marriage quotes

Alfred Adler:

We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a "getaway." We cannot love and be limited.

Ambrose Bierce:

Love: a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.

Amy Bloom:

Love at first sight is easy to understand; it's when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.

Ann Landers:

All married couples should learn the art of battle as they should learn the art of making love. Good battle is objective and honest--never vicious or cruel. Good battle is healthy and constructive, and brings to a marriage the principle of equal partnership.
Ann Landers Says Truth Is Stranger..., 1968


Anna Garlin Spencer:

The friendship between a man and a woman which does not lead to marriage or desire for marriage may be a life long experience of the greatest value to themselves and to all their circle of acquaintance and of activity; but for this type of friendship both a rare man and a rare woman are needed. Perhaps it should be added that either the man or the woman thus deeply bound in lifelong friendship who seeks marriage must find a still rarer man or woman to wed, to make such a three cornered comradeship a permanent success.

Anne Bradstreet:

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.

Betty Friedan:

If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.
speech, New York City, January 20, 1974


Bill Cosby:

For two people in a marriage to live together day after day is unquestionably the one miracle the Vatican has overlooked.

Danny DeVito:

There are two dilemmas that rattle the human skull: How do you hang on to someone who won't stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won't go?
The War of the Roses


Dick Gregory:

Political promises are much like marriage vows. They are made at the beginning of the relationship between candidate and voter, but are quickly forgotten.

Francis Bacon:

He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.

Friedrich Nietzsche:

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

Gay Hendricks:

One of the first things a relationship therapist learns is that couples argue to burn up energy that could be used for something else. In fact, arguments often serve the purpose of using up energy, so that the couple do not have to take the courageous, creative leap into an unknown they fear. Arguing serves the function of being a zone of familiarity into which you can retreat when you are afraid of making a creative breakthrough.

Georg C. Lichtenberg:

Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.

Gloria Steinem:

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

Groucho Marx:

Some people claim that marriage interferes with romance. There's no doubt about it. Anytime you have a romance, your wife is bound to interfere.
The Groucho Phile, 1976


Hannah Arendt:

The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which "the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one's skin or color or race" are minor indeed. Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs. [Dissent, Winter 1959]

Harriet Martineau:

Any one must see at a glance that if men and women marry those whom they do not love, they must love those whom they do not marry.

Helen Rowland:

Never trust a husband too far, nor a bachelor too near.

Homer:

There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.

John Berger:

All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.

Joseph Barth:

Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up.

Josh McDowell:

What you are as a single person, you will be as a married person, only to a greater degree. Any negative character trait will be intensified in a marriage relationship, because you will feel free to let your guard down -- that person has committed himself to you and you no longer have to worry about scaring him off.

Joyce Brothers:

Marriage is not just spiritual communion, it is also remembering to take out the trash.

Joyce Brothers:

My husband and I have never considered divorce... murder sometimes, but never divorce.

Katharine Hepburn:

If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.

Louis K. Anspacher:

Marriage is that relation between man and woman in which the independence is equal, the dependence mutual, and the obligation reciprocal.

Lyndon B. Johnson:

Only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, the the other, to let her have it.

Mark Twain:

After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
Adam, in Adam's Diary


Mark Twain:

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.

Mignon McLaughlin:

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

I first learned the concepts of non-violence in my marriage.

Nanette Newman:

A good marriage is at least 80 percent good luck in finding the right person at the right time. The rest is trust.

Ogden Nash:

To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong admit it;
Whenever you're right shut up.

Ogden Nash:

Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other who never forgets.

Oscar Wilde:

Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Pearl S. Buck:

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.

Rainer Maria Rilke:

A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?

Rita Rudner:

I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage. They've experienced pain and bought jewelry.

Robert C. Dodds:

The goal in marriage is not to think alike, but to think together.

Samuel Johnson:

Marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.

Simone Signoret:

Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years. That is what makes a marriage last --more than passion or even sex!

Socrates:

My advice to you is to get married. If you find a good wife, you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher.

Tom Mullen:

Happy marriages begin when we marry the ones we love, and they blossom when we love the ones we marry.

W. H. Auden:

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.

Will Rogers:

Elections are a good deal like marriages. There's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with public officials.

Will Stanton:

Getting a dog is like getting married. It teaches you to be less self-centered, to accept sudden, surprising outbursts of affection, and not to be upset by a few scratches on your car.