Quotes about marriage

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“In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find and continue to find grounds for marriage.”

“A good marriage, like any partnership, meant subordinating one's own needs to that of the other's, in the expectation that the other will do the same.”

“Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy”

“A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.”

“Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?”

“Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.”

“Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner.”

“But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different.”

“The kind of eyes that jumped from a woman's dreams right into her morning and made trouble in the marriage bed.”

“A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.”

“No marriage stays in the same pattern forever. It is both the best feature of marriage and the worst, that it inevitably changes.”

“Love & Marriage are about work & Compromise. They're about seeing someone for what he is, being disappointed and deciding to stick around anyway. They're about commitment and comfort, not some kind of sudden, hysterical recognition.”

“Husbands are chiefly good as lovers when they are betraying their wives.”

“What really holds their marriage together are mutual respect of an awesome depth, a shared sense of humor, faith that they were brought together by a force greater than themselves, and a love so unwavering and pure that it is sacred.”

“People want to believe that every marriage is perfect balance but it isn't. One person always loves more deeply than the other”

“There is something revolting about the way girls' minds so often jump to marriage long before they jump to love.”

“Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.”

“You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.”

“The only happy marriages I know are arranged ones.”

“My wife and I tried to breakfast together, but we had to stop or our marriage would have been wrecked.”

“Marriage is about compromise, it's about doing something for the other person, even when you don't want to.”

“A good marriage is where both people feel like they're getting the better end of the deal.”

“Maybe you expected marriage to be perfect - I guess that's where you and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who's there to remind you what you learned along the way.”

“Balance every thought with its opposition. Because the marriage of them is the destruction of illusion.”

“Marriage should be between a spouse and a spouse, not a gender and a gender.”

“That's another reason I keep putting marriage off. I know I want something like what you two share, and I'm not sure I've found it yet. I'm not sure I ever will. And with love like that… they say anything's possible, right?”

“The Apache don't have a word for love," he said.
"Know what they both say at the marriage? The squaw-taking ceremony?"
"Tell me."
"Varlebena. It means forever. That's all they say.”

“Marriage is give and take. You'd better give it to her or she'll take it anyway.”

“She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.”

“A sacrament--like marriage--means living a life better than your natural instincts, so that you're modeling God. And God never gives up.”

“They say all marriages are made in heaven, but so are thunder and lightning.”

“The most incomprehensible thing in the world to a man, is a woman who rejects his offer of marriage!”

“Marriage… is the union of two people of different sexes with a view to the mutual possession of each other's sexual attributes for the duration of their lives.”

“I think of how each person in a marriage owes it to the other to find individual happiness, even in a shared life. That this is the only way to grow together, instead of apart.”

“With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.”

“Marriage is the chief cause of divorce.”

“Rev. Pat Robertson says that if more states legalize gay marriage, God will destroy America. He did say that afterwards, gays will come in and do a beautiful renovation.”

“marriage is when a man stops disappointing many women and focuses on disappointing one!”

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

“Love is a possible strength, in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.”

“Women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage”

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

“Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.”

“Let us now set forth one of the fundamental truths about marriage: the wife is in charge.”

“Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.”

“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.”

“…marriage, they say, halves one's rights and doubles one's duties.”

“It’s a yes then? (Arik)
No. I thought I’d walk through hell to reclaim you and carry your baby just for the heck of it. Who needs marriage. (Geary)
I do! (Arik)
Good. I can let you live another day. (Geary)”

“John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.”

“You have to rise above the squabbling and chaos, and keep believing. You have to always keep your goals in mind.” -Hera, goddess of marriage”

“Brought up to respect the conventions, love had to end in marriage. I'm afraid it did.”

“The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.”

“It’s a very female thing, isn’t it, to take one boys’ night and snowball it into a marital infidelity that will destroy our marriage?”

“Even divorce, she thought, cannot erase all the bonds forged by years of marriage. Long after the papers are signed, decrees notarized, the ties still remain. And the most powerful tie of all is written in a child's flesh and blood.”

“It is not your love that sustains the marriage,
but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”

“Sometimes I think too much fuss is made about marriage. Century after century of carnal embracement and we're still no nearer to understanding one another.”

