Quotes on Marriage

QUOTES ON MARRIAGE.

Introduction...
Marriages may be made in heaven—but they occur here on earth. That fact has been the inspiration for wits throughout history. Gathered here are quotes, anecdotes, and aphorisms on the subject of matrimony—its trials, its tribulations, and its ultimate rewards. To what did Robert Mitchum attribute the length of his marriage? How did Oscar Wilde describe the effects of marriage on women? What was Groucho Marx’s definition of a wife? To what did W. C. Fields attribute the success of his marriage?
These and other views on marriage have been distilled in the quotes that follow. Read them along with your spouse to be.

Newlyweds...
• A man in the house is worth two in the street. —Mae West
• All tragedies are finish’d by a death, All comedies are ended by a marriage.—George Gordon, Lord Byron
• Always get married in the morning. That way, if it doesn’t work out, you haven’t wasted a whole day.—Mickey Rooney
• Both in the lower and middle classes the wise-acres urge young men "to think it over’ before taking the decisive step. Thus they foster the delusion that the choice of a wife or husband may be governed by a certain number of accurately weighable pros and cons. This is a crude delusion on the part of common sense.—Denis de Roughemont
• By all means, marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.—Socrates
• I feel sure that no girl could go to the altar, and would probably refuse, if she knew all.—Queen Victoria
• I was married by a Judge. I should have asked for a jury.—George Burns
• Keep you eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.—Benjamin Franklin
• Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.—Ambrose Bierce
• Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
• Love is the human condition that exists when the satisfaction or security of another person becomes as significant to one as ones own satisfaction or security.—Unknown
• Maidens! Why should you worry in choosing whom you shall marry? Choose whom you may, you will find you have got somebody else.—John Hay
• Marriage can be compared to a cage: birds outside it despair to enter, and birds within, to escape.—Richard Brinsley Sherid
• 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 good deal like a circus: There is not as much in it as is represented in the advertising.—Edgar Watson Howe
• Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.—Mae West
• Marriage is grand. Divorce is ten grand!—Rev. Dr. Adamovich
• Marriageable girls as well as mothers understand the terms and perils of the lottery called wedlock. That is why women weep at a wedding and men smile.—Honore de Balzac
• Marry in haste; repent at your leisure.—William Congreve
• 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.—William Shakespeare
• Most people marry upon mingled motives, between convenience and inclination.—Dr. Johnson
• My advice to girls; first, don’t smoke—to excess; second don’t drink—to excess; third, don’t marry—to excess.—Mark Twain
• My most brilliant achievement was my ability to persuade my wife to marry me.—Winston Churchill
• One of the best thins about marriage is that it gets young people to bed at a decent hour.—M.M. Musselman
• Only choose in marriage a woman whom you would choose as a friend if she were a man.—Joseph Joubert
• Propinquity does it.—Mrs. Humphrey Ward
• The trouble with some women is that they get all excited about nothing— and then marry him.—Cher
• They gave each other a smile with a future in it.—Ring Lardner
• To take a wife merely as an agreeable and rational companion, will commonly be found to be a grand mistake.—Lord Chesterfield
• When a girl marries, she exchanges the attention of many men for the inattention of one.—Helen Rosland
• When a women gets marries it’s like jumping into a hole in the ice in the middle of winter: You do it once, and you remember it the rest of your days.—Maxim Gorky
• When an old man marries, death laughs.—German Proverb
• When two people love each other, they don’t look at each other, they look in the same direction.—Ginger Rogers
• Who findeth a wife findeth a good thing.—Proverbs 18:22
• You can’t change a man, no-ways. By he time his Mummy turns him loose and he takes up with some innocent woman and marries her, he’s what he is.—Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Married With Children...
• "Are you lost, daddy?" I asked tenderly. "Shut up," he explained.—Ring Lardner
• A father is a banker provided by nature.—French Proverb
• A vacation frequently means that the family goes away for a rest, accompanied by a mother who sees that they all get it.—Marcelene Cox
• As a housewife, I feel that if the kids are still alive when my husband gets home from work, then, hey, I’ve done my job.—Roseanne Barr
• Before I got married I had six theories on children; now I have six children and no theories.—John Wilmot
• Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore, And that’s what parents were created for.—Ogden Nash
• Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.—Socrates
• Cleaning your house while the kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.—Phyllis Diller
• Death and taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them.—Margaret Mitchell
• Familiarly breeds contempt—and children.—Mark Twain
• Nervous breakdowns are hereditary. We get them from our children.—Graffito
• Never raise your hand at your children—it leaves your midsection unprotected.—Robert Orben
• Parenthood remains the single greatest preserve of the amateur.—Alvin Toffler
• Parents are not interested in justice; they are interested in quiet.—Bill Cosby
• People who say they sleep like a baby usually don’t have one.—Leo Burke
• Thank God kids never mean well.—Lily Tomlin
• The boy, of all wild beasts, is the most unmanageable.—Plato
• The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.—Bertrand Russell
• The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.—Sam Levenson
• The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.—King Edward VIII
• The value of marriage in not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.—Peter de Vries
• There are two ways to travel, first class or with children.—Richard Benchley
• Women who miscalculate are called "mothers.".—Abigail Van Buren
• You should have seen what a fine-looking man he was before he had children.—Arapesh Tribesman

Homefries...
