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
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
There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
DORIS LESSING
The Grass Is Singing
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 is the union of two hearts, without which there can be no marriage; but where this is the case, and the legal ceremony takes place, it is registered in Heaven. A father or mother getting their daughter to marry a man she does not care for is simply selling her, and a sin in all concerned, which cannot turn out for her happiness, but must lead to a life of mental misery and mental degradation. Having given their children a good Christian education, parents have no right to prevent, or try to prevent, their children marrying whosoever they choose, provided there is nothing against the character of the person chosen. Selling a young woman to an old man who is wealthy is a loathsome and disgusting sight; and the young woman should resist such a union at all hazards; for with such a marriage, or so-called marriage, ends all hope of earthly happiness and self-respect.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On Marriage", Short Essays
Marriage is also a social statement, preeminently describing and defining a person's relationship and place in society. Marital status, along with what we do for a living, is often one of the first pieces of information we give to others about ourselves. It's so important, in fact, that most married people wear a symbol of their marriage on their hand.
EVAN WOLFSON
Why Marriage Matters
Marriage is a land mine. A really intimate land mine. Adultery to kitchen fires. Never a dull [moment].
NORA ROBERTS
Blue Smoke
Marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Husband and wife did not need to speak words to one another, not just from the old habit of living together but because in that one long-ago instant at least out of the long and shabby stretch of their human lives, even though they knew at the time it wouldn't and couldn't last, they had touched and become as God when they voluntarily and in advance forgave one another for all that each knew the other could never be.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Go Down, Moses
Before marriage a woman may procure some éclat by pretending to believe in the fiction of her ascendancy; but after marriage, the worshipped beauty becomes a very plain every-day sort of person, and the poetry of the sex's power is at an end for ever!
ROBERT BELL
Marriage: A Comedy in Five Acts
A fulfilling sex life is one of the most powerful marital glues a couple can have.
KEVIN LEMAN
Sheet Music: Uncovering the Secrets of Sexual Intimacy in Marriage
You shouldn't marry anyone you have to try hard for.
RACHEL RAY
Good Housekeeping, July 2010
Nature admits of no permanence in the relation between man and woman.... It is only man's egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and legalities.
LEOPOLD VON SACHER-MASOCH
Venus in Furs
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
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
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh, no, it is an ever-fixéd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark
Whose worth's unknown, although its height be taken.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Sonnet CXVI
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!
Marriage is not a word, it's a sentence--a life sentence.
DAVID MINKOFF
Oy!
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