Quotations and Poems

» “A woman seldom asks advice before she has bought her wedding clothes.”
– Joseph Addison

» “When a match has equal partners then I fear not.”
– Aeschylus

» “Marriage is more than four bare legs in a bed.”
– Hoshang N. Akhtar

» “When two people marry they become in the eyes of the law one person, and that one person is the husband!”
– Shana Alexander

» “If a man works like a horse for his money, there are a lot of girls anxious to take him down the bridal path.”
– Marty Allen

» “The lion and the calf will lay down together, but the calf won’t get much sleep..”
– Woody Allen

» “Marriage is the death of hope.”
– Woody Allen

» “To marry unequally is to suffer equally.”
– Henri Frederic Amiel

» “The real act of marriage takes place in the heart, not in the ballroom or church or synagogue. It’s a choice you make — not just on your wedding day, but over and over again — and that choice is reflected in the way you treat your husband or wife.”
– Barbara De Angelis

» “Marriage is not a noun; it’s a verb. It isn’t something you get. It’s something you do. It’s the way you love your partner every day.”
– Barbara De Angelis

» “Marriage is that relation between man and woman in which the independence is equal, the dependence mutual, and the obligation reciprocal.”
– Louis K. Anspacher

» “To marry a man out of pity is folly; and, if you think you are going to influence the kind of fellow who has ”never had a chance, poor devil,” you are profoundly mistaken. One can only influence the strong characters in life, not the weak; and it is the height of vanity to suppose that you can make an honest man of anyone.”
– Margot Asquith

» “I married beneath me. All women do.”
– Lady Nancy Astor

» “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.”
– W. H. Auden

» “It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage.”
– Jane Austen

» “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.”
– Jane Austen

» “Wives are young men’s mistresses; companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.”
– Francis Bacon

» “In marriage there are no manners to keep up, and beneath the wildest accusations no real criticism. Each is familiar with that ancient child in the other who may erupt again. We are not ridiculous to ourselves. We are ageless. That is the luxury of the wedding ring.”
– Enid Bagnold

» “A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.”
– Honore De Balzac

» “It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.”
– Honore De Balzac

» “I am thinking of taking a fifth wife. Why not? Solomon had a thousand wives and he is a synonym for wisdom.”
– John Barrymore

» “Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up.”
– Joseph Barth

» “Marriage is low down, but you spend the rest of your life paying for it.”
– Baskins

» “Marriage always demands the greatest understanding of the art of insincerity possible between two human beings.”
– Vicki Baum

» “The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength –each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence.”
– Simone De Beauvoir

» “How many young hearts have revealed the fact that what they had been trained to imagine the highest earthly felicity was but the beginning of care, disappointment, and sorrow, and often led to the extremity of mental and physical suffering.”
– Catharine Esther Beecher

» “Well married a person has wings, poorly married shackles.”
– Henry Ward Beecher

» “Never marry a man who hates his mother, because he’ll end up hating you.”
– Jill Bennett

» “Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers. [1 Peter 3:7]“
– Bible

» “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her. [Ephesians 5:25]“
– Bible

» “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. [Genesis 2:24]“
– Bible

» “Who finds a wife finds a good thing, and obtains favor with the Lord.”
– Bible

» “For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. [Matthew 22:30]“
– Bible

» “The world has suffered more from the ravages of ill-advised marriages than from virginity.”
– Ambrose Bierce

» “Marriage. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.”
– Ambrose Bierce

» “Incompatibility. In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination.”
– Ambrose Bierce

» “As a general thing, when the woman wears the pants in the family, she has a good right to them.”
– Josh Billings

» “The mere idea of marriage, as a strong possibility, if not always nowadays a reasonable likelihood, existing to weaken the will by distracting its straight aim in the life of practically every young girl, is the simple secret of their confessed inferiority in men’s pursuits and professions to-day.”
– William Bolitho

» “When you get married you forget about kissing other women.”
– Pat Boone

» “Marriage is not just spiritual communion, it is also remembering to take out the trash.”
– Dr. Joyce Brothers

» “Marriage, it seems, confines every man to his proper rank.”
РJean De La Bruy̬re