• A different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.—George Eliot
• A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.—Rainer Maria Rilke
• A husband is what is left of the lover after the nerve has been removed.—Helen Rowland
• A light wife doth make a heavy husband.—William Shakespeare
• A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished.—Zsa Zsa Gabor
• A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn’t want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.—W. Somerset Maugham
• A man who wants a happy marriage should learn to keep his moth shut and his checkbook open.—Groucho Marx
• A married couple are well suited when both partners usually feel the need for a quarrel at the same time.—Jean Rostand
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was discussing a particularly unhappy marriage with another acquaintance of the couple. The marriage was a pity, said Tennyson’s companion, because with any other spouse either of the two unfortunates might have been happy. "By any other arrangement," Tennyson replied, "four people would have been unhappy instead of two."
• Bachelors should be heavily taxed. It’s not fair that some men should be happier than others.—Oscar Wilde
• Before marriage, a man declares that he would lay down his life to serve you; after marriage, he won’t even lay down his newspaper to talk to you.—Helen Rowland
• Every one of you hat his particular plague, and my wife is mine; and he is very happy who hath this only.—Pittacus
• I am glad I am not a man, for if I were, I’d be obliged to marry a woman.—Madame de Stael
• I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drinks and harlots.—W. B. Yeats
• I think every woman is entitled to a middle husband she can forget.—Adela Rogers St. John
• In marriage a man becomes slack and selfish and undergoes a fatty degeneration of the spirit.—Robert Louis Stevenson
• In matters of religion and matrimony I never give any advice, because I will not have anybody’s torments in this world or the next laid to my charge.—Lord Chesterfield
• It destroys one’s nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.—Benjamin Disraeli
• It is better to dwell in a corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman in a wide house.—Proverbs
• It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to produce the occasional bon mot.—Honore de Balzac
• Many a man owes his success to his first wife and his second wife to his success.—Jim Backus
• Margaret Thatcher’s husband, Dennis, was once asked who wore the pants in his family. "I do," he replied. "And I also wash and iron them."
• Marriage is the aftermath of love.—Noel Coward
• Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horsepond.—Thomas Love Peacock
• Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarly.—Honore de Balzac
• Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who come between them.—Sydney Smith
• Men have a much better time of it than women; for one thing they marry later; for another they die earlier.—H. L. Mencken
• My toughest fight was my first wife.—Muhammad Ali
• My wife doesn’t care what I do when I’m away, as long as I don’t have a good time.—Lee Trevino
• No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes she were not.—H. L. Mencken
• Only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, and the other, to let her have it.—Lyndon B. Johnson
• Spouses are impediments to great enterprises.—Francis Bacon
• The critical period in matrimony is breakfast time.—Phyllis Diller
• The female of the species is more deadly than the male.—Rudyard Kipling
• The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.—Honore de Balzac
• The only thing that holds a marriage together is the husband being big enough to step back and see where the wife is wrong.—Archie Bunker
• Why does a woman work ten years to change a man’s habits and then complain that he’s not the man she married?—Barbara Streisand
• Wives are people who feel they don’t dance enough.—Groucho Marx
• You can bear you own faults, and why not a fault in you wife?.—Benjamin Franklin

Golden Years...
