Quotes and anectdotes from the wise to the foolish, and the courageous to the drunk

marriage

A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends. 68 quotes from Samuel Butler

Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. 21 more sayings from Jane Austen

I prepare myself for rehearsals like I would for marriage. 3 other views from Maria Callas

If you want to know how your girl will treat you after marriage, just listen to her talking to her little brother. 3 wisdom & wit from Sam Levenson

It destroys one's nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being. 75 other quotes from Benjamin Disraeli

It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage. 21 quotes from Jane Austen

It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss volatile spirits prefer unhappiness. 46 thoughts from George Santayana

Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love. 4 more quotes from Ellen Key

Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl. 8 other quotes from Stephen Leacock

Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity? 68 more quotes from Samuel Butler

More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed. 9 sayings from Rainer Maria Rilke

No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married. 75 quotes from Benjamin Disraeli

A bride at her second marriage does not wear a veil. She wants to see what she is getting. 23 wisdom & wit from Helen Rowland

A husband is what is left of a lover, after the nerve has been extracted. 23 wisdom & wit from Helen Rowland

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. 29 quotes from W. Somerset Maugham

A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing. 7 views from Joey Adams

A wedding is a funeral where you smell your own flowers. 2 more quotes from Eddie Cantor

Books and marriage go ill together. 15 other quotes from Moliere

Courtship is to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a very dull play. 10 views from William Congreve

Divorce these days is a religious vow, as if the proper offspring of marriage. 10 more thoughts from Tertullian

God invented concubinage, satan marriage. 3 other views from Francis Picabia

Happy is the man who finds a true friend, and far happier is he who finds that true friend in his wife. 5 wisdom & wit from Franz Schubert

I've had two terrific relationships, but both ended in marriage. 8 wisdom & wit from Jane Seymour

In olden times sacrifices were made at the altar - a practice which is still continued. 23 other thoughts from Helen Rowland

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. 23 other wisdom & wit from Helen Rowland

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards. 96 quotes from Benjamin Franklin

Love is often the fruit of marriage. 15 wisdom & wit from Moliere

Love, the quest marriage, the conquest divorce, the inquest. 23 wisdom & wit from Helen Rowland

Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner. 30 other sayings from Charles Caleb Colton

Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it's a mistake to make a habit out of it. 29 more thoughts from W. Somerset Maugham

Marriage is an attempt to solve problems together which you didn't even have when you were on your own. 2 other thoughts from Eddie Cantor

Marriage is give and take. You'd better give it to her or she'll take it anyway. 7 quotes from Joey Adams

Marriage is like twirling a baton, turning hand springs or eating with chopsticks. It looks easy until you try it. 23 thoughts from Helen Rowland

Marriage is like wine. It is not be properly judged until the second glass. 5 wisdom & wit from Douglas William Jerrold

Marriage is the miracle that transforms a kiss from a pleasure into a duty. 23 more thoughts from Helen Rowland

Marriage is the most natural state of man, and... the state in which you will find solid happiness. 96 more thoughts from Benjamin Franklin

When I get married, it'll be no secret. 19 quotes from Elvis Presley

Where there's marriage without love, there will be love without marriage. 96 sayings from Benjamin Franklin

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband. 32 other wisdom & wit from Michel de Montaigne

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. 9 thoughts from John Steinbeck

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage. 22 wisdom & wit from Henry Adams

An ideal wife is one who remains faithful to you but tries to be just as charming as if she weren't. 5 more thoughts from Sacha Guitry

If it were not for the presents, an elopement would be preferable. 4 quotes from George Ade

If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love. 32 wisdom & wit from Michel de Montaigne

It had not occurred to me that marriage requires the same effort as a career. And unlike a career, marriage requires a joint effort. 14 other quotes from Jessica Savitch

Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it. 3 other views from Boris Pasternak

Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery. 33 views from Erma Bombeck

Marriage is an institution and that's where a couple finish up. 3 wisdom & wit from Les Dawson

Marriage is like a cage one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out. 32 more thoughts from Michel de Montaigne

Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory. 47 quotes from Abraham Lincoln

Marriage is too interesting an experiment to be tried only once. 6 other quotes from Eva Gabor

Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance. 32 other thoughts from Michel de Montaigne

One was never married, and that's his hell another is, and that's his plague. 4 other quotes from Robert Burton

The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less. 4 sayings from Brendan Behan

The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds - they mature slowly. 10 views from Peter De Vries

The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character. 10 sayings from Peter De Vries

The secret of a good marriage is forgiving your partner for marrying you in the first place. 5 more wisdom & wit from Sacha Guitry

