quotations about marriage
Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship--only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses. The death has occurred much earlier.
ERICA JONG
How To Save Your Own Life
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
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?
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
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
Marriage that daily doom.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit is Rich
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
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 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
Today's concept of marrying for love is a relatively new phenomenon. Historically, unions were transactional and women had no say in the matter. In colonial America, for example, there was no dating; fathers arranged their daughters' marriages with the goal of combining wealth and property. What's more, once married, women were prohibited from owning property. They were merely their husband's possession and lost all individual legal rights.
MAUREEN SHAW
"The Sexist and Racist History of Marriage That No One Talks About", Teen Vogue, November 28, 2017
Marriage follows on love as smoke on flame.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
Marriage is punishment for shoplifting in some countries.
GARTH ALGAR (DANA CARVEY)
Wayne's World
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
A successful marriage is the result of falling in love often--with the same person.
CROFT M. PENTZ
The Complete Book of Zingers
We only attain the true idea of marriage when we consider it as a spiritual union--a union of immortal affections, of undying faculties, of an imperishable destiny.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
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