quotations about marriage
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
In the choice of a wife, we ought to make use of our ears, and not our eyes.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
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
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
Marriage is not a word, it's a sentence--a life sentence.
DAVID MINKOFF
Oy!
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
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
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
Marriage emerged some forty-five hundred years ago and evolved into a widespread and accepted institution that bonded families, maintained order, and created wealth. Unlike today, where many of us are searching for our romantic "soul mate," marriage was originally more about economics than deep emotion.
ROBI LUDWIG
Till Death Do Us Part
Ask any woman in an arranged marriage. Love is the least stressful way out.
FAY WELDON
The Spa
Courtship to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a very dull Play.
WILLIAM CONGREVE
The Old Bachelor
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"
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
A little weeping, a little wheedling, a little self-degradation, a little careful use of our advantages, and then some man will say--"Come, be my wife!" With good looks and youth marriage is easy to attain. There are men enough; but a woman who has sold herself, even for a ring and a new name, need hold her skirt aside for no creature in the street. They both earn their bread in one way. Marriage for love is the beautifullest external symbol of the union of souls; marriage without it is the uncleanliest traffic that defiles the world.
OLIVE SCHREINER
The Story of an African Farm
A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Neurotic's Notebook
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 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
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
Love is one long sweet dream, and marriage is the alarm clock.
DAVID MINKOFF
Oy!