Quotes about marriage
page 6

John Bright photo
Clarence Thomas photo
Marguerite de Navarre photo

“Marriage is an estate of long duration, and one which should not be entered into lightly or without the approval of our closest friends and relatives.”

Mariage est un état de si longue durée, qu'il ne doit être commencé légèrement, ne sans l'opinion de nos meilleurs amis et parents.
Fourth Day, Novel XL (trans. P. A. Chilton)
L'Heptaméron (1558)

Vincent Van Gogh photo
Margaret Mead photo
Michael Chabon photo
Pope Benedict XVI photo
Sarah Brightman photo
Anne Morrow Lindbergh photo
Mary Eberstadt photo
Swami Shraddhanand photo
Henry Fielding photo

“His designs were strictly honorable, as the phrase is; that is, to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage.”

Henry Fielding (1707–1754) English novelist and dramatist

Book XI, Ch. 4
The History of Tom Jones (1749)

“Scientific collaborations are akin to marriages, or temporary marriages. Their breakup is not unlike a divorce and rarely avoids acrimony.”

Peter Freund (1936–2018) American physicist

[Peter G. O. Freund, A passion for discovery, World Scientific, 2007, 9812706461, 89]

Siddharth Katragadda photo
André Maurois photo
Clarence Thomas photo
Philip Larkin photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Harriet Harman photo

“While the happy couple are enjoying the thrill of the rose garden, the in-laws are saying that they are just not right for each other. We keep telling them that they cannot pay couples to stay together, and it is clear that it will take more than a three-quid-a-week tax break to keep this marriage together.”

Harriet Harman (1950) British politician

During the Queen's Speech Debate, on the newly formed Coalition Government and their policy to provide a tax break to married couples http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm100525/debtext/100525-0002.htm#10052511000378, 25 May 2010.

Hermann Hesse photo
Kate Clinton photo
Edward St. Aubyn photo
Frederick Buechner photo

“The marriage of convenience has this to recommend it: we are better judges of convenience than we are of love.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Marriage

David Cameron photo
Leonid Kantorovich photo

“Once some engineers from the veneer trust laboratory came to me for consultation with a quite skilful presentation of their problems. Different productivity is obtained for veneer-cutting machines for different types of materials; linked to this the output of production of this group of machines depended, it would seem, on the chance factor of which group of raw materials to which machine was assigned. How could this fact be used rationally?
This question interested me, but nevertheless appeared to be quite particular and elementary, so I did not begin to study it by giving up everything else. I put this question for discussion at a meeting of the mathematics department, where there were such great specialists as Gyunter, Smirnov himself, Kuz’min, and Tartakovskii. Everyone listened but no one proposed a solution; they had already turned to someone earlier in individual order, apparently to Kuz’min. However, this question nevertheless kept me in suspense. This was the year of my marriage, so I was also distracted by this. In the summer or after the vacation concrete, to some extent similar, economic, engineering, and managerial situations started to come into my head, that also required the solving of a maximization problem in the presence of a series of linear constraints.
In the simplest case of one or two variables such problems are easily solved—by going through all the possible extreme points and choosing the best. But, let us say in the veneer trust problem for five machines and eight types of materials such a search would already have required solving about a billion systems of linear equations and it was evident that this was not a realistic method. I constructed particular devices and was probably the first to report on this problem in 1938 at the October scientific session of the Herzen Institute, where in the main a number of problems were posed with some ideas for their solution.
The universality of this class of problems, in conjunction with their difficulty, made me study them seriously and bring in my mathematical knowledge, in particular, some ideas from functional analysis.
What became clear was both the solubility of these problems and the fact that they were widespread, so representatives of industry were invited to a discussion of my report at the university.”

Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) Russian mathematician

L.V. Kantorovich (1996) Descriptive Theory of Sets and Functions. p. 39; As cited in: K. Aardal, ‎George L. Nemhauser, ‎R. Weismantel (2005) Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science, p. 15-26

James Fitzjames Stephen photo

“The criminal law stands to the passion of revenge in much the same relation as marriage to the sexual appetite.”