» “I hate work. That’s why I got married.”
– Peg Bundy

» “The only thing that holds a marriage together is the husband being big enough to keep his mouth shut, to step back and see where his wife is wrong.”
– Archie Bunker

» “The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honor a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.”
– Anthony Burgess

» “One was never married, and that’s his hell; another is, and that’s his plague.”
– Robert Burton

» “I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell this to my children they just about throw up.”
– Barbara Bush

» “Though women are angels, yet wedlock’s the devil.”
– Lord Byron

» “I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.”
– Lord Byron

» “All tragedies are finished by a death, all comedies by a marriage.”
– Lord Byron

» “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

» “The deep, deep peace of the double-bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-lounge.”
– Patrick Campbell

» “If variety is the spice of life, marriage is the big can of leftover Spam.”
– Johnny Carson

» “A man will teach his wife what is needed to arouse his desires. And there is no reason for a woman to know any more than what her husband is prepared to teach her. If she gets married knowing far too much about what she wants and doesn’t want then she will be ready to find fault with her husband.”
– Barbara Cartland

» “There is a time for all things — except marriage my dear.”
– Thomas Chatterton

» “Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.”
– Gilbert K. Chesterton

» “There’s nothing like a Catholic wedding to make you wish life had a fast forward button.”
– Daniel Chopin

» “Before marriage a man yearns for a woman. Afterward the ”y” is silent.”
– W. A. Clarke

» “The most happy marriage I can imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

» “Never join with your friend when he abuses his horse or his wife, unless the one is to be sold and the other to be buried.”
– Charles Caleb Colton

» “Grief walks upon the heels of pleasure; married in haste, we repent at leisure.”
– William Congreve

» “The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.”
– Cyril Connolly

» “Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the way of our happy union.”
– Cyril Connolly

» “I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon and a cat that comes home late at night.”
– Marie Corelli

» “Marriage is like a bank account. You put it in, you take it out, you lose interest.”
– Irwin Cory

» “That married couples can live together day after day is a miracle the Vatican has overlooked.”
– Bill Cosby

» “I’ve sometimes thought of marrying, and then I’ve thought again.”
– Noel Coward

» “Marriage is a matter of give and take, but so far I haven’t been able to find anybody who’ll take what I have to give.”
– Cass Daley

» “My wife is always trying to get rid of me. The other day she told me to put the garbage out. I said to her I already did. She told me to go and keep an eye on it.”
– Rodney Dangerfield

» “My wife and I were happy for twenty. Then we met!”
– Rodney Dangerfield

» “I’d marry again if I found a man who had 15 million and would sign over half of it to me before the marriage and guarantee he’d be dead within a year.”
– Bette Davis

» “I think like any marriage, especially when you’ve had divorced parents like myself, you’d want to try even harder to make it work.”
– Princess of Wales Diana

» “When you’re a married man, Samivel, you’ll understand a good many things as you don’t understand now; but whether it’s worth while, going through so much, to learn so little, as the charity-boy said when he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter o taste.”
– Charles Dickens

» “Whatever you may look like, marry a man your own age — as your beauty fades, so will his eyesight.”
– Phyllis Diller

» “It destroys one’s nerve to be amiable every day to the same human being.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

» “I’m certain that most couples expect to find intimacy in marriage, but it somehow eludes them.”
– Dr. James C. Dobson

» “Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.”
– Isadora Duncan

» “So that ends my first experience of matrimony, which I always thought a highly over-rated performance.”
– Isadora Duncan

» “Men marry to make an end; women to make a beginning.”
– Alexis Dupuy

» “Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.”
– Andrea Dworkin

» “Marriage is socialism among two people.”
– Barbara Ehrenreich

» “Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.”
– George Eliot

» “I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married.”
– Elizabeth I

» “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?”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he!”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “When the blind lead the blind, no wonder they both fall into — matrimony.”
– George Farquhar

» “Wasn’t marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded? Wasn’t it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt?”
– Edna Ferber

» “One fool at least in every married couple.”
– Henry Fielding

» “When widows exclaim loudly against second marriages, I would always lay a wager than the man, If not the wedding day, is absolutely fixed on.”
– Henry Fielding