• 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.—Dr. Johnson
• A good husband should always bore his wife.—Fred. Jacob
• A lady of forty-seven who has been married twenty-seven years and has six children knows what love really is and described it for me like this: "Love is what you’ve been through with somebody."—James Thurber
• A man should be taller, older, heavier, uglier, and hoarser than his wife.—Edgar Watson Howe
• Absence sharpens love; presence strengthens it.—Thomas Fuller
• American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.—W. Somerst Maugham
• An ideal wife is one who remains faithful to you but tries to be just as if she weren’t.—Sacha Guitry
• Any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance, however passionate.—W. H. Auden
• At the end of what is called the "sexual life," the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure, and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.—Graham Greene
• Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.—Simone Signoret
• Even the God of Calvin never judged anyone as harshly as married couples judge each other.—Wilfred Sheed
• I married beneath myself. All women do.—Lady Astor
• In marriage do you be wise: Prefer the person before money, virtue before beauty, the mind before the body; then thou hast a wife, a •friend, a companion, a second self.—William Penn
• It was an unspoken pleasure, that having come together so many years, ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured.—Lillian Hellman
• Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.—Mark Twain
• Mahatma Gandhi was what women wish husbands were: thin, tan, and moral.—Anonymous
• Man and wife make one fool.—Ben Johnson
• Marriage from Love, like vinegar from wine—A sad, sour, sober beverage—by Time Is sharpened from its high celestial flavor Down to a very homely household savor.—George Gordon, Lord Byron
• Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.—J. B. Priestly
• Marriage is the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise lounge.—Mrs. Patrick Campbell
• Marriage is the perfection which love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought.—Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.—Cyril Connolly
• One of the best hearing aids a man can have is an attentive wife.—Groucho Marx
• One should never know too precisely whom one has married.—Friedrich Nietzsche
• One was never married, and that’s his hell; another is, and that’s his plague.—Robert Burton
• The actress Dame Sybil Thorndike was married to another actor, Sir Lewis Casson. After his death, Dame Thorndike was asked whether the couple had ever considered divorce. "Divorce?" she said. "Never. But murder, often!"
• The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.—Will Durant
• The only reason I took up jogging was so that I could hear heavy breathing again.—Erma Bombeck
• There is little difference between husbands you might as well keep the first.—Adela Robers St. Jon
• There is no more lovely, friendly, and charming relationship, communion, or company than a good marriage.—Martin Luther
• There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.—Homer
• There isn’t a wife in the world who has not taken the exact measure of her husband, weighed him and settled him in her own mind, and knows him as well as if she had ordered him after designs and specifications of her own.—Charles Dudley Warner
• Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.—Oscar Wilde
• We study ourselves three weeks, we love each other three months, we squabble three years, we tolerate each other thirty years, and then the children start all over again.—Hippolyte Taine
• What makes your marriage work?
• Robert Mitchum, after forty-two years of marriage, said, "Lack of imagination, I suppose."
• Rodney Dangerfield said, "We sleep in separate rooms, we have dinner apart, we take separate vacations - we’re doing everything we can to keep our marriage together."
• We would have broken up except for the children. Who were the children? Well, she and I were.—Mort Sahl
• What is instinct? It is the natural tendency in one, when filled with dismay, to turn to his wife.—Finley Peter Dunne
• When marrying, one should ask oneself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this woman into your old age?"—Friedrich Nietzsche
• Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.—Francis Bacon

Miscellaneous

• Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him. ~H.L. Mencken, A Book of Burlesques, 1916
• The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds - they mature slowly. ~Peter De Vries
• Marriage ceremony: an incredible metaphysical sham of watching God and the law being dragged into the affairs of your family. ~O.C. Ogilvie
• Love is one long sweet dream, and marriage is the alarm clock. ~Author Unknown• A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he's finished. ~Zsa Zsa Gabor
• Bigamy is having one husband or wife too many. Monogamy is the same. ~Oscar Wilde
• Spouse: someone who'll stand by you through all the trouble you wouldn't have had if you'd stayed single. ~Author Unknown
• I love being married. It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life. ~Rita Rudner
• Marriage means commitment. Of course, so does insanity. ~Author Unknown
• Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution. ~Mae West
• My wife says I never listen to her. At least I think that's what she said. ~Author Unknown
• I never knew what real happiness was until I got married. And by then it was too late. ~Max Kauffman
• Marriage, n. A community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all two. ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911
• Don't marry the person you think you can live with; marry only the individual you think you can't live without. ~Dr. James C. Dobson
• I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all. ~Lord Byron
• Mistress: something between a mister and a mattress. ~Author Unknown
• Mother-in-law: a woman who destroys her son-in-law's peace of mind by giving him a piece of hers. ~Author Unknown
• Bachelor: the only man who has never told his wife a lie. ~Author Unknown
• Wedding rings: the world's smallest handcuffs. ~Author Unknown
