Marriage quotes
1.9K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside marriage — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might be found more suitable mates. But the real soul-mate is the one you are actually married to."
"Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses."
"It is not marriage that fails; it is people that fail. All that marriage does is to show people up."
"All young women begin by believing they can change and reform the men they marry. They can't."
"It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination"
"Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery."
"A happy wedlock is a long falling in love."
"There is no greater feeling than when a groom turns to see his bride and has tears in his eyes because she is so beautiful."
"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."
"Marriage has a unique place because it speaks of an absolute faithfulness, a covenant between radically different persons, male and female; and so it echoes the absolute covenant of God with his chosen, a covenant between radically different partners."
"Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed."
"The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding."
"Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."
"Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it."
"The secret of a happy marriage is finding the right person. You know they're right if you love to be with them all the time."
"It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love."
"I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail, poisoned in the bushes, blown out on the trail; hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn, "Come in," she said, "I'll give ya shelter from the storm.""
"My heart is ever at your service."
"When the rose and the cross are united the alchemical marriage is complete and the drama ends. Then we wake from history and enter eternity."
"Don't marry a man to reform him - that's what reform schools are for."