» “There is a French saying: ”Love is the dawn of marriage, and marriage is the sunset of love.””
– De Finod

» “Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.”
– Richard Ford

» “I’m going to marry a Jewish woman because I like the idea of getting up Sunday morning and going to the deli.”
– Michael J. Fox

» “Where there is marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.”
– Benjamin Franklin

» “One good husband is worth two good wives, for the scarcer things are, the more they are valued.”
– Benjamin Franklin

» “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half-shut afterwards.”
– Benjamin Franklin

» “An undutiful daughter will prove an unmanageable wife.”
– Benjamin Franklin

» “Marriage accustomed one to the good things, so one came to take them for granted, but magnified the bad things, so they came to feel as painful as a grain in one’s eye. An open window, a forgotten quart of milk, a TV set left blaring, socks on the bathroom floor could become occasions for incredible rage. And something happened sexually in marriage –the swearing to forsake all others, despite its slight observance, had a profound effect. Some people felt trapped by it, impelled to assert what they called freedom. Some accepted it like a rein, and in the effort to avoid pain in the form of hopeless desire, cut off occasions of desire, avoided having long talks at parties with attractive members of the opposite sex. In time, all feeling for the opposite sex was cut off, and intercourse limited to the barest politesses. But something happened to you when you did that, a kind of death seeped up from the genitals to the rest of the body, till it showed in the eyes, the gestures, in a certain lifelessness.”
– Marilyn French

» “Two such as you with such a master speed cannot be parted nor be swept away from one another once you are agreed that life is only life forevermore together wing to wing and oar to oar.”
– Robert Frost

» “Deceive not thyself by over-expecting happiness in the married estate. Remember the nightingales which sing only some months in the spring, but commonly are silent when they have hatched their eggs, as if their mirth were turned into care for their young ones.”
– Thomas Fuller

» “If you would have a good wife, marry one who has been a good daughter.”
– Thomas Fuller

» “I never hate a man enough to give him his diamonds back.”
– Zsa Zsa Gabor

» “A man in love is incomplete until he has married — then he’s finished.”
– Zsa Zsa Gabor

» “I first learned the concepts of non-violence in my marriage.”
– Mahatma Gandhi

» “To be sure a stepmother to a girl is a different thing to a second wife to a man!”
– Elizabeth Gaskell

» “I hate to be a failure. I hate and regret the failure of my marriages. I would gladly give all my millions for just one lasting marital success.”
– J. Paul Getty

» “When a wife has a good husband it is easily seen in her face.”
– Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

» “In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, however, woman’s premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, ”until death doth part.””
– Emma Goldman

» “Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?”
– Emma Goldman

» “You, that are going to be married, think things can never be done too fast: but we that are old, and know what we are about, must elope methodically, madam.”
– Oliver Goldsmith

» “Love is blind and marriage is the institution for the blind.”
– James Graham

» “Every time a woman makes herself laugh at her husband’s often-told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks at his woman and says ”What would I do without you?” is already destroyed.”
– Germaine Greer

» “I grew up in a very large family in a very small house. I never slept alone until after I was married.”
– Lewis Grizzard

» “Instead of getting married again. I’m going to find a woman I don’t like and give her a house.”
– Lewis Grizzard

» “Two souls and one thought, two hearts and one pulse.”
– Halen

» “Marriage, for a woman at least, hampers the two things that made life to me glorious — friendship and learning.”
– Jane Harrison

» “The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.”
– Carolyn Heilbrun

» “Matrimony is the high sea for which no compass has yet to be invented.”
– Heinrich Heine

» “Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, ”What will you have, sir?” And I said, ”A glass of hemlock.””
– Ernest Hemingway

» “If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.”
– Katharine Hepburn

» “Try to take for a mate a person of your own neighborhood.”
– Hesiod

» “When a husband is embraced without affection, there must be some reason for it.”
– Hitopadesa

» “She is a wife who is the soul of her husband.”
– Hitopadesa

» “I should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a gorilla that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