“I would much prefer their minds to be engaged in the deadly arts than clouded with dreams of marriage and fortune, as your own so clearly is!”

“If the marriage were valid, she'd be your sister-in-law.”

“It was all role playing. I felt Larry was my little brother, Ben my big brother. Role playing was something I had known since I was born, but it wasn't a good basis for a marriage.”

“When you open a door for others to have an opinion on your relationship, it can be dangerous. Find what you need, not what everyone else wants for you. Women have been taught that in order to have a place in the world, an identity, they must marry and have children. If that's the life you truly want, great. But for many women, marriage is only about needing the world to know that someone desires them enough to say, "Here's a contract to prove that I love you and will commit to you for the rest of my life."”

“They married well because the marriage-place
Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell.
They were love’s characters come face to face.”

“The marriage of David Brooks and the Democratic Leadership Council makes perfect sense. It's repugnant and the kind of thing one should shield young children from knowing about, but it makes perfect sense. Both prefer a policy of being "cautious soldiers," "incrementalists" who shun upheavals and vote the status quo, although they subscribe to this policy for different reasons. Brooks worships the status quo because he has no penis and wants to spend the rest of his life buying periwinkle bath towels without troubling interruptions of conscience. The DLC, a nonprofit created in the mid-1980s to help big business have a say in the Democratic Party platform, supports the status quo because they are paid agents of the commercial interests that define it. Moreover, Brooks and the DLC have this in common: While they both frown on the open flag-waving and ostentatious religiosity of the talk-radio right-wing as being gauche and in bad form, they're only truly offended by people of their own background who happen to be idealistic. Hence the recurring backlash by both against the various angry electoral challenges to the establishment of the Democratic Party.”

“Human perfection is a sort of marriage between high thought and just action. This must form man's aim according to the "Gita."”

“The decline of Indian Buddhism was centrally due to the fact that it never offered the Indian laity a complete religion. Early Buddhism knew no ceremonies for birth and death, marriage, illness, and other critical turns of private life… Only for the community of monks did Buddhism provide a complete and well-defined way of life. …But Brahmins were needed for all the ordinary crises in life, ready with their rites and sacred formulas to ward off danger or minimize the damage. This elemental fact assured the survival of Brahminism in India.”

“This ideal University of Life … would never take the importance of culture for granted. It would know that culture is kept alive by a constant respectful questioning—not by an excessive and snobbish attitude of respect. Therefore, rather than leaving it hanging why one was reading Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, an ideal course covering nineteenth-century literature would ask plainly “What is it that adultery ruins in a marriage?” Students in the ideal University of Life would end up knowing much the same material as their colleagues in other institutions, they would simply have learned it under a very different set of headings.”

“A license cannot be revoked because a man is redheaded or because he was divorced, except for a calling, if such there be, for which redheadedness or an unbroken marriage may have some rational bearing. If a State licensing agency lays bare its arbitrary action, or if the State law explicitly allows it to act arbitrarily, that is precisely the kind of State action which the Due Process Clause forbids.”

“Good marriages seem to function something like a buddy system-- the people in them swim in their own waters but keep a protective eye on each other, and should the whistle blow, turn up quickly to hold each other's hand. It's more important today than ever before to know what your priorities are because life links us with more people than our hearts can hold, so men who know what they will go to the wall for, as well as for whom, are the ones whom it is nicest to be married to, presuming you're the one they have at the top of their list.”

“Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it's a mistake to make a habit out of it.”

“You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse
I made a Second Marriage in my house;
Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed
And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.”

“Rick Warren: The issue to me, I'm not opposed to that as much as I'm opposed to redefinition of a 5,000 year definition of marriage. I'm opposed to having a brother and sister being together and calling that marriage. I'm opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that marriage. I'm opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.
Steven Waldman: Do you think, though, that they are equivalent to having gays getting married?
Rick Warren: Oh, I do.”

“I grudged her nothing except my company. But it has gone further, like the degradation of rural England: this afternoon (Sunday in April) all the young men had women with them in far-flung cameradeie. If women ever wanted to be by themselves all would be well. But I don't believe they ever want to be, except for reasons of advertisement, and their instinct is never to let men be by themselves. This, I begin to see, is sex-war, and D. H. L. has seen it, in spite of a durable marriage, and is far more on the facts than Bernard Shaw and his Life Force.”