• Divorce: The past tense of marriage. ~Author Unknown
• How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being. ~Oscar Wilde
• More marriages might survive if the partners realized that sometimes the better comes after the worse. ~Doug Larson
• Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl. ~Stephen Leacock, Literary Lapses, 1910
• The most dangerous food is wedding cake. ~American Proverb
• Home cooking: where many a man thinks his wife is. ~Author Unknown
• Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage. ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
• Marriage is not a word - it is a sentence. ~Author Unknown
• There is so little difference between husbands you might as well keep the first. ~Adela Rogers St. Johns
• When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her. ~Sacha Guitry, Elles et toi, 1948
• It isn't tying himself to one woman that a man dreads when he thinks of marrying; it's separating himself from all the others. ~Helen Rowland, Violets and Vinegar
• Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast. ~Marlene Dietrich
• Only choose in marriage a man whom you would choose as a friend if he were a woman. ~Joseph Joubert
• Never strike your wife - even with a flower. ~Hindu Proverb
• One advantage of marriage is that, when you fall out of love with him or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you fall in again. ~Judith Viorst
• The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character. ~Peter Devries
• The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less. ~Brendon Behan
• Bride: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her. ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
• Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then. ~Katherine Hepburn
• If your husband and a lawyer were drowning and you had to choose, would you go to lunch or to a movie? ~Author Unknown
• A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person. ~Mignon McLaughlin
• What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility. ~George Levinger
• 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. ~Robert Anderson, Solitaire & Double Solitaire
• It destroys one's nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being. ~Benjamin Disraeli
• Love-matches are made by people who are content, for a month of honey, to condemn themselves to a life of vinegar. ~Countess of Blessington
• Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight. ~Phyllis Diller
• Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage. ~Sydney J. Harris
• The husband who doesn't tell his wife everything probably reasons that what she doesn't know won't hurt him. ~Leo J. Burke
• If you made a list of reasons why any couple got married, and another list of the reasons for their divorce, you'd have a lot of overlapping. ~Mignon McLaughlin
• Married life teaches one invaluable lesson: to think of things far enough ahead not to say them. ~Jefferson Machamer
• It's easy to understand love at first sight, but how do we explain love after two people have been looking at each other for years? ~Author Unknown
• A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing. ~W. Somerset Maugham
• The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin. ~Honore de Balzac, The Physiology of Marriage
• Never marry for money. Ye'll borrow it cheaper. ~Scottish Proverb
• Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who'll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you're in the wrong house, that's what it means. ~Henny Youngman
• The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast. ~Gabriel García Márquez
• She cried, and the judge wiped her tears with my checkbook. ~Tommy Manville
• By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher. ~Socrates
• Before marriage, a girl has to make love to a man to hold him. After marriage, she has to hold him to make love to him. ~Marilyn Monroe
• English Law prohibits a man from marrying his mother-in-law. This is our idea of useless legislation. ~Author Unknown
• A wedding anniversary is the celebration of love, trust, partnership, tolerance and tenacity. The order varies for any given year. ~Paul Sweeney
• Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too. ~H.L. Mencken
• Two mothers-in-law. ~Lord John Russell, on being asked what he would consider a proper punishment for bigamy
• A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing. ~Joey Adams
• Matrimony is a process by which a grocer acquired an account the florist had. ~Francis Rodman
• A question asked in a Surrey school exam went: "Why do cocks crow early every morning?" A twelve-year-old replied: "My dad says they have to make the most of it while the hens are asleep." ~Quoted in the Peterborough Daily Telegraph, 1983
• A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married. ~H.L. Mencken
• One shouldn't be too inquisitive in life. Either about God's secrets or one's wife.~Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
• I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. First, let her think she's having her own way. And second, let her have it. ~Lyndon Baines Johnson
• Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose. ~Beverley Nichols
• A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short. ~Author Unknown
• When a girl marries, she exchanges the attentions of many men for the inattention of one. ~Helen Rowland
• Before marriage, a man declares that he would lay down his life to serve you; after marriage, he won't even lay down his newspaper to talk to you. ~Helen Rowland
• Being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck. If you live through it, you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left. ~Jean Kerr, Mary, Mary, 1960
• A wedding is just like a funeral except that you get to smell your own flowers. ~Grace Hansen
• Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner. ~Charles Caleb Colton
• I've been married to one Marxist and one Fascist, and neither one would take the garbage out. ~Lee Grant
• A dress that zips up the back will bring a husband and wife together. ~James H. Boren
• Often the difference between a successful marriage and a mediocre one consists of leaving about three or four things a day unsaid. ~Harlan Miller
