All Quotes by Marriage
“Bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.”
“So, with decorum all things carry'd;Miss frown'd, and blush'd, and then was—married.”
“An unhappy gentleman, resolving to wed nothing short of perfection, keeps his heart and hand till both get so old and withered that no tolerable woman will accept them.”
“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.”
“Yet while my Hector still survives, I seeMy father, mother, brethren, all in thee.”
“Andromache! my soul's far better part.”
“I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem, and to be given away by a Novel.”
“Ay, marriage is the life-long miracle,The self-begetting wonder, daily fresh.”
“You should indeed have longer tarriedBy the roadside before you married.”
“Sure the shovel and tongsTo each other belongs.”
“Take heede, Camilla, that seeking al the Woode for a streight sticke, you chuse not at the last a crooked staffe.”
“Cling closer, closer, life to life, Our ring of Wedded Love.”
“And, to all married men, be this a caution,Neither to doat too much, nor doubt a wife.”
“The sum of all that makes a just man happyAnd fair descent, must make the yoke uneasy.”
“What therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder.”
“A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.”
“Women when they marry buy a cat in the bag.”
“Drink, my jolly lads, drink with discerning,Drink and be merry, lads, half seas over.”
“Some dish more sharply spiced than thisMilk-soup men call domestic bliss.”
“The garlands fade, the vows are worn away;So dies her love, and so my hopes decay.”
“Grave authors say, and witty poets sing,That honest wedlock is a glorious thing.”
“There swims no goose so gray, but soon or lateShe finds some honest gander for her mate.”
“Before I trust my Fate to thee,Question thy soul to-night for me.”
“A prudent wife is from the Lord.”
“Advice to persons about to marry—Don't.”
“Marriage is a desperate thing.”
“To disbelieve in marriage is easy: to love a married woman is easy; but to betray a comrade, to be disloyal to a host, to break the covenant of bread and salt, is impossible.”
“What God hath joined together no man shall ever put asunder: God will take care of that.”
“The whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women.”
“Lastly no woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is not for nothing that this "ignoble tobagie" as Michelet calls it, spreads all over the world.”
“Under this window in stormy weatherPut this man and woman asunder.”
“The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.”
“Celibate, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in a perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity.”
“Remember, it is as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman.”
“This I set down as a positive truth. A woman with fair opportunities and without a positive hump, may marry whom she likes.”
“What woman, however old, has not the bridal-favours and raiment stowed away, and packed in lavender, in the inmost cupboards of her heart?”
“Thrice happy is that humble pair,Of sad distrust and jealousy.”
“The happy married man dies in good stile at home, surrounded by his weeping wife and children. The old bachelor don't die at all—he sort of rots away, like a pollywog's tail.”
“'Tis just like a summer bird cage in a garden: the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair, and are in a consumption, for fear they shall never get out.”
“Why do not words, and kiss, and solemn pledge,Their spring-time with one love.”
“In the eye of the law no doubt, man and wife are for many purposes one: but that is a strong figurative expression, and cannot be so dealt with as that all the consequences must follow which would result from its being literally true.”
“When a woman marries, her husband is the head of the family.”
“A woman is to comfort her husband.”
“If such cruelty shall be sanctioned, and wives shall not be allowed necessaries, England will lose the happy reputation in all foreign kingdoms, which her inhabitants have achieved by their respect for this sex, the most excelling in beauty, which, as in this climate it far transcends that of the women in all other lands, so has this Kingdom surpassed all other countries in its tenderness and consideration for their welfare.”
“By the laws of England, by the laws of Christianity, and by the constitution of society, when there is a difference of opinion between husband and wife, it is the duty of the wife to submit to the husband.”
“There may by possibility be cases where cruelty may lead up directly to the wife's adultery.”
“A woman commits adultery in order to gratify her own unlawful passion: she does not think about the annoyance to her husband when she abandons herself to her lover.”
“The cock swan is an emblem or representation of an affectionate and true husband to his wife above all other fowls; for the cock swan holdeth himself to one female only, and for this cause nature hath conferred on him a gift beyond all others; that is, to die so joyfully, that he sings sweetly when he dies; upon which the poet saith:Cantator, cygnus, funeris ipse sui, &c."”
“There is not one of us who cannot recall to memory the experience of some case in which a woman submitted to the worst of treatment, treatment degrading and humiliating, and allowed it to continue rather than permit her name to become the subject of a public scandal.”
“The reason why the law will not suffer a wife to be a witness against her husband is to preserve the peace of families.”
“The husband is not liable for the criminal conduct of his wife.”
“Nothing is more natural than to marry.”
“The holy state of matrimony was ordained by Almighty God in Paradise, before the Fall of Man, signifying to us that mystical union which is between Christ and His Church; and so it is the first relation: and when two persons are joined in that holy state, they twain become one flesh1; and so it is the nearest relation.”