“I do not believe that the loyalty of those many who over those 270 years, and particularly in this century, worked together and died together as part of the union under the Crown, was to the Crown quite simply, even though they wore the Crown on their uniforms and many of them wore it on their hearts. They were not the mercenaries of a Habsburg empire bound together by personal union and dynastic marriages; they were not the servants of a Hohenzollern empire imposed by military force. It was the Crown of the United Kingdom in parliament which was the centre of loyalty, as it is the essential unifying element of this realm, in the name of which and under the inspiration of which men and women these 270 years have worked and lived and died together.”

“We have to acknowledge (to ourselves, at least) that many questions we want the "right" answers to just don't have any. These are the questions about the morality of stem-cell research or abortion or affirmative action or gay marriage or our obligations to future generations. Many enlightened people, including many scientists, think that reasonable people can eventually find the right answers to such questions. Alas, it will turn out that all anyone can really find are the answers that they like.”

“This White House fetishizes Iraqi national unity. It believes that to succeed, Iraqis should be like Americans, forever imprisoned in an arranged, unhappy political marriage.”

“By god, D. H. Lawrence was right when he had said there must be a dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension between a man and a woman, and how else could this be achieved save in the long monotony of marriage?”

“If invited, you would go to this person's wedding and give them a spice rack, but you would secretly hope that their marriage ends in a bitter, public divorce.”

“There is a war on men, and [feminists] are very open about it. They don't conceal it; they brag about it. You read all of their material – they're always saying they want to abolish the patriarchy. They said that husbands are not necessary in a marriage, they're not necessary in raising children.”

“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.”

“Marriage was a lottery, and you drew your lot in late adolescence or early adulthood at a point of maximum idiocy and confusion.”

“It is thought pretty to say that "Women have no passion." If passion is excitement in the daily social intercourse with men, women think about marriage much more than men do; it is the only event of their lives. It ought to be a sacred event, but surely not the only event of a woman's life, as it is now. Many women spend their lives in asking men to marry them, in a refined way. Yet it is true that women are seldom in love. How can they be?”

“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”

“Forcible marriages, euphemistically called matrimonial alliances, were common throughout the medieval period. Only some of them find mention in Muslim chronicles with their bitter details. Here is one example given by Shams Siraj Afif (fourteenth century). The translation from the original in Persian may be summarised as follows. Firoz Shah was born in the year 709 H. (1309 C. E.). His father was named Sipahsalar Rajjab, who was a brother of Sultan Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq Ghazi. The three brothers, Tughlaq, Rajjab, and Abu Bakr, came from Khurasan to Delhi in the reign of Alauddin (Khalji), and that monarch took all the three in the service of the Court. The Sultan conferred upon Tughlaq the country of Dipalpur. Tughlaq was desirous that his brother Sipahsalar Rajjab should obtain in marriage the daughter of one of the Rais of Dipalpur. He was informed that the daughters of Ranamall Bhatti were very beautiful and accomplished. Tughlaq sent to Ranamall a proposal of marriage. Ranamall refused. Upon this Tughlaq proceeded to the villages (talwandi) belonging to Ranamall and demanded payment of the whole year’s revenue in a lump sum. The Muqaddams and Chaudharis were subjected to coercion. Ranamall’s people were helpless and could do nothing, for those were the days of Alauddin, and no one dared to make an outcry. One damsel was brought to Dipalpur. Before her marriage she was called Bibi Naila. On entering the house of Sipahsalar Rajjab she was styled Sultan Bibi Kadbanu. After the lapse of a few years she gave birth to Firoz shah. If this could be accomplished by force by a regional officer, there was nothing to stop the king.”

“Why has it [the Church] never done what it was sent to do? Others …will say it has done so. Has it not lifted woman to equality and companionship with man, secured the sanctity and stability of marriage, changed parental despotism to parental service, and eliminated unnatural vice, the abandonment of children, blood revenge, and the robbery of the shipwrecked from the customs of Christian nations? Has it not abolished slavery, mitigated war, covered all lands with a network of charities to uplift the poor and the fallen, fostered the institutions of education, aided the progress of civil liberty and social justice, and diffused a softening tenderness throughout human life? It has done all that, and vastly more.”

