quotations about marriage
There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
NORMAN MAILER
News Summaries, December 31, 1969
After marriage, a woman's sight becomes so keen that she can see right through her husband without looking at him, and a man's so dull that he can look right through his wife without seeing her.
HELEN ROWLAND
A Guide to Men
The key to a successful marriage is accepting that you're not going to change the other person. And the words "Yes, dear. Whatever you want."
PATRICK DEMPSEY
Good Housekeeping, July 2011
I love being married. It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.
RITA RUDNER
stand-up routine
Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage
Dad was told by mother
You can't have one without the other.
SAMMY CAHN
"Love and Marriage"
The only way you can make a marriage work is as free, independent people. It needs to be based on the good feelings that you have for each other, not on need.
ALEXANDER LOWEN
"Alexander Lowen: An Energetic Man", Journal of Counseling & Development, September/October 1992
Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It differs from the ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is more binding, more exacting. Its returns are insignificantly small compared with the investments. In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, however, woman's premium is her husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, "until death doth part." Moreover, the marriage insurance condemns her to life-long dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness, individual as well as social. Man, too, pays his toll, but as his sphere is wider, marriage does not limit him as much as woman. He feels his chains more in an economic sense.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"Marriage and Love", Anarchism and Other Essays
Marriage is a sort of poetical see-saw.
G. K. CHESTERTON
What's Wrong with the World
By taking a second wife he pays the highest compliment to the first, by showing that she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second time.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
attributed, Life of Samuel Johnson
If love be not thy chiefest motive, thou wilt soon grow weary of a married state, and stray from thy promise, to search out thy pleasures in forbidden places.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Neurotic's Notebook
The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Letters to a Young Poet
Marriage has some thorns, but celibacy has no roses.
VERNON K. MCLELLAN
Wise Words and Quotes
The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Middlesex
It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry.... If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.
EZRA POUND
letter to his mother, 1909
In that family where the husband is pleased with his wife, and the wife with her husband, happiness will assuredly be lasting.
BRAHMA
The Laws of Manu
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization's oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that.
ANTHONY KENNEDY
Supreme Court of the United States ruling on the legality of gay marriage, June 26, 2015
Ask any woman in an arranged marriage. Love is the least stressful way out.
FAY WELDON
The Spa
When most people enter marriage, they have only had an "up close and personal" view of a small number of marriages, perhaps only one (i.e., their parents' marriage). Although you likely have known many married people throughout your lifetime, your vision of most marriages is limited to the images that the couples project to the world. You can never really know what another person's marriage is like behind closed doors. Therefore, most people enter into marriage with gaps in their understanding of what marriage entails.
CHRISTINE E. MURRAY
Just Engaged
Marriage isn't what it was. It's become a different thing because women have become human beings.
HERBERT GEORGE WELLS
Marriage