James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–1894) Indian judge

A General View Of The Criminal Law Of England (1863)

George Packer photo
Ward Churchill photo
Tawakkol Karman photo
Matthew Mitcham photo
Lee Kuan Yew photo
Stendhal photo

“A strange effect of marriage, such as the nineteenth century has made it! The boredom of married life inevitably destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. And yet, as a philosopher has observed, it speedily brings about, among people who are rich enough not to have to work, an intense boredom with all quiet forms of enjoyment. And it is only dried up hearts, among women, that it does not predispose to love.”

Étrange effet du mariage, tel que l'a fait le XIXe siècle! L'ennui de la vie matrimoniale fait périr l'amour sûrement, quand l'amour a précédé le mariage. Et cependant, dirait un philosophe, il amène bientôt chez les gens assez riches pour ne pas travailler, l'ennui profond de toutes les jouissances tranquilles. Et ce n'est que les âmes sèches parmi les femmes qu'il ne prédispose pas à l'amour.
Vol. I, ch. XXIII
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

Wolfram von Eschenbach photo

“Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival…was where love and marriage were brought together. It was an apple of a story. That's my favorite love story.”

Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170–1220) German knight and poet

Joseph Campbell (ed. Robert Walter and Phil Cousineau) The Hero’s Journey (Novato: New World Library, [1990] 2003) p. 104.
Criticism

John Donne photo
Ruth Bader Ginsburg photo
Ruth Bader Ginsburg photo

“You're saying, no, State said two kinds of marriage: the full marriage, and then this sort of skim-milk marriage.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

United States v. Windsor oral argument,

Pope Benedict XVI photo
George Bernard Shaw photo
Alain de Botton photo
Michel De Montaigne photo

“Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Attributed

Camille Paglia photo
Martin Amis photo
Jonathan Swift photo

“What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not we are told expressly: that they neither marry, nor are given in marriage.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)

Robert Sheckley photo

“Love is a wonderful game which begins in fun and ends in marriage.”

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) American writer

Source: The 10th Victim (1965), Chapter 15 (p. 131)

Pauline Kael photo
Siddharth Katragadda photo

“Marriage is god's way to ensure there are few great men”

Siddharth Katragadda (1972) Indian writer

page 55
Dark Rooms (2002)

Robert Seymour Bridges photo

“I have loved flowers that fade,
Within whose magic tents
Rich hues have marriage made
With sweet unmemoried scents:
A honeymoon delight,
A joy of love at sight,
That ages in an hour
My song be like a flower!”

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) British writer

Bk. II, No. 13, I Have Loved Flowers That Fade http://www.poetry-online.org/bridges_i_have_loved_flowers_that_fade.htm, st. 1 (1879).
Shorter Poems (1879-1893)

William Congreve photo
Norman Mailer photo

“There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

News summaries (31 December 1969)

Michael Badnarik photo
Ann Coulter photo
Gary S. Becker photo
Ken Ham photo
André Maurois photo
Rebecca West photo
Drashti Dhami photo
Gloria Swanson photo

“I'll be eighty this month. Age, if nothing else, entitles me to set the record straight before I dissolve. I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book.”

Gloria Swanson (1899–1983) American actress

Quoted in Bill Adler, Funny Ladies: The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women (2001) p. 52 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KOVGUVYj2XUC&pg=PA52&lpg=PA52&dq=%22Age,+if+nothing+else,+entitles+me+to+set+the+record+straight+before+I+dissolve.%22&source=bl&ots=QGbAVbdU0l&sig=G37ipttwzeIIx1L2CAVM2Mz9M60&hl=en&sa=X&ei=VsszT6XYKMqh0QXs5-CiAg&ved=0CEgQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=%22Age%2C%20if%20nothing%20else%2C%20entitles%20me%20to%20set%20the%20record%20straight%20before%20I%20dissolve.%22&f=false

John Adams photo

“Whoever escapes marriage
And women's harm, comes to deadly old age
Without any son to support him.”

Stanley Lombardo (1943) Philosopher, Classicist

Theogony, lines 607–609
Translations, Works and Days and Theogony (1993)

Dick Morris photo

“No candidate can win a presidential race advocating gay marriage and opposing the military action in Iraq.”