» “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.”
– Homer

» “Polygamy is an endeavor to get more out of life than there is in it.”
– Elbert Hubbard

» “All marriages are happy it’s living together afterwards that causes all the problems.”
– Raymond Hull

» “Americans, who make more of marrying for love than any other people, also break up more or their marriages, but the figure reflects not so much the failure of love as the determination not to live without it.”
– Morton Hunt

» “Marriage is the torment of one, the felicity of two, the strife and enmity of three.”
– Washington Irving

» “Heaven will be no heaven to me if I do not meet my wife there.”
– Andrew Jackson

» “Marriage is like wine. It is not be properly judged until the second glass.”
– Douglas William Jerrold

» “Marriage is a mistake every man should make.”
– Sir George Jessel

» “Marriage is an act of will that signifies and involves a mutual gift, which unites the spouses and binds them to their eventual souls, with whom they make up a sole family –a domestic church.”
– John Paul II

» “Marriage is the best state for man in general, and every man is a worst man in proportion to the level he is unfit for marriage.”
– Samuel Johnson

» “There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman.”
– Samuel Johnson

» “Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.”
– Samuel Johnson

» “It is not from reason and prudence that people marry, but from inclination.”
– Samuel Johnson

» “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

» “There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship –only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses. The death has occurred much earlier.”
– Erica Jong

» “Bigamy is having one husband too many. Monogamy is the same.”
– Erica Jong

» “I never knew what real happiness was until I got married and by then it was too late.”
– Max Kauffman

» “Marrying a man is like buying something you’ve been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn’t always go with everything else in the house.”
– Jean Kerr

» “Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.”
– Ellen Key

» “Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.”
– Soren Kierkegaard

» “I don’t worry about terrorism. I was married for two years.”
– Sam Kinison

» “Marriage is a lottery, but you can’t tear up your ticket if you lose.”
– F. M. Knowles

» “Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.”
– Karl Kraus

» “Sensual pleasures have the fleeting brilliance of a comet; a happy marriage has the tranquillity of a lovely sunset.”
– 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

» “My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind –intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.”
– D. H. Lawrence

» “Progress of a marriage: ”There was a time when you couldn’t make me happy. Now the time has come when you can make me unhappy.””
– Irving Layton

» “Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.”
– Stephen B. Leacock

» “Rituals are important. Nowadays it’s hip not to be married. I’m not interested in being hip.”
– John Lennon

» “I have come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying, and for this reason, I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be blockhead enough to have me.”
– Abraham Lincoln

» “Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory.”
– Abraham Lincoln

» “Let the wife make the husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave.”
– Martin Luther

» “There is no more lovely, friendly, and charming relationship, communion, or company than a good marriage.”
– Martin Luther

» “Marriages are made in heaven and consummated on Earth.”
– John Lyly

» “The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez

» “The sum and substance of female education in America, as in England, is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life, and to pretend that they do not think so.”
– 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.”
– Harriet Martineau

» “One of the best hearing aids a man can have is an attentive wife.”
– Groucho Marx

» “Eighty percent of married men cheat in America. The rest cheat in Europe.”
– Jackie Mason

» “A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.”
– Andre Maurois

» “A marriage without conflicts is almost as inconceivable as a nation without crises.”
– Andre Maurois

» “A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.”
– Andre Maurois

» “You can never be happily married to another until you get a divorce from yourself. A successful marriage demands a certain death to self.”
– Jerry Mccant

» “There’s a way of transferring funds that is even faster than electronic banking. It’s called marriage.”
– Donald H. Mcgannon

» “Marriage was all a woman’s idea and for man’s acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful.”
– Phyllis Mcginley

» “Say what you will, making marriage work is a woman’s business. The institution was invented to do her homage; it was contrived for her protection. Unless she accepts it as such –as a beautiful, bountiful, but quite unequal association –the going will be hard indeed.”
– Phyllis Mcginley

» “A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.”
– Mignon Mclaughlin

» “The institution of marriage in all societies is a pattern within which the strains put by civilization on males and females alike must be resolved, a pattern within which men must learn, in return for a variety of elaborate rewards, new forms in which sexual spontaneity is still possible, and women must learn to discipline their receptivity to a thousand other considerations.”
– Margaret Mead

