Quotations: Marriage

I pay very little regard...to what any young person says on the subject of marriage. If they profess a disinclination for it, I only set it down that they have not yet seen the right person.
Jane Austen

Marriage is a fight to the death. Before contracting it, the two parties concerned implore the benediction of Heaven because to promise to love each other forever is the rashest of enterprises.
Honore de Balzac

Marriage is a science; never begin marriage by a rape.
Honore de Balzac

Marriage is an institution necessary to the maintenance of society but contrary to the laws of nature.
Honore de Balzac

Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit.
Honore de Balzac

When passion is not fed, it changes to need. At this juncture, marriage becomes a fixed idea in the mind of the bourgeois, being the only means whereby he can win a woman and appropriate her to his uses.
Honore de Balzac

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
Honore de Balzac

Marriage always demands the finest arts of insincerity possible between two human beings.
Vicki Baum

I used to believe that marriage would diminish me, reduce my options. That you had to be someone less to live with someone else when, of course, you have to be someone more.
Candice Bergen

Love is a temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder.
Ambrose Bierce

Marriage is the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
Ambrose Bierce

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

I always cry at weddings, especially my own.
Humphrey Bogart

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.
Joyce Brothers

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

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.
Pearl Buck

One was never married and that's his hell; another is, and that's his plague.
Robert Burton

To marry a woman who you love and who loves you is to lay a wager with her as to who will stop loving the other first.
Albert Camus

The first bond of society is marriage.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

Marriage is a wonderful invention; but, then again, so is a bicycle repair kit.
Billy Connolly

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

The heart of marriage is memories.
Bill Cosby

It destroys one's nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.
Benjamin Disraeli

No man is regular in his attendance at the house of commons until he is married.
Benjamin Disraeli

I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.
Will Durant

There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I'll get married again.
Clint Eastwood

Lasting harmony with a woman (was) an undertaking in which I twice failed rather disgracefully.
Albert Einstein

You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets.
Nora Ephron

Women and men have to fight together to change society - and both will benefit... Partnership, not dependence, is the real romance in marriage.
Muriel Fox

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

I first learned the concepts of non-violence in my marriage.
Mahatma Gandhi

Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!
William Hazlitt

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

A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died; it was the triumph of hope over experience.
Samuel Johnson

Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.
Samuel Johnson

Love in marriage should be the accomplishment of a beautiful dream, and not, as it too often is, the end.
Alphonse Karr

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

Marriage is a wonderful institution...but who wants to live in an institution?
Groucho Marx

A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.
Andre Maurois

A marriage without conflicts is almost as inconceivable as a nation without crises.
Andre Maurois

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
Mignon McLaughlin

A great marriage is not when the 'perfect couple' comes together. It is when an imperfect couple learns to enjoy their differences.
Dave Meurer

Marriage...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 de Montaigne

Intimacy is what makes a marriage, not a ceremony, not a piece of paper from the state.
Kathleen Norris

A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
Terry Pratchett

I guess the only way to stop divorce is to stop marriage.
Will Rogers

In Hollywood a marriage is a success if it outlasts milk.
Rita Rudner

All marriages are mixed marriages.
Chantal Saperstein

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove.
William Shakespeare

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

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage is like life - it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.
Robert Louis Stevenson

You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.
Robert Louis Stevenson

You never can see into someone else's marriage.
Sean Stewart

It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination.
Henry David Thoreau

That is what marriage really means: helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible and autonomous beings who do not run away from life.
Paul Tournier

Marriage is part of a sort of 50's revival package that's back in vogue along with neckties and naked ambition.
Calvin Trillin

Marriage is not merely sharing the fettucini, but sharing the burden of finding the fettucini restaurant in the first place.
Calvin Trillin

Marriage is three parts love and seven parts forgiveness of sins.
Lao Tzu

Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
Voltaire

Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution yet.
Mae West

Long engagements give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which is never advisable.
Oscar Wilde

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