Dick Morris (1947) American political commentator and consultant

2003-07-31
Dean is a driving force in chasing faithful away
The Daily Courier
4A
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=894&dat=20030731&id=HVcLAAAAIBAJ&pg=4730,5177425

Samson Raphael Hirsch photo

“However important it is that love shall precede marriage, it is far more important that it shall continue after marriage.”

Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888) Jewish theologian, germany 19th century

Commentary on Genesis XXIV, 67 quoted by Joseph H. Hertz, Pentateuch, p. 87

Toni Morrison photo

“Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good. Love is none of that. There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn - by practice and careful contemplations - the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. How do you know you have graduated? You don't. What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. Do you understand me? God is not interested in you. He is interested in love and the bliss it brings to those who understand and share the interest. Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life. But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won't mean a thing. God bless the pure and holy. Amen.”

Paradise (1997)

“When I graduated from high school, I hoped that one day gay Americans would be able to get married. And now here I am 45 years later officiating same-sex marriages—how can I not be optimistic that the future is bright?”

Daayiee Abdullah (1954) Homosexual Muslim activist

First Gay ‘Imam’ in USA Says ‘Quran Doesn’t Call for Punishment of Homosexuals’ http://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2015/05/159043/first-gay-imam-in-usa-says-quran-doesnt-call-for-punishment-of-homosexuals/ (22 May 2015), Morocco World News.

Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Mahadev Govind Ranade photo

“The preamble to the Regulation says that women were employed wholesale to entice and take away the wives or female children for purposes of prostitution, and it was common practice among husbands and fathers to desert their families and children. Public conscience there was none, and in the absence of conscience it was futile to expect moral indignation against the social wrongs. Indeed the Brahmins were engaged in defending every wrong for the simple reason that they lived on them. They defended Untouchability which condemned millions to the lot of the helot. They defended caste, they defended female child marriage and they defended enforced widowhood—the two great props of the Caste system. They defended the burning of widows, and they defended the social system of graded inequality with its rule of hypergamy which led the Rajputs to kill in their thousands the daughters that were born to them. What shames! What wrongs! Can such a Society show its face before civilized nations? Can such a society hope to survive?”

Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901) Indian scholar, social reformer and author

In support of the Regulation (VII of 1819) to put a stop to this moral degeneracy such were the questions which Ranade asked. He concluded that on only one condition it could be saved—namely, rigorous social reform. Quoted in Ranade Gandhi & Jinnah
At his 100th Anniversary lecture delivered in 1943 on Ranade, Gandhi & Jinnah by Dr. Ambedkar

André Maurois photo
Paul Bettany photo
Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo
Yukteswar Giri photo
Wesley Clark photo
Ernest Hemingway photo

“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?"”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

And I said, "A glass of hemlock."
Pt. 2, Ch. 5
Papa Hemingway (1966)

Pramod Muthalik photo

“Our activists will go around with a priest, a turmeric stub and a ‘mangal sutra’ on February 14. If we come across couples being together in public and expressing their love, we will take them to the nearest temple and conduct their marriage.”

Pramod Muthalik (1963) Indian politician

On Valentine's Day, as quoted in " We’ll not spare dating couples on Valentine’s Day: Muthalik http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/well-not-spare-dating-couples-on-valentines-day-muthalik/article348725.ece", The Hindu (6 February 2009)

Michele Bachmann photo
Jerry Falwell photo

“You know, you almost got to be a homosexual to be recognized in the entertainment industry anymore. Ellen [Degeneres], and all the rest. I love them, pray for their souls, but they're immoral. And the Hollywood scene — five and eight and 10 marriages — not something to be emulated.”

Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) American evangelical pastor, televangelist, and conservative political commentator

Televised sermon at the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia (25 June 2006), as quoted in "Falwell on the "moral pervert[s]" in Hollywood: "[Y]ou almost got to be a homosexual to be recognized in the entertainment industry anymore" at Media Matters for America (27 June 2006)

André Maurois photo

“A marriage without conflicts is almost as inconceivable as a nation without crises.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Marriage

Alan Keyes photo
Earl Warren photo
George Takei photo
Honoré de Balzac photo

“Marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two.”

