Marriage - Quotes

A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short. - Andre Maurois

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

A great marriage is not when the ‘perfect couple’ comes together. It is when an imperfect couple learns to enjoy their differences. - Dave Meurer

A great marriage isn’t something that just happens; it’s something that must be created. - Fawn Weaver

A happy man marries the girl he loves; a happier man loves the girl he marries. - Unknown

A happy marriage doesn’t mean you have a perfect spouse or a perfect marriage. It simply means you’ve chosen to look beyond the imperfections in both. - Fawn Weaver

A happy marriage has in it all the pleasures of friendships, all the enjoyment of sense and reason – and indeed all the sweets of life. - Joseph Addison

A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers. - Robert Quillen

A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other. Any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection, would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration. - Percy Bysshe Shelley

A long-lasting marriage is built by two people who believe in – and live by – the solemn promise they made. - Darlene Schacht

A man never has good luck who has a bad wife. - Henry Ward Beecher

A single life is doubtless preferable to a married one, where prudence and affection do not accompany the choice; but where they do, there is no terrestrial happiness equal to the married state. - Wellins Calcott

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

All of us, at least unconsciously, marry in the hope of healing our wounds. Even if we do not have a traumatic background, we still have hurts and unfilled needs that we carry inside. We all suffer from feelings of self-doubt, unworthiness, and inadequacy. No matter how nurturing our parents were, we never received enough attention and love. So in marriage we look to our spouse to convince us that we are worthwhile and to heal our infirmities. - Leslie L. Parrott

Before you marry keep both eyes open; after marriage keep one eye shut. - Jamaican Proverb

Being in a long marriage is a little bit like that nice cup of coffee every morning – I might have it every day, but I still enjoy it. - Stephen Gaines

But marriage goes in waves. You’ve got to be patient. People bail and give up on their marriages way too early. They just don’t put the work and the effort into it. You’ve got to suck up your ego a lot of times, because that can be a big downfall. - Anna Benson

Car manufacturer’s formula for a successful marriage: Stick to one model! - Unknown

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

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success. - Henry Ford

Courtship to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a very dull Play. - William Congreve

Experts on romance say for a happy marriage there has to be more than a passionate love. For a lasting union, they insist, there must be a genuine liking for each other. Which, in my book, is a good definition for friendship. - Marilyn Monroe

Focus on your marriage. Because that's the nucleus of the home, whatever you do to restore its health and strength will naturally restore what's broken among the other relationships. If you have no children yet, this will make a comfortable nest for them to begin life well. If you have children, the changes you make in your marriage will affect the rest of the household more quickly and dramatically than you think. - Charles R. Swindoll

Getting married is easy. Staying married is more difficult. Staying happily married for a lifetime should rank among the fine arts. - Roberta Flack

Happily ever after is not a fairy tale. It’s a choice. - Fawn Weaver

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

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

Ideally, couples need three lives; one for him, one for her, and one for them together. - Unknown

If you can hang in there through minor and major differences of opinion, through each other's big and little screwups, year after year, you come to understand that the person you married is really, terribly flawed. There isn't a human being you can hang out with, day in and day out, for over a decade and not come to the same inescapable realization. - Kyran Pittman

If you have the least doubt about it, do not marry. - John Lubbock

If you made a list of the reasons why any couple got married, and another list of the reasons for their divorce, you’d have a hell of a lot of overlapping. - Mignon McLaughlin

In courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight – that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin. - George Eliot

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

In marriage do thou be wise; prefer the person before money; virtue before beauty; the mind before the body. - William Penn

In that family where the husband is pleased with his wife, and the wife with her husband, happiness will assuredly be lasting. - Brahma

In the choice of a wife, we ought to make use of our ears, and not our eyes. - Wellins Calcott

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

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

Keep the eyes wide open before marriage and half shut afterwards. - Benjamin Franklin

Keep the fire lit in your marriage and your life will be filled with warmth. - Fawn Weaver

Let the wife make her husband glad to come home and let him make her sorry to see  him leave.  Martin Luther