“It is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today's decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact—and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court's claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”

“We have turned our backs on God, and given Him lip-service by maintaining a belief in His existence and at the same time embracing that which is abhorrent to Him; things such as homosexual marriage, abortion, adultery, fornication, pornography, lying, theft and blasphemy. Few have any fear of God, which the Bible says is the ‘beginning’ of wisdom. A wise man once said, ‘Most I fear God. Next I fear him who fears Him not.’ When someone doesn’t fear God, they give themselves to evil.”

“A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage—but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.”

“They tried to say that being gay is a sin, and I said that adultery is a sin. Adultery is responsible for breaking up more marriages, but do we put that in the Constitution? It’s absurd.”

“Like I said, you're in this together. Men have certain needs, women have different needs; that's the way it was hundreds of years ago, and that's the way it's going to be hundreds of years from now. If you both realize that, and you both work on meeting each other's needs, you'll have a good marriage. And part of that, for both of you, is trust. In the end, it's that simple.”

“The title that has consecrated this Alter is the Marriage of Souls, and the Golden thread that tyes the hearts of all the world; I tell you, Madam, Freindshipp is beyond all relations of flesh and blood, because it is less materiall.”

“The only kind of marriage liberals had ever glorified is the gay kind. But thanks to Michael Schiavo, the sanctity of marriage is fast becoming a liberal sacrament, with the proviso it has to involve 'mercy killing.' It took Michael Schiavo's devoted efforts to starve and dehydrate his wife to restore liberal faith in the institution.”

“I really don't have a problem with gay marriage… because I'm tolerant and rational.”

“Went for a walk, whistling. Saw a throne in a window. I said: What chair is this? Is it the one great Ferdinand sat in, when he sent the ships to find the Indies? The seat is frayed. Hardly a day passes without an announcement of some kind of marriage, a pregnancy, a cancer, a rebirth. Sometimes they drift in from the Yukon and other far places, come in and sit down at the kitchen table, want a glass of milk and a peanut-butter-and-jelly, I oblige, for old times’ sake. Sent me the schedule for the Little League soccer teams, they’re all named after cars, the Mustangs vs. the Mavericks, the Chargers vs. the Impalas. Something funny about that. My son. Slept with What’s-Her-Name, they said, while she was asleep, I don’t think that’s fair. Prone and helpless in the glare of the headlights. They went away, then they came back, at Christmas and Eastertide, had quite a full table, maybe a dozen in all including all the little…partners they’d picked up on their travels….”

“The generation of young people that questioned the establishment in the '60s is now middle-aged, and has become the establishment itself. Moral absolutes have been eliminated, "feel-good" religions created, and free sex legitimized, paving the way for disposable marriages. The results of these tailor-made values are new strains of sexually transmitted diseases, more potent drugs, more broken families and out-of-wedlock pregnancy rates and worrisome suicide rates.”

“You can't possibly care about debt relief and the Simpsons. If you listen to Ligeti and James Macmillan then why would you want to know who won the United game last night or which Cabernet Sauvignon to drink with your meal tonight? Get back into your box.
Something else missing from the Times of 1968 was anything to do with the home or emotional life. There is nothing about marriage, divorce, children, schools, au pairs, depression, drinking, health, drugs, teenagers, affairs, fashion, sex, successful relationships, failing relationships, interior decor, cancer, infertility, faith, grandparents - or any of the other things that make up the texture of our non-working lives.”

“In a marriage you need 'compatibility of conscience.”

“When Melinda filed for divorce, she wrote down only two words as her reason for seeking a dissolution of our two-year marriage: Incontrovertibly self-absorbed. Or is that three words? No matter. The question I have is: Did she mean me or her?”

“I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.”

“Marriage is not just spiritual communion and passionate embraces; marriage is also three meals a day, sharing the workload and remembering to carry out the trash.”

“My aim has always been modest; I wanted to transform the arranged marriage (of art and architecture) into a love match.”