Marriage

Sourced

• Marriage is unusual in that the more I see of it, the less I believe in it.
  • Jacob M. Appel, The Mistress of Wholesome

• A husband is what is left of a lover, after the nerve has been extracted.
  • Helen Rowland, A Guide to Men

• Some marriages give bachelors a master's degree.
  • Leonid S. Sukhorukov, All About Everything

• Marge: Homer, is this the way you pictured married life?
  Homer: Yup, pretty much. Except we drove around in a van solving mysteries.
  • The Simpsons and others.

• Now non-Indian people think they know all about arranged marriages. 'So I hear that when you're born, the first thing your parents do is chose a nice girl for you to marry when you're old enough.' 'No, No! It doesn't work like that. Arranged marriages are more like going to a car show. Your dad lets you look at, and compare all the cars. 'Oh that one is nice. You would like that one, you like it? Ya, you are going to get that one.' - 'Don't I get to test drive it?' - 'No, not now, wait until you are married, then you can test drive it all you want.
  • Russell Peters

• A marriage so free, so spontaneous, that it would allow of wide excursions of the pair from each other, in common or even in separate objects of work and interest, and yet would hold them all the time in the bond of absolute sympathy, would by its very freedom be all the more poignantly attractive, and by its very scope and breadth all the richer and more vital -- would be in a sense indestructible.
  • Edward Carpenter, Love's Coming of Age

• Marriage is wonderful when it lasts forever, and I envy the old couples in When Harry Met Sally who reminisce tearfully about the day they met 50 years before. I no longer believe, however, that a marriage is a failure if it doesn't last forever. It may be a tragedy, but it is not necessarily a failure. And when a marriage does last forever with love alive, it is a miracle.
  • Peggy O'Mara, Mothering, Fall 1989

• Marriage, n. A community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

• A bad marriage is like an electrical thrilling machine: it makes you dance, but you can't let go.
  • Ambrose Bierce, A Cynic Looks at Life, 1912

• There's nothing a woman hates more than her fiance's best friend. He knows all the secrets she's going to spend the rest of her life trying to find out.
  • Jeff Douglas line in the musical Brigadoon

• Marriage? That's for life! It's like cement!
  • Woody Allen's What's New, Pussycat?

• Marriage is like a coffin and each kid is another nail.
  • Homer Simpson (The Simpsons-How I Spent My Strummer Vacation)

• Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other.
  • Arthur Schopenhauer (Heiraten heißt das Mögliche tun, einander zum Ekel zu werden.)

• Young men not ought to marry yet, and old men never ought to marry at all.
  • Diogenes of Sinope, from Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, by Diogenes Laertus.

• I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.
  • Wilkie Collins, No Name, Sc. IV. Ch. 8

• Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
  • George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, IV

• Sir, it is so far from being natural for a man and a woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives that they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.
  • Samuel Johnson, Boswell's Life of Johnson, 31st March 1772

• The tragedy of marriage is that while all women marry thinking that their man will change, all men marry believing their wife will never change.
  • Len Deighton, London Match (London: Hutchinson, 1985) p. 18

• In the marriage ceremony, that moment when falling in love is replaced by the arduous drama of staying in love, the words "in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, till death do us part" set love in the temporal context in which it achieves its meaning. As time begins to elapse, one begins to love the other because they have shared the same experience... Selves may not intertwine; but lives do, and shared memory becomes as much of a bond as the bond of the flesh.
  • Michael Ignatieff, "Lodged in the Heart and Memory"

• A man expects an angel for a wife; [yet] he knows that she is like himself -- erring, thoughtless and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling radiancy of better things. ... You may safely go to school with hope; but ere you marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: that hope and love address themselves to a perfection never realized, and yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of lift; that you yourself are compacted of infirmities ... and yet you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that, while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce find one but, by some generous reading, will become to you a lesson, a model and a noble spouse through life. So thinking, you will constantly support your own unworthiness and easily forgive the failings of your friend. Nay, you will be wisely glad that you retain the ... blemishes; for the faults of married people continually spur up each of them, hour by hour, to do better and to meet and love upon a higher ground.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque

• The godly union of souls in mutual forebearance with each other's infirmities, and mutual stimulating each other's graces--this surely is a fragment of true happiness that has survived the Fall.
  • Charles Bridges, An Exposition of Ecclesiastes, comment on Ecclesiastes 4:7-9.

