quotations about marriage
If society will adopt the rule of nature, and justify no marriage without a supreme affection, the evils of marriage without love will be sufficiently cured. Those who marry without the consent of Nature may securely expect trouble.
JOSEPH COOK
Marriage: With Preludes on Current Events
Marriage may be polygamic, monogamic, polyandric, complex according to the Oneida pattern, or other, and is true marriage (I do not say perfect marriage) so long as it promotes the happiness of the persons married, and the procreation, support, and education of children, and so long as it is founded on the joint free contract of the persons married, and remains under the sanction of the organic society of which those persons are members.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic, and Financial Fragments
There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
DORIS LESSING
The Grass Is Singing
I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.
G. K. CHESTERTON
What's Wrong with the World
Before marriage a woman may procure some éclat by pretending to believe in the fiction of her ascendancy; but after marriage, the worshipped beauty becomes a very plain every-day sort of person, and the poetry of the sex's power is at an end for ever!
ROBERT BELL
Marriage: A Comedy in Five Acts
A bride at her second marriage does not wear a veil. She wants to see what she is getting.
HELEN ROWLAND
A Guide to Men
Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow in both cases, excludes us from all enquiry.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
notes, Queen Mab
Mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy are common during the first year of any marriage.
JAMES THURBER
Is Sex Necessary?
Upon marrying, we need most to pray for one of two things in our partners--the love that blinds, or the good-nature that excuses.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
One way to describe the new vision of twenty-first-century marriage is that we have grafted onto the companionship marriage of the previous century the expectations and mores of a lover relationship--the kind of passion, attention, and emotional closeness that we most commonly associate with youth, and with the early stages of a relationship. The common thread running through both of these times is that the couple is principally concerned with itself. I call this nose-to-nose energy. But sooner or later--and certainly with the advent of those things that won't go away--healthy couples turn to side-by-side energy. No longer principally wrapped up in each other, the partners stand in harness together shoulder to shoulder, facing out toward the life they are building.
TERRENCE REAL
The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work
Probably the institution of marriage had its origin in love of property. Both men and women were united in this--that whatever they loved best, they wished to possess. The usual theory holds that the communal system would not permit the gratification of this desire at the expense of communal rights, and that therefore men were driven to gratify their passion by purchasing or by capturing women from neighboring and hostile tribes.
HENRY ADAMS
Historical Essays
They stand at the altar before the minister and emotionally utter the words, "I do." It is a pivotal moment--the end of the wedding, but the start of the marriage. This is either the inauguration of a covenant or partnership that either expresses divine love that transcends all or (as is increasingly the case) the fractious nature of a communion unplanned, unevenly yoked, and selfishly formed.
SAM OHENE-APRAKU
foreword, A Purposeful Marriage
Marriage is socialism among two people.
BARBARA EHRENREICH
The Worst Years of Our Lives
A fulfilling sex life is one of the most powerful marital glues a couple can have.
KEVIN LEMAN
Sheet Music: Uncovering the Secrets of Sexual Intimacy in Marriage
How you end something as profound and important as a marriage is a reflection of how you live your life--financially, emotionally, and spiritually.
SUZE ORMAN
The Road to Wealth
How the world can change,
It can change like that,
Due to one little word:
"Married."
FRED EBB
Cabaret
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
Many people marry first, and have to learn afterwards the duty of a married state, and the comforts and inconveniences that attend it; and it is not uncommon to meet with persons whose depraved judgments encourage them to think it immaterial, whether or not love proceeds tying the matrimonial knot, looking upon it as a matter of future expectation.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends
HOMER
The Odyssey
Husband and wife are like the two equal parts of a soybean. If the two parts are put under the earth separately, they will not grow. The soybean will grow only when the parts are covered by the skin. Marriage is the skin which covers each of them and makes them one.
BABA HARI DASS
attributed, Sunbeams: A Book of Quotations