quotations about marriage
It was crazy: marriage. You gave your whole life, your whole happiness, over to one other human being, even the best of them inept at times, prone to reach for some other fulfillment, some other pleasure.
ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING
Marriage: A Duet
Our parents' marriage makes a huge impact on our own marriage. Our parents teach us what relationships are and give us scripts for the way we understand love. What's more, we are drawn to the familiar. This is why people who resemble our parents feel like home and, in effect, why many of us marry someone like our opposite-sex parent. While this seems like great news for those of us who grew up with positive experiences of love, it might be a little disheartening for those who didn't.
LAURA TRIGGS
"Why I Stopped Comparing My Marriage to My Parents' Marriage", Verily Mag, November 30, 2017
Not everyone believes that marriage transforms miserable and immature single people into paragons of maturity and bliss.
BELLA DEPAULO
Singled Out
Husband and wife are like the two equal parts of a soybean. If the two parts are put under the earth separately, they will not grow. The soybean will grow only when the parts are covered by the skin. Marriage is the skin which covers each of them and makes them one.
BABA HARI DASS
attributed, Sunbeams: A Book of Quotations
Marriage may be polygamic, monogamic, polyandric, complex according to the Oneida pattern, or other, and is true marriage (I do not say perfect marriage) so long as it promotes the happiness of the persons married, and the procreation, support, and education of children, and so long as it is founded on the joint free contract of the persons married, and remains under the sanction of the organic society of which those persons are members.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic, and Financial Fragments
The expectations you bring to your partnership can make or break your marriage. Don't miss out on the sterling moments of marriage because your ideals are out of sync with your partner's. Don't believe the myth that you and your partner automatically come with the same expectations for marriage. Instead, remember that the more openly you discuss your differing expectations, the more likely you are to create a vision of marriage that you agree on--and that is unique to the two of you.
LESLIE L. PARROTT
Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts
So many promising girls allowed themselves to be submerged altogether in marriage for a time, and when they emerged everyone had forgotten the promise of their début.
HERBERT GEORGE WELLS
Marriage
Yet, from, an early period in human history, a secondary function of sexual intercourse had been slowly growing up to become one of the great objects of marriage. Among animals, it may be said, and even sometimes in man, the sexual impulse, when once aroused, makes but a short and swift circuit through the brain to reach its consummation. But as the brain and its faculties develop, powerfully aided indeed by the very difficulties of the sexual life, the impulse for sexual union has to traverse ever longer, slower, more painful paths, before it reaches--and sometimes it never reaches--its ultimate object. This means that sex gradually becomes intertwined with all the highest and subtlest human emotions and activities, with the refinements of social intercourse, with high adventure in every sphere, with art, with religion. The primitive animal instinct, having the sole end of procreation, becomes on its way to that end the inspiring stimulus to all those psychic energies which in civilisation we count most precious. This function is thus, we see, a by-product. But, as we know, even in our human factories, the by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product. That is so as regards the functional products of human evolution. The hand was produced out of the animal forelimb with the primary end of grasping the things we materially need, but as a by-product the hand has developed the function of making and playing the piano and the violin, and that secondary functional by-product of the hand we account, even as measured by the rough test of money, more precious, however less materially necessary, than its primary function. It is, however, only in rare and gifted natures that transformed sexual energy becomes of supreme value for its own sake without ever attaining the normal physical outlet. For the most part the by-product accompanies the product, throughout, thus adding a secondary, yet peculiarly sacred and specially human, object of marriage to its primary animal object. This may be termed the spiritual object of marriage.
HAVELOCK ELLIS
"The Objects of Marriage", Little Essays of Love and Virtue
Marriage is a land mine. A really intimate land mine. Adultery to kitchen fires. Never a dull [moment].
NORA ROBERTS
Blue Smoke
A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Neurotic's Notebook
The longer a marriage is put off, the less probability that it will occur at all.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
Let us now set forth one of the fundamental truths about marriage: the wife is in charge.
BILL COSBY
Woman's Day, September 1, 2009
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
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
Venus in Furs
Marriage is, in actual fact, just a way of living. Before marriage, we don't expect life to be all sunshine and roses, but we seem to expect marriage to be that way.
LESLIE L. PARROTT
Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts
Marriage is a language of love, equality, and inclusion.
EVAN WOLFSON
Why Marriage Matters
A good marriage is good for you. That isn't just a platitude. Mounting research shows that it is the literal truth. When your marriage is healthy, your body and mind are healthier.
CLIFF ISAACSON
The Good-for-You Marriage
How you end something as profound and important as a marriage is a reflection of how you live your life--financially, emotionally, and spiritually.
SUZE ORMAN
The Road to Wealth
Happy marriage is the greatest wealth a man can possess, and one that a peasant can have as easily as a king.
DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS
The Lost Diary of Don Juan
The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life's struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character. If motherhood is the highest fulfillment of woman's nature, what other protection does it need, save love and freedom? Marriage but defiles, outrages, and corrupts her fulfillment. Does it not say to woman, Only when you follow me shall you bring forth life? Does it not condemn her to the block, does it not degrade and shame her if she refuses to buy her right to motherhood by selling herself? Does not marriage only sanction motherhood, even though conceived in hatred, in compulsion? Yet, if motherhood be of free choice, of love, of ecstasy, of defiant passion, does it not place a crown of thorns upon an innocent head and carve in letters of blood the hideous epithet, Bastard? Were marriage to contain all the virtues claimed for it, its crimes against motherhood would exclude it forever from the realm of love.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"Marriage and Love", Anarchism and Other Essays