quotations about marriage
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
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
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
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 not a word, it's a sentence--a life sentence.
DAVID MINKOFF
Oy!
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
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 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
In the choice of a wife, we ought to make use of our ears, and not our eyes.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
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
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
Love is one long sweet dream, and marriage is the alarm clock.
DAVID MINKOFF
Oy!
Ask any woman in an arranged marriage. Love is the least stressful way out.
FAY WELDON
The Spa
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
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
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
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
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
It's terribly hard to be married ... harder than anything else. I think you have to be an angel.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
A Dream Play
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