» “I’ve been married three times — and each time I married the right person.”
– Margaret Mead

» “For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.”
– H. L. Mencken

» “If I ever marry it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself.”
– H. L. Mencken

» “Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner’s inquest.”
– H. L. Mencken

» “After seven years of marriage, I’m sure of two things — first, never wallpaper together, and second, you’ll need two bathrooms.. both for her. The rest is a mystery, but a mystery I love to be involved in.”
– Dennis Miller

» “Often the difference between a successful marriage and a mediocre one consists of leaving about three or four things a day unsaid.”
– Harlan Miller

» “Love is often the fruit of marriage.”
РMoli̬re

» “We often marry in despair, so that we repent of it all our life after.”
РMoli̬re

» “We cannot do without it, and yet we disgrace and vilify the same. It may be compared to a cage, the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair to get out.”
– Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

» “A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.”
– Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

» “If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.”
– Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

» “Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out.”
– Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

» “In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.”
– Iris Murdoch

» “Marriage should be a duet-when one sings, the other claps.”
– Joe Murray

» “Successful marriage is always a triangle: a man, a woman, and God.”
– Cecil Myers

» “Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who cannot sleep with window shut, and a woman who cannot sleep with the window open.”
– Ogden Nash

» “There is only one thing for a man to do who is married to a woman who enjoys spending money, and that is enjoy earning it.”
– Ogden Nash

» “To keep your marriage brimming, with love in the wedding cup, whenever you’re wrong, admit it; whenever you’re right, shut up.”
– Ogden Nash

» “The secret to a happy marriage is to tell your spouse everything, but the essentials.”
– Cynthia Nelms

» “A good marriage is at least 80 percent good luck in finding the right person at the right time. The rest is trust.”
– Nanette Newman

» “It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage: which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

» “The best friend is likely to acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is based on the talent for friendship.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

» “Only as far as a man is happily married to himself is he fit for married life and family life in general.”
– Novalis

» “Quarrels are the dowry which married folk bring one another.”
– Ovid

» “If you wish to marry suitably, marry your equal.”
– Ovid

» “My wife isn’t married to me forever; she’s married to me for good. That keeps me on my toes.”
– Mal Pancoast

» “In marriage do thou be wise; prefer the person before money; virtue before beauty; the mind before the body.”
– William Penn

» “Saw a wedding in the church. It was strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition.”
– Samuel Pepys

» “God invented concubinage, Satan marriage.”
– Francis Picabia

» “They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.”
– Alexander Pope

» “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

» “Be to their virtue very kind; be to their faults a little blind.”
– Matthew Prior

» “Choose your wife as you wish your children to be.”
– Proverb

» “Marrying is easy, it’s housework that’s hard.”
– Proverb

» “Those that marry for money sell their liberty.”
– Proverb

» “Three things drive a man outdoors; smoke, a leaking roof and a scolding wife.”
– Proverb

» “You’ll repent if you marry, and repent if you don’t.”
– Proverb

» “Marriage is like a besieged castle; those who are on the outside wish to get in; and those who are on the inside wish to get out.”
– Arabian Proverb

» “Marriage is the sunset of love.”
– French Proverb

» “Weeping bride, laughing wife, laughing bride, weeping wife.”
– German Proverb

» “It’s a sad house where the hen crows louder than the cock.”
– Scottish Proverb

» “Never marry for money. Ye’ll borrow it cheaper.”
– Scottish Proverb

» “The day you marry, it is either kill or cure.”
– Spanish Proverb

» “He who marries for money earns it.”
– Yiddish Proverb

» “Your marriage moves toward a state of isolation. Unless you lovingly and energetically nurture your marriage, you will begin to drift away from your mate.”
– Dennis Rainey

» “Marriage is a lottery in which men stake their liberty and women their happiness.”
– Madame De Rieux

» “It doesn’t much signify whom one marries, for one is sure to find out the next morning that it was someone else.”
– Will Rogers

» “Always get married in the morning. That way if it doesn’t work out, you haven’t wasted the whole day.”
– Mickey Rooney