“Marriage in the contemplation of every Christian community is the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.”
“In the Christian Church marriage was elevated in a later age to the dignity of a sacrament.”
“Marriage, in its origin, is a contract of natural law; it may exist between two individuals of different sexes, although no third person existed in the world, as happened in the case of the common ancestors of mankind: It is the parent, not the child of civil society. "Principium urbis et quasi seminarium reipublicce."”
“A contract executed without any part performance.”
“Our law considers marriage in the light of a contract, and applies to it with some exceptions, the ordinary principles which apply to other contracts.”
“If people are drunk or delirious,To let the folks lodge in her inn.”
“A marriage contract compels a woman to work for a man. This is voluntary servitude so long as a woman loves a man. But when she does not love him it becomes involuntary servitude, which the consititution does not permit in the United States.”
“Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.”
“Marriage? That's for life! It's like cement!”
““How excellent is the saying of one of old: ‘He that adventureth upon matrimony is like unto one who thrusteth his hand into a sack containing many thousands of serpents and one eel. Yet, if Fate so decree, he may draw forth the eel.’””
“He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public…. He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question, when a man should marry—"A young man not yet, an elder man not at all".”
“No jealousy their dawn of love o'ercast, To the fond husband and the faithful wife.”
“A bad marriage is like an electrical thrilling machine: it makes you dance, but you can't let go.”
“Marriage, n. A community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.”
“I'd rather die Maid, and lead apes in HellThan wed an inmate of Silenus' Cell.”
“The godly union of souls in mutual forebearance with each other's infirmities, and mutual stimulating each other's graces--this surely is a fragment of true happiness that has survived the Fall.”
“Marriage and hanging go by destiny; matches are made in heaven.”
“'Cause grace and virtue are withinThey shall be suffer'd to espouse.”
“For talk six times with the same single lady,And you may get the wedding dresses ready.”
“There was no great disparity of years,Which fain would lull its river-child to sleep.”
“That they may not become too complacent or delighted in married life, he makes them distressed by the shortcomings of their partners, or humbles them through willful offspring, or afflicts them with the want or loss of children. But, if in all these matters he is more merciful to them, he shows them by diseases and dangers how unstable and passing all mortal blessings are, that they may not be puffed up with vain glory.”
“A marriage so free, so spontaneous, that it would allow of wide excursions of the pair from each other, in common or even in separate objects of work and interest, and yet would hold them all the time in the bond of absolute sympathy, would by its very freedom be all the more poignantly attractive, and by its very scope and breadth all the richer and more vital -- would be in a sense indestructible.”
“So why do we marry? According to Kabbala, the compulsion to rush into a lifelong commitment is an expression of the human soul's deepest ambitions. The subliminal signals emanating from the soul have caused the logic-defying institution of marriage to be an integral part of the human fabric since the dawn of time. The soul's desire to connect and commit makes the aspiration for marriage one of our most basic instincts.”
“You cannot easily make a good drama out of the success or failure of a marriage, just as you could not make a good drama out of the growth of an oak tree or the decay of an empire. As Polonius very reasonably observed, it is too long. A happy love-affair will make a drama simply because it is dramatic; it depends on an ultimate yes or no. But a happy marriage is not dramatic; perhaps it would be less happy if it were.”
“I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.”
“Marriage is the union of two different surnames, in friendship and in love, in order to continue the posterity of the former sages, and to furnish those who shall preside at the sacrifices to heaven and earth, at those in the ancestral temple, and at those at the altars to the spirits of the land and grain.”
“The best way to remember your wife's birthday is to forget it once.”
“The tragedy of marriage is that while all women marry thinking that their man will change, all men marry believing their wife will never change.”
“Any married man should forget his mistakes - no use two people remembering the same thing.”
“Marriage is memory, marriage is time.”
“Young men not ought to marry yet, and old men never ought to marry at all.”
“I have always thought that every woman should marry, and no man.”
“There's nothing a woman hates more than her fiance's best friend. He knows all the secrets she's going to spend the rest of her life trying to find out.”
“If the policy of the law has withheld from married women certain powers and faculties, the Courts of law must continue to treat them as deprived of those powers and faculties, until the legislature directs those Courts to do otherwise.”
“Let women be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife, and Christ is the head of the Church.”
“A man should marry four wives: A Persian to have some one to talk to; a Khurasani woman for his housework; a Hindu for nursing his children; a woman from Mawaraun nahr, or Transoxiana, to have some one to whip as a warning to the other three.”
“The joys of marriage are the heaven on earth,Eternity of pleasures.”
“Where there's marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.”
