Quotes about marriage

Never marry for money. Ye'll borrow it cheaper.

— Scottish Proverb

The day you marry, it is either kill or cure.

— Spanish Proverb

He who marries for money earns it.

— Yiddish Proverb

Your marriage moves toward a state of isolation. Unless you lovingly and energetically nurture your marriage, you will begin to drift away from your mate.

— Dennis Rainey

Marriage is a lottery in which men stake their liberty and women their happiness.

— Madame De Rieux

It doesn't much signify whom one marries, for one is sure to find out the next morning that it was someone else.

— Will Rogers

Always get married in the morning. That way if it doesn't work out, you haven't wasted the whole day.

— Mickey Rooney

Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

A bride at her second marriage does not wear a veil. She wants to see what she is getting.

— Helen Rowland

After marriage, a woman's sight becomes so keen that she can see right through her husband without looking at him, and a man's so dull that he can look right through his wife without seeing her.

— Helen Rowland

Before marriage, a man will go home and lie awake all night thinking about something you said; after marriage, he'll go to sleep before you finish saying it.

— Helen Rowland

Marriage is the miracle that transforms a kiss from a pleasure into a duty.

— Helen Rowland

Marriage is the operation by which a woman's vanity and a man's egotism are extracted without an anaesthetic.

— Helen Rowland

When a girl marries, she exchanges the attentions of all the other men of her acquaintance for the inattention of just one.

— Helen Rowland

In the perfect wedlock, the man, I should say, is the head, but the woman the heart, with which he cannot dispense.

— Ruckett

Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.

— Bertrand Russell

Nature admits of no permanence in the relation between man and woman. It is only man's egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and legalities.

— Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

The horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.

— Marquis De Sade

It takes two to make a marriage a success and only one to make it a failure.

— Herbert Samuel

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

A little weeping, a little wheedling, a little self-degradation, a little careful use of our advantages, and then some man will say .Come, be my wife! With good looks and youth marriage is easy to attain. There are men enough; but a woman who has sold herself, even for a ring and a new name, need hold her skirt aside for no creature in the street. They both earn their bread in one way. Marriage for love is the most beautiful external symbol of the union of souls; marriage without it is the least clean traffic that defiles the world.

— Olive Schreiner

It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.

— George Bernard Shaw

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

— George Bernard Shaw

Tis safest in matrimony to begin with a little aversion.

— Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years. That is what makes a marriage last --more than passion or even sex!

— Simone Signoret

All men make mistakes, but married men find out about them sooner.

— Red Skelton

If a man truly wants to communicate with his wife, he must enter her world of emotions.

— Gary Smalley

Marrying into money was not a good thing for me.

— Anna Nicole Smith

It resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated, often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.

— Sydney Smith

Married couples resemble a pair of scissors, often moving in opposite directions, yet punishing anyone who gets in between them.

— Sydney Smith

By all means marry. If you get a good wife you will become happy, and if you get a bad one you will become a philosopher.

— Socrates

The concerts you enjoy together neighbors you annoy together children you destroy together that make marriage a joy

— Stephen Sondheim

Marriage: A ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.

— Herbert Spencer

The marriage state, with and without the affection suitable to it, is the completest image of Heaven and Hell we are capable of receiving in this life.

— Sir Richard Steele

Once you are married, there is nothing for you, not even suicide, but to be good.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage is one long conversation, checkered by disputes.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage should be a duet -- when one sings, the other claps. Joe Murray The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.

— Henry Lewis Stimson

We love in others what we lack in ourselves, and would be everything, but what we are.

— Richard Henry Stoddard

Each coming together of man and wife, even if they have been mated for many years, should be a fresh adventure; each winning should necessitate a fresh wooing.

— Marie Carmichael Stopes

A happy marriage perhaps represents the ideal of human relationship -- a setting in which each partner, while acknowledging the need of the other, feels free to be what he or she by nature is: a relationship in which instinct as well as intellect can find expression; in which giving and taking are equal; in which each accepts the other, and I confronts Thou.

— Anthony Storr

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

Try praising your wife, even if it does frighten her at first.

— Billy Sunday

Love is blind -- marriage is the eye-opener.

— Pauline Thomason

Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: The one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.

— Mark Twain

Whether a fellow winds up with a nest egg or a goose egg depends a heap on the kind of chick he married.

— Source Unknown

Marriage is an institution, but who wants to live in an institution?

— Source Unknown

A good marriage is like a casserole, only those responsible for it really know what goes in it.

— Source Unknown

A marriage is a series of friendships. Love serves as its underlying theme. Friendships provide it with the new challenges around which the relationship further develops. Each type of friendship with ones partner comes into being, rises to a peak of enthusiasm, and then wanes away in our cedar chest of sentimental values. Every once in a while we go to the chest and draw out a friendship item to give us a shot in the arm. Then we put it away till another day.

— Source Unknown

Marriage is like a violin. After the music is over, you still have the strings.

— Source Unknown

Marriage is like a hot bath. Once you get used to it, it's not so hot.

— Source Unknown

Any man who married for money and got it. Earned it.

— Source Unknown

Compromise: An amiable arrangement between husband and wife whereby they agree to let her have her own way.

— Source Unknown

He believes that marriage and a career don't mix. So after the wedding he plans to quit his job.

— Source Unknown

If it weren't for marriage, men and women would have to fight with total strangers.

— Source Unknown

Marital Freedom: The liberty that allows a husband to do exactly that which his wife pleases.

— Source Unknown

Marriage is a three ring circus: engagement ring, wedding ring, and suffering.

— Source Unknown

The pretentiously -- named ensuite bathroom is a major factor in divorce. Privacy is paramount in marriage.

— Source Unknown

No man was ever shot by his wife while doing the dishes.

— Source Unknown

The man who says his wife can't take a joke forgets that she took him.

— Source Unknown

Marriage isn't a word... it's a sentence.

— Source Unknown

One of society's biggest problems today is that we've allowed relationships to be accepted as impermanent, particularly marriage.

— Source Unknown

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

— John Updike

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

— John Updike

I've been married so long, I am on my third bottle of Tabasco sauce.

— Susan Vass

A marriage is no amusement but a solemn act, and generally a sad one.

— Queen Victoria

Being married gives one one's position like nothing else can.

— Queen Victoria

I think people really marry far too much; it is such a lottery after all, and for a poor woman a very doubtful happiness.

— Queen Victoria

Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.

— Voltaire

The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds -- they mature slowly.

— Peter De Vries

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.

— Peter De Vries

The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.

— Peter De Vries

To many women marriage is only this. It is merely a physical change impinging on their ordinary nature, leaving their mentality untouched, their self-possession intact. They are not burnt by even the red fire of physical passion - far less by the white fire of love.

— Mary Webb

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

— Mae West

It's not the men in my life that counts, it's the life in my men.

— Mae West

I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.

— Edith Wharton

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

They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins.

— Oscar Wilde

On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband's dinners.

— Oscar Wilde

The best part of married life is the fights. The rests is merely so.

— Thornton Wilder

Our marriage is like anybody's marriage, It goes through ups and downs. It's a little garden that you have to tend all the time. When we're home, it's not like we walk around all dolled up going, We are celebrities! We are famous! I change diapers. I clean up dog doo.

— Bruce Willis

This would be a much better world if more married couples were as deeply in love as they are in debt.

— Earl Wilson

I was so cold the other day, I almost got married.

— Shelley Winters

In Hollywood all the marriages are happy, it's trying to live together afterwards that causes all the problems.

— Shelley Winters

Marriage isn't a process of prolonging the life of love, but of mummifying the corpse.

— Sir P(elham) G(renville) Wodehouse

Marrying to increase love is like gaming to become rich; alas, you only lose what little stock you had before.

— William Wycherley

Any young man who is unmarried at the age of twenty one is a menace to the community.

— Brigham Young

Many marriages would be better if the husband and the wife clearly understood that they are on the same side.

— Zig Ziglar

Marriage used to be bondage and still is in some places. That's disconcerting.

— James Dye

Marriage is NOT about HAVING another person. Marriage is about GIVING ONESELF to another person.

— Eric Parslow

A man stays in touch with society by means of a wife.

— Michael Lipsey

It’s a straightforward matter of equality: it’s outrageously unfair that heterosexuals shoulder alone the burden of keeping divorce lawyers in Italian sports cars

— Mark Simpson

Marriage is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and passion

— William Mocca

To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.

— Oscar Wilde

Wives are young men's mistresses; companions for middle age, and old men's nurses. So as a man may have a quarrel to marry when he will.

— Francis Bacon

The world must be peopled. When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.

— William Shakespeare

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.

— Oscar Wilde

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

— George Bernard Shaw

When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.

— Oscar Wilde

Marriage. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.

— Ambrose Bierce

I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage. They've experienced pain and bought jewelry.

— Rita Rudner