» “Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.”
– Jean Jacques Rousseau

» “After marriage, a woman’s sight becomes so keen that she can see right through her husband without looking at him, and a man’s so dull that he can look right through his wife without seeing her.”
– Helen Rowland

» “Marriage is the operation by which a woman’s vanity and a man’s egotism are extracted without an anaesthetic.”
– Helen Rowland

» “When a girl marries, she exchanges the attentions of all the other men of her acquaintance for the inattention of just one.”
– Helen Rowland

» “A bride at her second marriage does not wear a veil. She wants to see what she is getting.”
– Helen Rowland

» “Marriage is the miracle that transforms a kiss from a pleasure into a duty.”
– Helen Rowland

» “Before marriage, a man will go home and lie awake all night thinking about something you said; after marriage, he’ll go to sleep before you finish saying it.”
– Helen Rowland

» “In the perfect wedlock, the man, I should say, is the head, but the woman the heart, with which he cannot dispense.”
– Ruckett

» “I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage. They’ve experienced pain and bought jewelry.”
– Rita Rudner

» “Nature admits of no permanence in the relation between man and woman. It is only man’s egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and legalities.”
– Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

» “The horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.”
– Marquis De Sade

» “It takes two to make a marriage a success and only one to make it a failure.”
– Herbert Samuel

» “In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer

» “To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer

» “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 most beautiful external symbol of the union of souls; marriage without it is the least clean traffic that defiles the world.”
– Olive Schreiner

» “The world must be peopled. When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.”
– William Shakespeare

» “Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.”
– George Bernard Shaw

» “There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.”
– George Bernard Shaw

» “When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”
– George Bernard Shaw

» “It is a woman’s business to get married as soon as possible, and a man’s to keep unmarried as long as he can.”
– George Bernard Shaw

» “‘Tis safest in matrimony to begin with a little aversion.”
– Richard Brinsley Sheridan

» “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!”
– Simone Signoret

» “All men make mistakes, but married men find out about them sooner.”
– Red Skelton

» “If a man truly wants to communicate with his wife, he must enter her world of emotions.”
– Gary Smalley

» “Marrying into money was not a good thing for me.”
– Anna Nicole Smith

» “Married couples resemble a pair of scissors, often moving in opposite directions, yet punishing anyone who gets in between them.”
– Sydney Smith

» “It resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated, often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.”
– Sydney Smith

» “By all means marry. If you get a good wife you will become happy, and if you get a bad one you will become a philosopher.”
– Socrates

» “The concerts you enjoy together neighbors you annoy together children you destroy together that make marriage a joy”
– Stephen Sondheim

» “Marriage: A ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.”
– Herbert Spencer

» “The marriage state, with and without the affection suitable to it, is the completest image of Heaven and Hell we are capable of receiving in this life.”
– Sir Richard Steele

» “Marriage is one long conversation, checkered by disputes.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson

» “Once you are married, there is nothing for you, not even suicide, but to be good.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson

» “Marriage should be a duet — when one sings, the other claps. Joe Murray The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.”
– Henry Lewis Stimson

» “We love in others what we lack in ourselves, and would be everything, but what we are.”
– Richard Henry Stoddard

» “Each coming together of man and wife, even if they have been mated for many years, should be a fresh adventure; each winning should necessitate a fresh wooing.”
– Marie Carmichael Stopes

» “A happy marriage perhaps represents the ideal of human relationship — a setting in which each partner, while acknowledging the need of the other, feels free to be what he or she by nature is: a relationship in which instinct as well as intellect can find expression; in which giving and taking are equal; in which each accepts the other, and I confronts Thou.”
– Anthony Storr

» “Why does a woman work ten years to change a man’s habits and then complain that he’s not the man she married?”
– Barbara Streisand

» “Try praising your wife, even if it does frighten her at first.”
– Billy Sunday

» “Love is blind — marriage is the eye-opener.”
– Pauline Thomason

» “Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: The one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.”
– Mark Twain

» “Marital Freedom: The liberty that allows a husband to do exactly that which his wife pleases.”
– Source Unknown