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults. 10 quotes from Peter De Vries

When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her. 5 quotes from Sacha Guitry

When undertaking marriage, everyone must be the judge of his own thoughts, and take counsel from himself. 13 more quotes from Francois Rabelais

Marriage was all a woman's idea and for man's acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful. 6 more thoughts from Phyllis McGinley

Marriage! Nothing else demands so much of a man. 11 thoughts from Henrik Ibsen

She's been married so many times she has rice marks on her face. 16 other quotes from Henny Youngman

The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret. 16 more quotes from Henny Youngman

When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship. 18 other wisdom & wit from Joseph Campbell

An affair now and then is good for a marriage. It adds spice, stops it from getting boring... I ought to know. 21 other sayings from Bette Davis

Brought up to respect the conventions, love had to end in marriage. I'm afraid it did. 21 other thoughts from Bette Davis

I'd marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars, would sign over half to me, and guarantee that he'd be dead within a year. 21 quotes from Bette Davis

In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape. 3 sayings from Gerald Brenan

Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history. 11 quotes from Nicolas Chamfort

Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage. 81 sayings from William Shakespeare

Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she's a householder. 12 thoughts from Thornton Wilder

Marriage is a mistake every man should make. 2 sayings from George Jessel

Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel. 27 quotes from Leonardo da Vinci

Marriage is miserable unless you find the right person that is your soulmate and that takes a lot of looking. 4 views from Marvin Gaye

Marriage is the tomb of love. 4 quotes from Giacomo Casanova

Marriage is the torment of one, the felicity of two, the strife and enmity of three. 18 more views from Washington Irving

Marriage, laws, the police, armies and navies are the mark of human incompetence. 2 quotes from Dora Russell

Marriage: a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman. 20 thoughts from Herbert Spencer

Marriage: A word which should be pronounced 'mirage'. 20 other thoughts from Herbert Spencer

Marrying for love may be a bit risky, but it is so honest that God can't help but smile on it. 42 more wisdom & wit from Josh Billings

The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public. 2 other views from George Jessel

Mama and Daddy King represent the best in manhood and womanhood, the best in a marriage, the kind of people we are trying to become. 4 views from Coretta Scott King

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning. 53 views from Honore de Balzac

Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences. 5 other quotes from Isadora Duncan

I married beneath me, all women do. 3 thoughts from Nancy Astor

If I get married, I want to be very married. 14 thoughts from Audrey Hepburn

Marriage is a good deal like a circus: there is not as much in it as is represented in the advertising. 23 other sayings from E. W. Howe

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war. 52 quotes from Gilbert K. Chesterton

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity. 53 quotes from Honore de Balzac

Never tell a secret to a bride or a groom wait until they have been married longer. 23 sayings from E. W. Howe

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman. 53 more quotes from Honore de Balzac

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul. 53 other thoughts from Honore de Balzac

Only choose in marriage a man whom you would choose as a friend if he were a woman. 14 other views from Joseph Joubert

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin. 53 quotes from Honore de Balzac

They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake. 43 other views from Alexander Pope

This marriage is no one's business but our own. 8 quotes from Bobby Darin

To me, marriage is partly a religious thing and I'm not religious. 5 more thoughts from Alastair Campbell

What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? 3 quotes from Angela Carter

Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it's a piece of humbug. 7 other wisdom & wit from Max Frisch

Marriage, like death, is a debt we owe to nature. 3 more quotes from Julia Ward Howe

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love. 18 quotes from Pearl S. Buck

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person. 21 quotes from Mignon McLaughlin

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. 53 views from Marilyn Monroe

Marriage destroyed my relationship with two wonderful men. 53 other quotes from Marilyn Monroe

Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage. 20 sayings from Christopher Lasch

Never get married in college it's hard to get a start if a prospective employer finds you've already made one mistake. 59 other quotes from Elbert Hubbard

Nothing in life is as good as the marriage of true minds between man and woman. As good? It is life itself. 18 views from Pearl S. Buck

The comfortable estate of widowhood is the only hope that keeps up a wife's spirits. 2 other views from John Gay

Well married a person has wings, poorly married shackles. 58 more quotes from Henry Ward Beecher

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures. 3 more views from Mary Augusta Ward

It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership. 3 quotes from Mary Augusta Ward

A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short. 14 wisdom & wit from Andre Maurois

A marriage without conflicts is almost as inconceivable as a nation without crises. 14 quotes from Andre Maurois

A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day. 14 other quotes from Andre Maurois

All men make mistakes, but married men find out about them sooner. 5 more thoughts from Red Skelton

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious. 24 views from Jean Cocteau

