quotations about marriage
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
When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindu, his best friends hear no more of him.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
letter to Leigh Hunt
I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend -- perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Epipsychidion
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
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
Happy marriage is the greatest wealth a man can possess, and one that a peasant can have as easily as a king.
DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS
The Lost Diary of Don Juan
They stand at the altar before the minister and emotionally utter the words, "I do." It is a pivotal moment--the end of the wedding, but the start of the marriage. This is either the inauguration of a covenant or partnership that either expresses divine love that transcends all or (as is increasingly the case) the fractious nature of a communion unplanned, unevenly yoked, and selfishly formed.
SAM OHENE-APRAKU
foreword, A Purposeful Marriage
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
Ah. That ceremony. I see. That's it, then. A formula, a shibboleth meaningless as a child's game, performed by someone created by the situation whose need it answered: a crone mumbling in a dungeon lighted by a handful of burning hair, something in a tongue which not even the girls themselves understand anymore, maybe not even the crone herself, rooted in nothing of economics for her or for any possible progeny since the very fact that we acquiesced, suffered the farce, was her proof and assurance of that which the ceremony itself could never enforce; vesting no new rights in anyone, denying to none the old--a ritual as meaningless as that of college boys in secret rooms at night, even to the same archaic and forgotten symbols?--you call that a marriage, when the night of a honeymoon and the casual business with a hired prostitute consists of the same suzerainty over a (temporarily) private room, the same order of removing the same clothes, the same conjunction in a single bed? Why not call that a marriage too?
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
So many promising girls allowed themselves to be submerged altogether in marriage for a time, and when they emerged everyone had forgotten the promise of their début.
HERBERT GEORGE WELLS
Marriage
Let us now set forth one of the fundamental truths about marriage: the wife is in charge.
BILL COSBY
Woman's Day, September 1, 2009
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
I think one of the real tests of a stable marriage is being married to a man who worships at the shrine of burnt food -- the back-yard chef.
ERMA BOMBECK
I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression
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
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"
Marriage has some thorns, but celibacy has no roses.
VERNON K. MCLELLAN
Wise Words and Quotes
It's terribly hard to be married ... harder than anything else. I think you have to be an angel.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
A Dream Play
Never marry but for love; but see that thou lov'st what is lovely.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Marriage does not unite two people; it entangles them.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
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