preludes on Current Events

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Never marry but for love; but see that thou lov'st what is lovely.

WILLIAM PENN

Some Fruits of Solitude

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The marriage tie becomes possessed of a history and takes to itself traditions. This history and these traditions form a great fund, to which changing conditions and growing imagination constantly add. And the traditions, more especially, bear heavily upon the individual, overmastering his natural expression of the love instinct and forcing him to an artificial expression of that love instinct. He loves, not as his savage forbears loved, but as his group loves.

JACK LONDON

The Kempton-Wace Letters

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Marriage is socialism among two people.

BARBARA EHRENREICH

The Worst Years of Our Lives

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In the choice of a wife, we ought to make use of our ears, and not our eyes.

WELLINS CALCOTT

Thoughts Moral and Divine

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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

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To make a happy fire-side clime
To weans and wife,
That's the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.

ROBERT BURNS

"To Dr. Blacklock"

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When is it right to marry, and when, after that, is it right to have children? Those are personal questions, and they have personal answers. Answers that are different for different people. But there are rules of thumb, generalizations that hold true more often than society thinks. Our grandparents knew that, but modern America has largely forgotten. Forgotten that the best things in life are actually the purpose of life, and that there is no wisdom in delaying what on our deathbed we will consider the jewels of our existence.

BOB LONSBERRY

A Various Language

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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

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Men and women are natural enemies, like cat and dog--only more so. They are forced to live together for a time, or this wonderful race couldn't go on.

NEITH BOYCE

Enemies

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