quotations about marriage
Most women use more brains picking a horse in the third at Belmont than they do picking a husband.
LAUREN BACALL
How to Marry a Millionaire
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
Marriage is a sort of poetical see-saw.
G. K. CHESTERTON
What's Wrong with the World
Ask any woman in an arranged marriage. Love is the least stressful way out.
FAY WELDON
The Spa
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
Courtship to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a very dull Play.
WILLIAM CONGREVE
The Old Bachelor
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
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 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
Marriages are always moving from one season to another. Sometimes we find ourselves in winter--discouraged, detached, and dissatisfied; other times we experience springtime, with its openness, hope, and anticipation. On still other occasions we bask in the warmth of summer--comfortable, relaxed, enjoying life. And then comes fall with its uncertainty, negligence, and apprehension. The cycle repeats itself many times throughout the life of a marriage, just as the seasons repeat themselves in nature.
GARY D. CHAPMAN
note to readers, Summer Breeze
Matrimony is an engagement which must last the life of one of the parties, and there is no retracting ... therefore, to avoid all the horror of a repentance that comes too late, men should thoroughly know the real causes that induce them to take so important a step, before they venture upon it; do they stand in need of a wife, an heiress, or a nurse; is it their passions, their wants, or their infirmities, that solicit them to wed?
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Marriage is commonly a meal wherein the soup is better than the desert.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.
OSCAR WILDE
A Woman of No Importance
That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.
JOHN UPDIKE
foreword, Too Far To Go
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
It is internal union, not external agreement, that makes the real marriage.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
It's terribly hard to be married ... harder than anything else. I think you have to be an angel.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
A Dream Play
Marriage is meant to be a very sacred union between two people who have no intention of ever becoming emotionally or physically tied to another person for the rest of eternity. Most people mean their marriage vows when they take them, but oftentimes--these days more often than not, according to statistics--the initial commitment begins to wane and ultimately dissipates altogether. We live in a time when most people who get married before they turn thirty are merely doing a practice run.
ZANE
Dear G. Spot
Much of the quarrels and hatred which arise between married people come, in my mind, from the husband's rage and revolt at discovering that his slave and bedfellow, who is to minister to all his wishes, and is church-sworn to honour and obey him--is his superior; and that he, and not she, ought to be the subordinate of the twain.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond