When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.
When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.
The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.
The chain of wedlock is so heavy that it takes two to carry it - and sometimes three.
Marriage is that relation between man and woman in which the independence is equal, the dependence mutual, and the obligation reciprocal.
Wasn't marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded? Wasn't it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt?
Marriage is the most natural state of man, and...the state in which you will find solid happiness.
The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.
Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.
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.
For every quarrel a man and wife have before others, they have a hundred when alone.
Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.
Marriage is the torment of one, the felicity of two, the strife and enmity of three.
It is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilised society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.
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.
All married couples should learn the art of battle as they should learn the art of making love. Good battle is objective and honest- never vicious or cruel. Good battle is healthy and constructive, and brings to a marriage the principle of equal partnership.
There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.
Married love between man and woman is bigger than oaths guarded by right of nature.
Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames.
Marriage is an Athenic weaving together of families, of two souls with their individual fates and destinies, of time and eternity - everyday life married to the timeless mysteries of the soul.
How many young hearts have revealed the fact that what they had been trained to imagine the highest earthly felicity was but the beginning of care, disappointment, and sorrow, and often led to the extremity of mental and physical suffering.
When marrying, one should ask oneself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this woman into your old age?
The best friend is likely to acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is based on the talent for friendship.
Between a man and his wife nothing ought to rule but love. Authority is for children and servants, yet not without sweetness.
This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.
A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude. Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky.
A bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever.
Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.
Men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.