quotations about marriage
A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.
JANE AUSTEN
Pride and Prejudice
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
A man never has good luck who has a bad wife.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman's slavery was assumed to be for life.
HENRY ADAMS
Historical Essays
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"
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
Marriage is divine in its institution, sacred in its union, holy in the mystery, sacramental in its signification, honourable in its appellative, religious in its employments: it is advantage to the societies of men, and it is "holiness to the Lord."
JEREMY TAYLOR
The Marriage Ring
People marry with a deep longing that their partner will tend to their wounds, not throw salt in them. Honor your partner's vulnerability.
HARRIET LERNER
Twitter post, November 2, 2014
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
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
The mere idea of marriage, as a strong possibility, if not always nowadays a reasonable likelihood, existing to weaken the will by distracting its straight aim in the life of practically every young girl, is the simple secret of their confessed inferiority in men's pursuits and professions today.
WILLIAM BOLITHO
Twelve Against the Gods
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
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
Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.
OSCAR WILDE
A Woman of No Importance
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
Marriages are made in heaven though consummated on Earth.
JOHN LYLY
Euphues and his England
Marriage is a sort of poetical see-saw.
G. K. CHESTERTON
What's Wrong with the World
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
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 a pretty amazing thing when you think about it. For two people to live together for so long under the same roof is a big accomplishment. Fifty-year anniversaries are becoming extinct, yet again proving that long marriages deserve awards and praise. Sometimes I see old people in restaurants sitting together eating their meals and I watch them. Sometimes it makes me sad. They don't even talk. Is it because they have nothing else to say, or can they simply read each other's mind by now?
JENNY MCCARTHY
Life Laughs