MARRIAGE QUOTES XVI

quotations about marriage

It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry.... If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.

EZRA POUND

letter to his mother, 1909

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Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It differs from the ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is more binding, more exacting. Its returns are insignificantly small compared with the investments. In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, however, woman's premium is her husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, "until death doth part." Moreover, the marriage insurance condemns her to life-long dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness, individual as well as social. Man, too, pays his toll, but as his sphere is wider, marriage does not limit him as much as woman. He feels his chains more in an economic sense.

EMMA GOLDMAN

"Marriage and Love", Anarchism and Other Essays

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

DAVID MINKOFF

Oy!


No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization's oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that.

ANTHONY KENNEDY

Supreme Court of the United States ruling on the legality of gay marriage, June 26, 2015


If love be not thy chiefest motive, thou wilt soon grow weary of a married state, and stray from thy promise, to search out thy pleasures in forbidden places.

WILLIAM PENN

Some Fruits of Solitude

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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

Esmond

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Marriage is like the army--many complain, but you'd be surprised how many reenlist.

VERNON K. MCLELLAN

attributed, Wise Words and Quotes

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Marriage is an economic arrangement in many ways, let's face it.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Period of Adjustment

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Marriage emerged some forty-five hundred years ago and evolved into a widespread and accepted institution that bonded families, maintained order, and created wealth. Unlike today, where many of us are searching for our romantic "soul mate," marriage was originally more about economics than deep emotion.

ROBI LUDWIG

Till Death Do Us Part

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The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

Letters to a Young Poet

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A bachelor is a guy who never made the same mistake once.

PHYLLIS DILLER

attributed, Women Know Everything!: 3,241 Quips, Quotes & Brilliant Remarks

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Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.

OSCAR WILDE

A Woman of No Importance

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Men and women are natural enemies, like cat and dog--only more so. They are forced to live together for a time, or this wonderful race couldn't go on.

NEITH BOYCE

Enemies

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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

foreword, Too Far To Go

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Marriage is divine in its institution, sacred in its union, holy in the mystery, sacramental in its signification, honourable in its appellative, religious in its employments: it is advantage to the societies of men, and it is "holiness to the Lord."

JEREMY TAYLOR

The Marriage Ring

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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

Middlesex

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If you exchanged wedding vows, tape them to your bathroom mirror and read them aloud to yourself every morning along with the ritual brushing of teeth. It's not realistic to believe that you will live your promises as a daily practice -- unless you're a saint or a highly evolved Zen Buddhist. Not where marriage is concerned. But you can make a practice of returning to your vows when the going gets rough.

HARRIET LERNER

"Returning To Your Wedding Vows", Huffington Post, April 2, 2012

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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 STORK

The Integrity of Personality

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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

"Alexander Lowen: An Energetic Man", Journal of Counseling & Development, September/October 1992

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The mere idea of marriage, as a strong possibility, if not always nowadays a reasonable likelihood, existing to weaken the will by distracting its straight aim in the life of practically every young girl, is the simple secret of their confessed inferiority in men's pursuits and professions today.

WILLIAM BOLITHO

Twelve Against the Gods

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