“My son is my son till he have got him a wife,But my daughter's my daughter all the days of her life.”
“They that marry ancient people, merely in expectation to bury them, hang themselves, in hope that one will come and cut the halter.”
“Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman', for she was taken out of man." For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.”
“Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.”
“The critical period in matrimony is breakfast-time.”
“However important it is that love shall precede marriage, it is far more important that it shall continue after marriage.”
“In the marriage ceremony, that moment when falling in love is replaced by the arduous drama of staying in love, the words "in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, till death do us part" set love in the temporal context in which it achieves its meaning. As time begins to elapse, one begins to love the other because they have shared the same experience... Selves may not intertwine; but lives do, and shared memory becomes as much of a bond as the bond of the flesh.”
“In reply he said: “Did YOU not read that he who created them from [the] beginning made them male and female and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother and will stick to his wife, and the two will be one flesh’?”
“I tell you the truth," Jesus said to them, "no one who has left home or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age and, in the age to come, eternal life.”
“At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.”
“Those who are engaged to marry are called to live chastity in continence. They should see in this time of testing a discovery of mutual respect, an apprenticeship in fidelity, and the hope of receiving one another from God. They should reserve for marriage the expressions of affection that belong to married love. They will help each other grow in chastity.”
“A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience.”
“Sir, it is so far from being natural for a man and a woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives that they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.”
“Marriages would in general be as happy, if not more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor.”
“Marriage is the safe harbor men proffer from a tempest they themselves conjure into creation.”
“Under the Constitution, same-sex couples seek in marriage the same legal treatment as opposite-sex couples, and it would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right.”
“The husband is the chief of the family and the head of the wife. The woman, because she is flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone, must be subject to her husband and obey him; not, indeed, as a servant, but as a companion, so that her obedience shall be wanting in neither honor nor dignity. Since the husband represents Christ, and since the wife represents the Church, let there always be, both in him who commands and in her who obeys, a heaven-born love guiding both in their respective duties.”
“He must be rich whom I could love,'Tis all the same to me.”
“As unto the bow the cord is,Useless each without the other!”
“In the majority of cases which are brought to me as a consulting psychologist for love and marital adjustment, there are self-deceptions to be uncovered as well as attempts to deceive other people. Beneath such love conflicts there is almost always a festering psychological core of dishonesty.”
“Hail, wedded love, mysterious law; true sourceOf human offspring.”
“To the nuptial bowerFlung rose, flung odours from the spicy shrub.”
“Therefore God's universal lawSmile she or lour.”
“There's a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told, Love on thro' all ills, and love on till they die.”
“That is why a man will leave his father and his mother and he must stick to his wife and they must become one flesh.”
“Marriage is wonderful when it lasts forever, and I envy the old couples in When Harry Met Sally who reminisce tearfully about the day they met 50 years before. I no longer believe, however, that a marriage is a failure if it doesn't last forever. It may be a tragedy, but it is not necessarily a failure. And when a marriage does last forever with love alive, it is a miracle.”
“In the majority of cases which are brought to me as a consulting psychologist for love and marital adjustment, there are self-deceptions to be uncovered as well as attempts to deceive other people. Beneath such love conflicts there is almost always a festering psychological core of dishonesty.”
“Even cohabitation has been corrupted – by marriage.”
“When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.”
“Here's the advice I give everyone about marriage — is she someone you find interesting? … You will spend more time with this person than anyone else for the rest of your life, and there is nothing more important than always wanting to hear what she has to say about things … Does she make you laugh? And I don’t know if you want kids, but if you do, do you think she will be a good mom? Life is long. These are the things that really matter over the long term.”
“Let the husband render to his wife the affection owed her, and likewise also the wife to her husband.”
“The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband. And in like manner the husband also hath not power of his own body, but the wife.”
“Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.”
“The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife.”
“A husband is what is left of a lover, after the nerve has been extracted.”
“There is not infrequently, in marriage, a suggestion of purchase, of acquiring a woman on condition of keeping her in a certain standard of material comfort. Often and often, a marriage hardly differs from prostitution except by being harder to escape from.”
“[C]hildren are what makes marriage important. But for children, there would be no need of any institution concerned with sex, but as soon as children enter in, the husband and wife, if they have any offspring, are compelled to realise that their feelings towards each other are no longer what is of most importance.”
“We got married: society’s solution to loneliness, lust and laundry.”
“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”
“Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other.”
“If you shall marry,You give away myself, which is known mine.”
“Men are April when they woo, December when they wed; maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.”
“I will fasten on this sleeve of thine:Thou art an elm, my husband, I, a vine.”
“Men's vows are women's traitors! All good seeming,But worn a bait for ladies.”
“Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tearsShe married.”
“The instances that second marriage moveAre base respects of thrift, but none of love.”