• The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret. ~Henny Youngman
• Marriage is a mistake every man should make. ~George Jessel
• I guess walking slow getting married is because it gives you time to maybe change your mind. ~Virginia Cary Hudson, O Ye Figs and Juleps, 1962
• A husband is what is left of a lover, after the nerve has been extracted. ~Helen Rowland
• My husband and I divorced over religious differences. He thought he was God, and I didn't. ~Author Unknown
• All marriages are happy. It's the living together afterward that causes all the trouble. ~Raymond Hull
• The concern that some women show at the absence of their husbands does not arise from their not seeing them and being with them, but from the apprehension that their husbands are enjoying pleasures in which they do not participate, and which, from their being at a distance, they have not the power of interrupting. ~Michel de Montaigne
• I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night. ~Marie Corelli
• Never feel remorse for what you have thought about your wife; she has thought much worse things about you. ~Jean Rostand, Le Mariage, 1927
• Marriage: A word which should be pronounced "mirage." ~Herbert Spencer
• If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse - as a man shoots himself. ~H.L. Mencken
• Hubert Humphrey talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages. ~Barry Goldwater
• Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier. ~H.L. Mencken
• I dreamed of a wedding of elaborate elegance, A church filled with family and friends. I asked him what kind of a wedding he wished for. He said one that would make me his wife.~Author Unknown
• Getting divorced just because you don't love a man is almost as silly as getting married just because you do. ~Zsa Zsa Gabor
• Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences. ~Isadora Duncan
• Love may be blind but marriage is a real eye-opener! ~Author Unknown
• Three rings of marriage are the engagement ring, the wedding ring, and the suffering. ~Author Unknown
• Marriage is like a bank account. You put it in, you take it out, you lose interest. ~Irwin Corey
• If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married. ~Katharine Houghton Hepburn
• Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State- and church-begotten weed, marriage? ~Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love
• On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable. ~Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love
• Marriage is a wonderful invention: then again, so is a bicycle repair kit. ~Billy Connolly
• Marriage is good for those who are afraid to sleep alone at night. ~St. Jerome, Attack on Jovinian
• A great poet has seldom sung of lawfully wedded happiness, but of free and secret love; and in this respect, too the time is coming when there will no longer be one standard of morality for poetry and another for life. To anyone tender of conscience, the ties formed by a free connection are stronger than the legal ones. ~Ellen Key, quoted by Sprading in Liberty and the Great Libertarians
• Men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage - they've experienced pain and bought jewelry. ~Rita Rudner
• A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband. ~Michel de Montaigne, Essays
• It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time. ~Balzac, Physiologie du mariage, 1829
• When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. ~From the movie When Harry Met Sally
• It's a funny thing that when a man hasn't anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married. ~Robert Frost
• Someone asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true and incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage. ~Gloria Steinem
• If you want to read about love and marriage, you've got to buy two separate books. ~Alan King
• Marriage is like a phone call in the night: first the ring, and then you wake up. ~Evelyn Hendrickson
• If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry. ~Chekho
• The Wedding March always reminds me of the music played when soldiers go into battle. ~Heinrich Heine• 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? ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men, 1850
• When a man opens a car door for his wife, it's either a new car or a new wife. ~Prince Philip, 1988
• You should never kiss a girl unless you have enough bucks to buy her a big ring and her own VCR, 'cause she'll want to have videos of the wedding. ~Jim, age 10
• It gives me a headache to think about that stuff. I'm just a kid. I don't need that kind of trouble. ~Kenny, age 7, when asked if it's better to be single or married
• Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she's a householder. ~Thornton Wilder
• No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single. ~H.L. Mencken
• Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open. ~George Bernard Shaw
• Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance. ~Michel de Montaigne
• I'd marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars and would sign over half of it to me before the marriage, and guarantee he'd be dead within the year. ~Bette Davis
• Men should keep their eyes wide open before marriage, and half-shut afterwards. ~Madeleine de Scudery
• Marrying for love may be a bit risky, but it is so honest that God can't help but smile on it. ~Josh Billings
• Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows - marriage does. ~Groucho Marx
• Why does a woman work ten years to change a man's habits and then complain that he's not the man she married? ~Barbra Streisand
• No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married. ~Benjamin Disraeli
• In olden times sacrifices were made at the altar - a practice which is still continued. ~Helen Rowland
• He's the kind of man a woman would have to marry to get rid of. ~Mae West
• The concept of two people living together for 25 years without a serious dispute suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep. ~A.P. Herbert
• Never get married in the morning - you never know who you might meet that night. ~Paul Hornung
• Never get married in college; it's hard to get a start if a prospective employer finds you've already made one mistake. ~Elbert Hubbard