I adore the theater and I am a painter. I think the two are made for a marriage of love. I will give all my soul to prove this once more. 5 more thoughts from Marc Chagall

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. 115 other thoughts from George Bernard Shaw

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us. 115 more quotes from George Bernard Shaw

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity. 115 more views from George Bernard Shaw

Marriage, like money, is still with us and, like money, progressively devalued. 4 more quotes from Robert Graves

One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance. 9 quotes from Iris Murdoch

The only good husbands stay bachelors: They're too considerate to get married. 3 quotes from Finley Peter Dunne

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage. 115 quotes from George Bernard Shaw

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms. 12 views from Franz Kafka

Caesar might have married Cleopatra, but he had a wife at home. There's always something. 5 views from Will Cuppy

He that loves not his wife and children feeds a lioness at home, and broods a nest of sorrows. 8 thoughts from Jeremy Taylor

He's the kind of man a woman would have to marry to get rid of. 31 thoughts from Mae West

It is better to be unhappy in love than unhappy in marriage, but some people manage to be both. 4 other wisdom & wit from Guy de Maupassant

Let a man do what he will by a single woman, the world is encouragingly apt to think Marriage a sufficient amends. 22 other quotes from Samuel Richardson

Love before marriage is absolutely necessary. 22 more wisdom & wit from Samuel Richardson

Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution. 31 more sayings from Mae West

Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other who never forgets them. 14 other thoughts from Ogden Nash

Marriage is the mother of the world. It preserves kingdoms, and fills cities and churches, and heaven itself. 8 other quotes from Jeremy Taylor

Marriage, it seems, confines every man to his proper rank. 26 views from Jean de la Bruyere

Never again! I can see no reason for marriage - ever at all. I've had it. Three times is enough. 5 quotes from Ingrid Bergman

To keep your marriage brimming, With love in the loving cup, Whenever you're wrong, admit it Whenever you're right, shut up. 14 views from Ogden Nash

Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives. 63 quotes from Samuel Johnson

Bachelors know more about women than married men if they didn't they'd be married too. 60 more sayings from H. L. Mencken

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution? 60 more quotes from H. L. Mencken

Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes. 9 thoughts from J. B. Priestley

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later for another thing, they die earlier. 60 wisdom & wit from H. L. Mencken

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. 2 other wisdom & wit from A. P. Herbert

The critical period of matrimony is breakfast-time. 2 more views from A. P. Herbert

The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife. 15 sayings from Cyril Connolly

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest. 60 sayings from H. L. Mencken

But I wanted marriage for myself. I was not calculating about it. I wish I was more calculating. 2 views from Linda McCartney

Faithful women are all alike, they think only of their fidelity, never of their husbands. 7 sayings from Jean Giraudoux

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. 100 more views from Oscar Wilde

How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive. 100 quotes from Oscar Wilde

Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and give her a house. 2 quotes from Lewis Grizzard

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. 103 quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche

Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. 6 quotes from William O. Douglas

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution? 29 other sayings from Groucho Marx

Never feel remorse for what you have thought about your wife she has thought much worse things about you. 13 views from Jean Rostand

No person connected with me by blood or marriage will be appointed to office. 6 sayings from Rutherford B. Hayes

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry. 100 wisdom & wit from Oscar Wilde

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows - marriage does. 29 quotes from Groucho Marx

The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman. 24 more views from Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. 100 other sayings from Oscar Wilde

There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about. 100 other quotes from Oscar Wilde

I had only two offers of marriage in my life, and I refused both. 2 thoughts from Catherine Helen Spence

But, alas! what poor Woman is ever taught that she should have a higher Design than to get her a Husband? 7 more sayings from Mary Astell

Divorce is probably of nearly the same date as marriage. I believe, however, that marriage is some weeks the more ancient. 78 quotes from Voltaire

Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. 5 quotes from Abigail Adams

Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce. 78 sayings from Voltaire

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being. 39 sayings from Robert Louis Stevenson

Let the wife make the husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave. 32 other sayings from Martin Luther

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty. 52 other sayings from George Eliot

Marriage is like life - it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses. 39 more thoughts from Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes. 39 sayings from Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest. 52 sayings from George Eliot

Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police. 39 other sayings from Robert Louis Stevenson

My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me. 74 quotes from Winston Churchill

The ceremony took six minutes. The marriage lasted about the same amount of time though we didn't get a divorce for almost a year. 14 more wisdom & wit from Hedy Lamarr

There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage. 32 wisdom & wit from Martin Luther

There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them. 25 other views from C. S. Lewis

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation. 98 quotes from Mark Twain