“God, the best maker of all marriages,Combine your hearts in one.”
“He is the half part of a blessed man,Whose fulness of perfection lies in him.”
“A world-without-end bargain.”
“Hanging and wiving goes by destiny.”
“As are those dulcet sounds in break of dayAnd summon him to marriage.”
“Happiest of all, is, that her gentle spiritAs from her lord, her governor, her king.”
“I will marry her, sir, at your request; but if there be no great love in the beginning, yet heaven may decrease it upon better acquaintance * * * I hope, upon familiarity will grow more contempt: I will marry her; that I am freely dissolved, and dissolutely.”
“But earthlier happy is the rose distill'd,Grows, lives and dies in single blessedness.”
“I would not marry her, though she were endowed with all that Adam had left him before he transgressed: she would have made Hercules have turned spit, yea, and have cleft his club to make the fire too. * * * I would to God some scholar would conjure her; for certainly, while she is here, a man may live as quiet in hell as in a sanctuary.”
“No, the world must be peopled. When I said, I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.”
“She is not well married that lives married long:But she's best married that dies married young.”
“She is your treasure, she must have a husband;And for your love to her lead apes in hell.”
“If she deny to wed, I'll crave the dayWhen I shall ask the banns and when be married.”
“Who wooed in haste, and means to wed at leisure.”
“She shall watch all night:This is the way to kill a wife with kindness.”
“Thy husband * * * commits his bodyToo little payment for so great a debt.”
“Let still the woman takeThan women's are.”
“Then let thy love be younger than thyself,Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour.”
“Now go with me and with this holy manPlight me the full assurance of your faith.”
“Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.”
“The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.”
“George Bernard Shaw Man and Superman (1903)”
“Let's say you're a 6-month-old girl, no evidence whatsoever of any abuse. They're simply saying, 'You, in this culture, may grow up to be a child bride when you're 14. Therefore we're going to remove you now when you're 6 months old. Or, 'You're a 6-month-old boy; 25, 30 years, 40 years from now you're going to be a predator, so we're going to take you away now.”
“Marge: Homer, is this the way you pictured married life? Homer: Yup, pretty much. Except we drove around in a van solving mysteries.”
“Marriage is like a coffin and each kid is another nail.”
“I have always been convinced that if a woman once made up her mind to marry a man nothing but instant flight could save him.”
“Marry a wife according to your choice.Have children to your heart's content.”
“Marrying is human. Having children is divine.”
“When I married a malicious husband, when I bore a malicious son, an unhappy heart was assigned to me.”
“For his pleasure he got married. On his thinking it over he got divorced.”
“Marriage was not originated by human law. When God created Eve, she was a wife to Adam; they then and there occupied the status of husband to wife and wife to husband. . . . It would be sacrilegious to apply the designation “a civil contract” to such a marriage. It is that and more – a status ordained by God.”
“As the husband is the wife is; thou art mated with a clown,And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.”
“But happy they, the happiest of their kind!Their Hearts, their Fortunes, and their Beings blend.”
“Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of equals.”
“Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.”
“A bride burns her bridges, having fallen in love, and drowns in marriage.”
“'Tis my maxim, he's a fool that marries; but he's a greater that does not marry a fool.”
“You are of the society of the wits and railleurs … the surest sign is, since you are an enemy to marriage,—for that, I hear, you hate as much as business or bad wine.”
“I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being, neither white, black, brown nor red. When you are dealing with humanity as one family, there's no question of integration or intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being, or one human being living around and with another human being.”
“Body and soul, like peevish man and wife,United jar, and yet are loth to part.”
“He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.”
“To have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.”
“To love, cherish, and to obey.”
“With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.”
“He that said it was not good for man to be alone, placed the celibate amongst the inferior states of perfection.”
“Cursed be the man, the poorest wretch in life,I'd break her spirit or I'd break her heart.”
“To sit, happy married lovers; Phillis trifling with a plover'sAs I sit alone at present, dreaming darkly of a dun.”
“We've been together now for forty years, As I'd swop for my dear old Dutch.”
“Man and wife,Coupled together for the sake of strife.”
“Oh! how many torments lie in the small circle of a wedding ring.”
“Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure,Marry'd in haste, we may repent at leisure.”
“Misses! the tale that I relate But proper time to marry.”
“Wedlock, indeed, hath oft compared been And they that are within would fain go out.”
“At length cried she, I'll marry:I may lead apes in hell forever.”
“The wictim o' connubiality.”
“Every woman should marry—and no man.”
“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.”
“You are of the society of the wits and railers;… the surest sign is, you are an enemy to marriage, the common butt of every railer.”
“The husband's sullen, dogged, shy,The man grows jealous and with cause.”
“It is not good that the man should be alone.”