Le mariage est un combat à outrage avant lequel les deux époux demandent au ciel sa bénédiction, parce que s'aimer toujours est la plus téméraire des entreprises; le combat ne tarde pas à commencer, et la victoire, c'est-à-dire la liberté, demeure au plus adroit.
Part I, Meditation I: The Subject http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Physiology_of_Marriage/Part_1/Med_1.
Physiology of Marriage (1829)

Dan Savage photo
Charles Krauthammer photo
Siddharth Katragadda photo
Mitt Romney photo

“In France, for instance, I'm told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

[2007-05-06, Romney Reaches to the Christian Right, Perry Bacon Jr., The Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/05/AR2007050501081.html]
2007 campaign for Republican nomination for United States President

John Adams photo

“My friend, there is something very serious in this business. The Holy Ghost carries on the whole Christian system in this earth. Not a baptism, not a marriage, not a sacrament can be administered but by the Holy Ghost, Who is transmitted from age to age by laying the hands of the Bishop on the heads of candidates for the ministry.... There is no authority, civil or religious — there can be no legitimate government — but what is administered by this Holy Ghost. There can be no salvation without it — all without it is rebellion and perdition, or, in more orthodox words, damnation... Your prophecy, my dear friend, has not become history as yet. I have no resentment of animosity against the gentleman [Jefferson] and abhor the idea of blackening his character or transmitting him in odious colors to posterity. But I write with difficulty and am afraid of diffusing myself in too many correspondences. If I should receive a letter from him, however, I should not fail to acknowledge and answer it.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Adams as misquoted by David Barton, in "The Dream of Dr. Benjamin Rush & God's Hand in Reconciling John Adams and Thomas Jefferson" in WallBuilders (June 2008) http://www.wallbuilders.com/LIBissuesArticles.asp?id=10152; omitting many words, giving a very misleading impression that Adams (who did not believe in the Christian Trinity) is endorsing the viewpoint that a government must be administered by the Holy Ghost to be legitimate. Barton went on to use another version, substituting some of Adams' words with false ones:
Misattributed

“But Rizvi has summarized them in the following words from Waliullah’s magnum opus in Arabic, Hujjat-Allah al-Baligha: “According to Shah Wali-Allah the mark of the perfect implementation of the Sharia was the performance of jihad. There were people, said the Shah, who indulged in their lower nature by following their ancestral religion, ignoring the advice and commands of the Prophet Mohammed. If one chose to explain Islam to people like this it was to do them a disservice. Force, said the Shah, was the better course - Islam should be forced down their throats like bitter medicine to a child. This, however, was possible only if the leaders of the non-Muslim communities who failed to accept Islam were killed, the strength of the community was reduced, their property confiscated and a situation was created which led to their followers and descendants willingly accepting Islam. Another means of ensuring conversions was to prevent other religious communities from worshipping their own gods. Moreover, unfavourable discriminating laws should be imposed on non-Muslims in matters of rule of retaliation, compensation for manslaughter, and marriage and political matters. However, the proselytization programme of Shah Wali-Allah only included the leaders of the Hindu community. The low class of the infidels, according to him, were to be left alone to work in the fields and for paying jiziya. They like beasts of burden and agricultural livestock were to be kept in abject misery and despair.””

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) Indian muslim scholar

S.A.A. Rizvi, Shah Wali-Allah and His Times, Canberra. 1980, p.285-6 Quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (1995). Muslim separatism: Causes and consequences. ISBN 9788185990262

Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Manny Pacquiao photo

“As a Christian, same-sex marriage is not allowed. Woman was made for man, man was made for woman. For me, it’s common sense. Will you see any animals where male is to male and female is to female? The animals are better. They know how to distinguish, male or female. If we approve male on male, female on female, then man is worse than animal. Right? Even among animals… those of the same sex are not allowed to lie together. But I’m not condemning them. Just the marriage, the committing of sin against God.”

Manny Pacquiao (1978) Filipino boxer, basketball player, singer and politician, dancer.

Pacquiao's stand on Same-Sex marriage
As quoted in Manny Pacquiao’s stand on same-sex marriage: ‘Mas masahol pa sa hayop ang tao’ http://www.interaksyon.com/interaktv/manny-pacquiaos-stand-on-same-sex-marriage-mas-masahol-pa-sa-hayop-ang-tao InterAksyon, February 15, 2016

“If the second marriage really succeeds, the first one didn't really fail.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Marriage