marriage

   Thosewhotalk most abouttheblessings of marriageand the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the claim were broken and the prisoners were left free to choose, the whole social fabric would flyasunder.Youcan't havetheargument both ways.Ifthe prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?

—Shaw, George Bernard

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

—Updike,John Hoyer

   Courtship to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a very dull play.

—Congreve,William

'We stay together, but we distrust each other.' 'Ah, yes,†but isn't that a definition of marriage?'

—Bradbury, Malcolm Stanley

Mydefinition of marriage† It resembles a pairof shears, so joined that theycannot be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.

—Smith, Rev Sydney

All weddings are similar but every marriage is different. Death comes to everyone but one mourns alone.

—Berger,John Peter

But for his funeral trainwhichthe bridegroomsees in the distance, Would he so joyfully, think you, fall in with the marriage- procession?

—Clough, Arthur Hugh

If the husband be a man with whom you have lived on a friendly footing before marriage,öif you did not come inonthewife'sside,öif youdid not sneak intothehouse in her train, but were an old friend in first habits of intimacy before their courtship was so much as thought on,ölook about you† Every long friendship, every old authentic intimacy, must be brought into their office to be new stamped with their currency, as a sovereign Prince calls in the good old money that was coined in some reign before he was born or thought of, to be new marked and minted with the stamp of his authority, before he will let it pass current in the world.

—Lamb, Charles

A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage.

—Butler, Samuel

He was getting over a four-day drunk, and I was getting over a 4-year marriage.

—Hellman, Lillian Florence

Hanging and marriage, you know, go by destiny.

—Farquhar, George

Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.

—Austen,Jane

But if marriage be such a blessed state, how comes it, may you say, that there are so few happy marriages? Now in answer to this, is it not to be wondered that so few succeed, we should rather be surprized to find so manydo, considering how imprudently menengage, the motive they act by, and the very strange conduct they observe throughout.

—Astell, Mary

Impersonal criticism†is like an impersonal fist fight or an impersonal marriage, and as successful.

—Nathan, GeorgeJean

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.

—Stevenson, Robert Louis

Isnot marriageanopenquestion, whenit isalleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institutionwishtoget out; and suchas are out wishtoget in.

—Emerson, RalphWaldo

A journey is like a marriage. The certainway to be wrong is to think you control it.

—Steinbeck,John Ernest

The joys of marriage are the heaven on earth, Life's paradise, great princess, the soul's quiet, Sinews of concord, earthly immortality, Eternity of pleasures; no restoratives Like to a constant woman.

—Ford,John

Those who marry God†can become domesticated tooöit's just as humdrum a marriage as all the others.

—Greene, (Henry) Graham

A man wants what a woman hasösex. He can steal it (rape), persuade her to give it away (seduction), rent it (prostitution), leaseit over thelong term (marriage inthe United States), or own it outright (marriage in most societies).

—Dworkin, Andrea

There's almost as many different sorts of marriage as there's different sorts of people. There's the young things that marry for love, not knowing what they're doing, and the old things that marry for moneyand comfort and companionship. There's the people that marry for children. There's the people that don't intend to have children and that aren't fit to have them. There's the peoplethat marry becausethey're so much run after by the other sex that they have to put a stop to it somehow. There's the people that want to trya new experience, and the people that want to have done with experiences.

—Shaw, George Bernard

Marriage, n. The state or condition of a community Billings consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.

—Bierce, Ambrose Gwinett

For the crown of our life as it closes Is darkness, the fruit thereof dust; No thorns go as deep as a rose's, And love is more cruel than lust. Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives; And marriage and death and division Make barren our lives.

—Swinburne, Algernon Charles

One of the differences between marriage and prostitution is that in marriage you only have to make a deal with one man.

—Dworkin, Andrea

   He that may be but sturt or stryfe,

—Dunbar,William

Without thinking highly either of men or matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want.

—Austen,Jane

Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.

—Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson

Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.

—Wilder,Thornton Niven

Mariage est un e¤  tat de si longue dure¤  e qu'il ne doit e"  tre commence¤   le¤  ge'  rement, ni sans l'opinion de nos meilleurs amis et parents. Marriageisa state of such longdurationthat it should not begin lightly, nor without the opinion of our best friends and parents.