Love is one long sweet dream, and marriage is the alarm clock. - David Minkoff

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

Many marriages would be saved if we would only listen with the same passion that we feel about wanting to be heard. - Harriet Lerner

Marriage does not guarantee you will be together forever, it’s only paper. It takes love respect, trust, understanding, friendship and faith in your relationship to make it last. - Unknown

Marriage follows on love as smoke on flame. - Chamfort

Marriage is a commitment - a decision to do, all through life, that which will express your love for one’s spouse. -Herman H. Kieval

Marriage is a mosaic you build with your spouse. Millions of tiny moments that create your love story. - Jennifer Smith

Marriage is a pretty amazing thing when you think about it. For two people to live together for so long under the same roof is a big accomplishment. Fifty-year anniversaries are becoming extinct, yet again proving that long marriages deserve awards and praise. - Jenny McCarthy

Marriage is hard work; the illusion that you get married and live happily ever after is absolute rubbish. - Julie Andrews

Marriage is like a deck of cards. In the beginning, all you need is two Hearts and a Diamond. By the end, you wish you had a Club and a Spade. - Aunty Acid

Marriage is like a house. When a light bulb burns out you don’t not go and buy a new house, you fix the light bulb. - Unknown

Marriage is like a public toilet. Those waiting outside are desperate to get in and those inside are desperate to come out. - Unknown

Marriage is like life in this – that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses. - Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage is like watching the color of leaves in the fall; ever changing and more stunningly beautiful with each passing day. - Fawn Weaver

Marriage is more than just finding a man that you like the looks of or that you don't mind being touched by. Marriage is for a mighty long time and unless you figure it that way, there's no sense in going into it to begin with. Marriage calls for a lot of thought. - Cheyenne Bodie

Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner. - Amy Bloom

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes. - Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage is the comfort of the considerate and prudent; but the torment of the inconsiderate and self-willed. - William Scott Downey

Marriage is the lightning rod that absorbs anxiety and stress from all other sources, past and present. When marriage has a firm foundation of solid friendship and mutual respect, it can tolerate a fair amount of raw emotion. A good fight can clear the air, and it's nice to know we can survive conflict and even learn from it. Many couples, however, get trapped in endless rounds of fighting and blaming that they don't know how to get out of. When fights go unchecked and unrepaired, they can eventually erode love and respect, which are the bedrock of any successful relationship. - Harriet Lerner

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

Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy. - Unknown

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

Marriage is the sanctuary of the heart. You have been entrusted with the heart of another human being. Whatever else your life’s great mission will entail, loving and defending this heart next to you is part of your great quest. - John Eldredge

Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. - Unknown

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

Marriage may sometimes be compared to a lottery, in which it is better not to have purchased a ticket than to have drawn a blank. - Norman MacDonald

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

Marriage problems are relationship problems, they are the result of how two people interact with each other. You may abandon a troubled marriage, but you will still bring the way you interact with others along with you. - Mark Gungor

Marriage, ultimately, is the practice of becoming passionate friends. - Harville Hendrix

Marriages are always moving from one season to another. Sometimes we find ourselves in winter--discouraged, detached, and dissatisfied; other times we experience springtime, with its openness, hope, and anticipation. On still other occasions we bask in the warmth of summer – comfortable, relaxed, enjoying life. And then comes fall with its uncertainty, negligence, and apprehension. The cycle repeats itself many times throughout the life of a marriage, just as the seasons repeat themselves in nature. - Gary D. Chapman

Marriages are like diets – they can be ruined by having a little dish on the side. - Croft M. Pentz

Marry'd in haste, we oft repent at leisure. - Benjamin Franklin

Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't always go with everything else in the house. - Jean Kerr

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

Matrimony is an engagement which must last the life of one of the parties, and there is no retracting ... therefore, to avoid all the horror of a repentance that comes too late, men should thoroughly know the real causes that induce them to take so important a step, before they venture upon it; do they stand in need of a wife, an heiress, or a nurse; is it their passions, their wants, or their infirmities, that solicit them to wed? - Charles Caleb Colton

Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed. - Oscar Wilde

More marriages might survive if the partners realized that sometimes the better comes after the worse. - Doug Larson

Most couples get married because it’s time, not because they’re in love. They might have money issues, parental pressure, or they’re simply tired of being alone – so they pick Mr. Good Enough and tie the knot. - H.M. Ward

Most people get married believing a myth that marriage is a beautiful box full of all the things they have longed for: companionship, intimacy, friendship, etc. The truth is that marriage at the start is an empty box. You must put something in before you can take anything out. There is no love in marriage. Love is in people. And people put love in marriage. There is no romance in marriage. You have to infuse it into  your marriage. A couple must learn that the art and form the habit of giving, loving, serving, praising keeping the box full. If you take out more than you put in, the box will be empty. - Unknown

Much of the quarrels and hatred which arise between married people come, in my mind, from the husband's rage and revolt at discovering that his slave and bedfellow, who is to minister to all his wishes, and is church-sworn to honour and obey him – is his superior; and that he, and not she, ought to be the subordinate of the twain. - William Makepeace Thackeray

Mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy are common during the first year of any marriage. - James Thurber

No one can go back and change how it started but a new future for any marriage can begin the moment one person begins to invest in it. - Fawn Weaver

No, there are three people in a marriage, there's the woman, there's the man, and there's what I call the third person, the most important, the person who is composed of the man and woman together. - Jose Saramago

Often the difference between a successful marriage and a mediocre one consists of leaving about three or four things a day unsaid. - Harlan Miller

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

One was never married, and that's his hell; another is, and that's his plague. - Robert Burton

Our natural tendency in the middle of winter is to avoid the elements as much as possible. When the weather turns frigid, we retreat inside for survival and wait for it to warm up or for the season to change. In a winter marriage, there may be a similar tendency to "avoid the elements." Spouses may withdraw within themselves, hunkering down and trying to ride out the cold season, hoping for spring but not taking any positive steps to move their marriage toward spring. However, unlike the natural seasons, the seasons of a marriage do not typically change without some positive action – unless it's a change from bad to worse. - Gary D. Chapman

People marry with a deep longing that their partner will tend to their wounds, not throw salt in them. Honour your partner's vulnerability. - Harriet Lerner

Possibilities for the success of a marriage are endless. But you have to be willing to search for them. - Jason R. Redmond

Sexiness wears thin after a while and beauty fades, but to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that’s a real treat. - Joanne Woodward

She is always married too soon, who gets a bad husband, and she is never married too late, who gets a good one. - Daniel Defoe

Show me a man who is smiling from ear-to-ear and living a beautiful life, and I’ll show you a man who is grateful for what he has and utterly in love with his wife. - Fawn Weaver

Some people put up and shut up and give their life into a miserable future in a marriage. This is not healthy for all who are connected with the marriage be it the couple, children and the external family. The ultimate problem lays in the couple who stick it out for all those years for the sake of the kids, money, time invested in each other, social, religious or family commitments, status or whatever their reason may be to hold that marriage together ignoring their own feelings for the external feelings and commitments. Then comes a time that we get all the freedom and the money we want to live comfortable but your heart is not comfortable because the dreams, goals and senses are lost and there is no vision for tomorrow. - Jeanette de Jonk

Sometimes I think marriage licenses should be like driver's licenses. They expire after a number of years, and in order to keep going you have to renew. Wouldn't that be kind of genius? It would force you both to look at the relationship, and if it's not working, the marriage would expire so you could go on your merry way, or on the positive side of it, you could look at each other and say we really want to renew. What a way to keep it fresh! - Jenny McCarthy

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 afterwards, and you will have the truth about him. - H.L. Mencken

Success in marriage does not come merely through finding the right mate, but through being the right mate. - Barnett R. Brickner

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

The difference between an ordinary marriage and an extraordinary marriage is in giving just a little ‘extra’ every day, as often as possible, for as long as we both shall live. - Fawn Weaver

The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin. - Jeffrey Eugenides

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

The great secret of a successful marriage is to treat all disasters as incidents and none of the incidents as disasters. - Harold Nicolson

