quotations about marriage
A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Neurotic's Notebook
Marriage problems are relationship problems, they are the result of how two people interact with each other. You may abandon a troubled marriage, but you will still bring the way you interact with others along with you.
MARK GUNGOR
Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage
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
Ask any woman in an arranged marriage. Love is the least stressful way out.
FAY WELDON
The Spa
Marriage is generally used as a term for a social institution. As such it may be defined as a relation of one or more men to one or more women which is recognized by custom or law and involves certain rights and duties both in the case of the parties entering the union and in the case of children born of it. These rights and duties vary among different peoples, and cannot therefore all be included in a general definition: but there must, of course, be something which they have in common. Marriage always implies the right of sexual intercourse: society holds such intercourse allowable in the case of husband and wife, and, generally speaking, even regards it as their duty to gratify in some measure the other partner's desire. But the right to sexual intercourse is not necessarily exclusive. It can hardly be said to be so, from the legal point of view, unless adultery is regarded as an offense which entitles the other partner to dissolve the marriage union, and this, as we know, is by no means always the case.
EDWARD WESTERMARCK
The History of Human Marriage
Courtship to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a very dull Play.
WILLIAM CONGREVE
The Old Bachelor
Society is built on marriage ... marriage and its consequences.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
The Forsyte Saga
If you exchanged wedding vows, tape them to your bathroom mirror and read them aloud to yourself every morning along with the ritual brushing of teeth. It's not realistic to believe that you will live your promises as a daily practice -- unless you're a saint or a highly evolved Zen Buddhist. Not where marriage is concerned. But you can make a practice of returning to your vows when the going gets rough.
HARRIET LERNER
"Returning To Your Wedding Vows", Huffington Post, April 2, 2012
Marriage is a sort of poetical see-saw.
G. K. CHESTERTON
What's Wrong with the World
Men and women are natural enemies, like cat and dog--only more so. They are forced to live together for a time, or this wonderful race couldn't go on.
NEITH BOYCE
Enemies
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
My new found meaning of Marriage is a place where you can be yourself and has breathing space to grow personally and spiritually as and when I want without having to consult my partner about my changes. It is a beautiful place without suffocation, a place where you can learn and teach each other, a place where you do not feel prohibited and a place where you do not have to log in and log out.
JEANETTE DE JONK
Unconventional & Spiritual Marriage
Marriages are always moving from one season to another. Sometimes we find ourselves in winter--discouraged, detached, and dissatisfied; other times we experience springtime, with its openness, hope, and anticipation. On still other occasions we bask in the warmth of summer--comfortable, relaxed, enjoying life. And then comes fall with its uncertainty, negligence, and apprehension. The cycle repeats itself many times throughout the life of a marriage, just as the seasons repeat themselves in nature.
GARY D. CHAPMAN
note to readers, Summer Breeze
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
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 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 today.
WILLIAM BOLITHO
Twelve Against the Gods
When a Man has married a wife
He finds out whether
Her knees & elbows are only
glued together.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Poems from Blake's Notebook
In the choice of a wife, we ought to make use of our ears, and not our eyes.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
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