» “Marriage isn’t a word… it’s a sentence.”
– Source Unknown

» “Marriage is like a violin. After the music is over, you still have the strings.”
– Source Unknown

» “Marriage is like a hot bath. Once you get used to it, it’s not so hot.”
– Source Unknown

» “Marriage is an institution, but who wants to live in an institution?”
– Source Unknown

» “Marriage is a three ring circus: engagement ring, wedding ring, and suffering.”
– Source Unknown

» “If it weren’t for marriage, men and women would have to fight with total strangers.”
– Source Unknown

» “He believes that marriage and a career don’t mix. So after the wedding he plans to quit his job.”
– Source Unknown

» “Compromise: An amiable arrangement between husband and wife whereby they agree to let her have her own way.”
– Source Unknown

» “Any man who married for money and got it. Earned it.”
– Source Unknown

» “A good marriage is like a casserole, only those responsible for it really know what goes in it.”
– Source Unknown

» “The man who says his wife can’t take a joke forgets that she took him.”
– Source Unknown

» “A marriage is a series of friendships. Love serves as its underlying theme. Friendships provide it with the new challenges around which the relationship further develops. Each type of friendship with ones partner comes into being, rises to a peak of enthusiasm, and then wanes away in our cedar chest of sentimental values. Every once in a while we go to the chest and draw out a friendship item to give us a shot in the arm. Then we put it away till another day.”
– Source Unknown

» “No man was ever shot by his wife while doing the dishes.”
– Source Unknown

» “The pretentiously — named ensuite bathroom is a major factor in divorce. Privacy is paramount in marriage.”
– Source Unknown

» “One of society’s biggest problems today is that we’ve allowed relationships to be accepted as impermanent, particularly marriage.”
– Source Unknown

» “Whether a fellow winds up with a nest egg or a goose egg depends a heap on the kind of chick he married.”
– Source Unknown

» “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

» “Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.”
– John Updike

» “I’ve been married so long, I am on my third bottle of Tabasco sauce.”
– Susan Vass

» “I think people really marry far too much; it is such a lottery after all, and for a poor woman a very doubtful happiness.”
– Queen Victoria

» “A marriage is no amusement but a solemn act, and generally a sad one.”
– Queen Victoria

» “Being married gives one one’s position like nothing else can.”
– Queen Victoria

» “Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.”
– Voltaire

» “The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.”
– Peter De Vries

» “The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.”
– Peter De Vries

» “The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds — they mature slowly.”
– Peter De Vries

» “To many women marriage is only this. It is merely a physical change impinging on their ordinary nature, leaving their mentality untouched, their self-possession intact. They are not burnt by even the red fire of physical passion –far less by the white fi”
– Mary Webb

» “Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.”
– Mae West

» “It’s not the men in my life that counts, it’s the life in my men.”
– Mae West

» “I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.”
– Edith Wharton

» “Long engagements give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which is never advisable.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband’s dinners.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one’s face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin, but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she’s a householder.”
– Thornton Wilder

» “The best part of married life is the fights. The rests is merely so.”
– Thornton Wilder

» “Our marriage is like anybody’s marriage, It goes through ups and downs. It’s a little garden that you have to tend all the time. When we’re home, it’s not like we walk around all dolled up going, ”We are celebrities! We are famous!” I change diapers. I clean up dog doo.”
– Bruce Willis

» “This would be a much better world if more married couples were as deeply in love as they are in debt.”
– Earl Wilson

» “In Hollywood all the marriages are happy, it’s trying to live together afterwards that causes all the problems.”
– Shelley Winters

» “I was so cold the other day, I almost got married.”
– Shelley Winters

» “Marriage isn’t a process of prolonging the life of love, but of mummifying the corpse.”
– Sir Pelham G(renville) Wodehouse

» “Marrying to increase love is like gaming to become rich; alas, you only lose what little stock you had before.”
– William Wycherley

» “Any young man who is unmarried at the age of twenty one is a menace to the community.”
– Brigham Young

» “Many marriages would be better if the husband and the wife clearly understood that they are on the same side.”
– Zig Ziglar