Unsourced

• Hard work is damn near as overrated as monogamy.
  • Huey P. Long

• Marrying is all about just obtaining a piece of paper. Divorcing is just obtaining another.
  • Celeste Tan

• An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have; the older she gets, the more interested he is in her.
  • Agatha Christie (denied by her)

• He's a wonderful first husband.
  • James Goldsmith, on his daughter Jemima's marriage to Imran Khan

• I believe in tying the marriage knot, as long as it's around the woman's neck.
  • W. C. Fields

• I first learned the concepts of non-violence in my marriage.
  • Mohandas Gandhi

• I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.
  • Groucho Marx

• Garth, marriage is a punishment for shoplifting in some countries.
  • Mike Myers (As Wayne Campbell)

• Marriage is a wonderful invention; but then again, so is a bicycle puncture repair kit.
  • Billy Connolly

• Marriage is the dark side of the honeymoon.
  • Leonard S. Wisdon

• Marriage makes an end of many short follies - being one long stupidity.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche

• Marriage is really tough because you have to deal with feelings...and lawyers.
  • Richard Pryor

• Marriage is a wonderful institution ... but who wants to live in an institution?
  • Groucho Marx

• Marriage is the chief cause of divorce.
  • Groucho Marx

• 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.
  • J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter to Michael Tolkien, March, 1941

• No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
  • Honore de Balzac

• 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

• Some people ask the secret of our long marriage. We take time to go to a restaurant two times a week. A little candlelight, dinner, soft music and dancing. She goes Tuesdays, I go Fridays.
  • Henny Youngman

• The concept of marriage must have been thought up by an unimaginative pig.
  • Albert Einstein

• If you want to appreciate the Sun, be a miner; to value the land, be a sailor and to long for freedom, get married!..
  • Mehmet ildan

• There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I'll get married again.
  • Clint Eastwood

• The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret.
  • Henny Youngman

• Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage: "Ye who enter here leave all hope behind."
  • Emma Goldman

• Who ever strikes at marriage either by word or act undermines the foundation of all moral society.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• You only know what happiness is once you're married. But then it's too late.
  • Peter Sellers

• Any marriage where the bride is allowed to speak and wear clothes is doomed to failure.
  • Quark (Star Trek: DS9)

• Worf: "Before the wedding we must endure 5 tests. Blood, pain, sacrifice, suffering and finally, death." "Sound's like marriage all right."
  • Star Trek DS9 (You are cordially invited...)

• Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
  • Oscar Wilde

• Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
  • Oscar Wilde

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

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

• The proper basis for a marriage is mutual misunderstanding.
  • Oscar Wilde

• No one can consider themselves truly married until they understand every word their spouse is not saying.
  • Lord Mancroft

• So heavy is the bond of marriage that it takes two, and sometimes three to bear it.
  • Alexander Dumas, found on a Baci wrapper.

• Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her a house.
  • Louis Grizzard Quoted in Readers Digest

• Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution yet.
  • Mae West

• A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he is finished.
  • Zsa Zsa gabor

• In married life, a little hypocricy has always greased the works.
  • Swami Raj

• A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
  • H. L. Mencken

• Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner.
  • Charles Caleb Colton

• No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
  • H L Mencken

Unknown / Anonymous

• It is possible to affirm God's desire for committed, long-lasting intimate relationship without concluding that every marriage is ordained by God.

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

• Before marriage, boys will be boys and girls will be virgins. After marriage, boys will be boys and girls will be faithful.

• Life is a bitch, and then you marry one.

• As soon as you find the one to marry, just shut up and listen.

• Weddings are the most grotesque human ceremony; Marriage the most cruel of human bondage

• You don't marry someone you can live with, you marry the person who you cannot live without.

• Marriage is the institution where the woman loses her name and the man his solvency.

• Never marry someone whom you wouldn't want to be divorced from.

• Every man should marry - after all, happiness is not the only thing in life.

• Marriage is like falling into a black hole,you only want to do it with someone that you can take a long ride with.

• Marriage is a relationship in which one side is always right and the other is the husband.

• Why is marriage so expensive? Because it is worth it.

• A wife lasts as long as a life. An ex-wife lasts forever.

• A fate worse than death is to be married alive.

• If you marry for love and not for money, then you'll have warm nights and cold days.

• Why did the polygamist cross the aisle? To get to the other bride.

• If you don't want to be tied to a raving lunatic for the rest of your life, buy a dog licence, not a marriage licence.

• The difference between a married man and a zombie is a checkbook.

• A man and a woman should marry when they can happily not stand each other for the rest of their lives.

• All men are free in their minds until they get married.

• A relationship is like taking a holiday cruise, an affair is like a being briefly on a yacht, a marriage is like staying on a raft.

• There are always some quarrels in a relationship, there is sometimes love in a marriage.

• Marriage is a respectable way to end a loving relationship.

• With friends you may laugh; with your mistress you can be passionate; with your wife you should be silent.

• Let him go let him tarry,
  Let him sink or let him swim;
  If he doesn't care for me then I don't care for him.
  For I'm going to marry a far nicer boy.
  • Old English West Country rhyme

• The game of life ends when marriage begins.

• Marriage is a romance in which the hero dies in the first chapter.

• "I am" is said to be the shortest sentence in the English language. "I do" is the longest.