The greatest marriages are built on teamwork. A mutual respect, a healthy dose of admiration, and a never-ending portion of love and grace. - Fawn Weaver

The key to a successful marriage is accepting that you're not going to change the other person. - Patrick Dempsey

The longer a marriage is put off, the less probability that it will occur at all. - Edgar Watson Howe

The only way you can make a marriage work is as free, independent people. It needs to be based on the good feelings that you have for each other, not on need. - Alexander Lowen

The secret of a happy marriage is finding the right person. You know they’re right if you love to be with them all the time. - Julia Child

The secret to a good marriage, as far as I am concerned, is a joke I make: Keep the fights clean and the sex dirty. - Michael J. Fox

The secret to a happy marriage is if you can be at peace with someone within four walls, if you are content because the one you love is near to you, either upstairs or downstairs, or in the same room, and you feel that warmth that you don’t find very often, then that is what love is all about. - Bruce Forsyth

The secret to a long and healthy marriage is to work at it and don't try and change each other. - Jack LaLanne

There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands. - Doris Lessing

There is a connection between what you are putting into your marriage and what you are getting out of it. - Mark Gungor

There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage. - Martin Luther

There is no such thing as a solid marriage. Marriage is more like an airplane than a rock. You have to commit the thing to flight, and then it creaks and groans, and keeping it air borne depends entirely on attitude. Working at it, though, you can fly forever. Only you and your partner know how hard it has been, or how worthwhile. - Unknown

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

They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake. - Alexander Pope

They stand at the altar before the minister and emotionally utter the words, "I do." It is a pivotal moment – the end of the wedding, but the start of the marriage. This is either the inauguration of a covenant or partnership that either expresses divine love that transcends all or (as is increasingly the case) the fractious nature of a communion unplanned, unevenly yoked, and selfishly formed. - Sam Ohene-Apraku

Those who enter into marriage, must be fully prepared to establish their marriage, as the first priority in their lives. - James E. Faust

To keep your marriage brimming with love in the loving cup, to keep your marriage brimming, with love in the wedding cup, whenever you’re wrong, admit it; whenever you’re right, shut up. - Ogden Nash

Unfortunately, a marriage license doesn't come with a job description or a set of instructions. There is definitely "some assembly required." In fact, putting together a modern-day marriage can be likened to assembling an air-plane in flight. - Patricia Love

Well-married, a man is winged – ill-matched, he is shackled. - Henry Ward Beecher

Were the husband as blind to the faults of the wife, as the lover to the faults of the maiden, few unhappy marriages would follow happy courtships. - Ivan Panin

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility. - Leo Tolstoy

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

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

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory. - Friedrich Nietzsche

When most people enter marriage, they have only had an "up close and personal" view of a small number of marriages, perhaps only one (i.e., their parents' marriage). Although you likely have known many married people throughout your lifetime, your vision of most marriages is limited to the images that the couples project to the world. You can never really know what another person's marriage is like behind closed doors. Therefore, most people enter into marriage with gaps in their understanding of what marriage entails. - Christine E. Murray

When the hour of adversity arrives, when false friends are scattered, when we are moving through the keen atmosphere of selfishness, then it is that the virtuous wife, like an angel of light, shines with peculiar lustre. - William Scott Downey

Without sounding pessimistic, I learned that I don't believe in marriage. I believe in a commitment that you make in your heart. There's no paper that will make you stay. - Diane Kruger

Write a list of ways that you have benefited from being married to your spouse. Then write a list of your spouse’s positive patterns and qualities. Keep adding to the lists and reread them frequently. - Rabbi Pliskin

You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words. - Elizabeth Gilbert

You don’t marry one person; you marry three: the person you think they are, the person they are, and the person they are going to become as a result of being married to you. - Richard Needham

You don’t marry someone you can live with; you marry the person who you cannot live without. - Unknown

You know it’s never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It’s always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride. - Jodi Picoult

You meet thousands of people and none of them really touch you, and then you meet one person and your life is changed forever. - Jamie Randall

You never know anyone until you marry them. - Eleanor Roosevelt