—Marguerite d'Angoule"  me

Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.

—Stevenson, Robert Louis

Marriage is a wonderful invention; but then again so is a bicycle repair kit.

—Connolly, Billy

Marriage is honourable, as you say; and if so, wherefore should cuckoldom be a discredit, being derived from so honourable a root?

—Congreve,William

Marriage is like life in thisöthat it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

—Stevenson, Robert Louis

Marriage is not a house or even a tent it is before that, and colder.

—Atwood, Margaret Eleanor

   Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

—Shaw, George Bernard

The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and cannot find it inourhearts either tomarry or not tomarry.Marriage isterrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.

—Stevenson, Robert Louis

Marriage is the grave or tomb of wit.

—Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle

   De toutes les choses se¤  rieuses, le mariage e¤  tant la plus bouffonne. Of all serious things, marriage is the most farcical.

—Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de

Marriage is the most licentious of human institutions.

—Shaw, George Bernard

Marriage is the only chance (and it is but a chance) offered to women for escape from this death†and how eagerly and how ignorantly it is embraced.

—Nightingale, Florence

What marriage is to morality, a properly conducted licensed liquor traffic is to sobriety.

—Twain, Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens

   Tout au monde est me"  le¤   d'amertume et de charmes: La guerre a ses douceurs, l'hymen a ses alarmes. Everything in the world is a mixture of the sweet and the sour: War has its own sweetness and marriage its alarms.

—La Fontaine,Jean de

Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horsepond.

—Peacock,Thomas Love

Literature†is lonely and waited for, brilliant and pure and frightened, a marriage of birds, a conversation of the blind.

—Moore, Lorrie

Cricket remains for me the game of games, the sanspareil, the great metaphor, the best marriage ever devisedof mind and body† For meit remainstheProust of pastimes, the subtlest and most poetic, the most past- and-present; whose beauty can lie equally in days, in a whole, or in one tiny phrase, a blinding split second.

—Fowles,John Robert

Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. Thereremainno legalslaves,exceptthemistress ofevery house.

—Mill,John Stuart

As to marriage on the part of a man, my dear, Society requires that heshould retrieve his fortunes by marriage. Society requires that he should gain by marriage. Society requires that he should found a handsome establishment by marriage. Society does not see, otherwise, what he has to do with marriage. Bleak House

—Dickens, CharlesJohn Huffam

What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?

—Carter, Angela Olive

   Le mariage doit incessamment combattre un monstre qui de¤ v ore tout: l'habitude. Marriage should always combat the monster that devours everything: habit.

—Balzac, Honore¤   de

She endured a five-year marriage to Ernest Hemingway that roughly coincided with and bore more than a passing resemblance to World War II.

—Barrer, Bruce

Medieval marriages were entirely a matter of property, and, as everyone knows, marriage without love means love without marriage.

—Clark, Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, Baron

It is best to live anyhow, as one may; do not be afraid of marriage with your mother! Many have lain with their mothers in dreams too. It is he to whom such things are nothing who puts up with life best.

—Sophocles

For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark.

—Bible (NewTestament)

There was a sound of revelry by night, And Belgium's capital had gathered then Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Foul as their soil, and frigid as their snows. The lamps that shone o'er fair women and brave men; A thousand hearts beat happily; and when Music arose with its voluptuous swell, Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again, And all went merryas a marriage bell; But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!

—Rochdale

   Tho'marriage makes man and wife one flesh, it leaves 'em still two fools.

—Congreve,William

He said that, by god,D. H. Lawrence was right when he had said there must be a dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly- tension between a man and a woman, and how else could this be achieved save in the long monotony of marriage?

—Gibbons, Stella Dorothea

There is more to marriage than four bare legs under a blanket.

—Davies, Robertson

What theydo in heaven we are ignorant of: what theydo not we aretold expressly, that they neither marry, norare given in marriage.

—Swift,Jonathan

   He wasnotfitfor marriage, only for work. A major writer, he conceded, required major torment.

—Bergreen, Laurence

A man of your head and hair should owe more to that reverend ceremony, and not mountthemarriage bed like atown-bull, ora mountain-goat; but stay the dueseason and ascend it then with religion and fear.

—Jonson, Ben

But you are dull, nothing comes nimbly from you; you dance like a plumber's daughter and deserve two thousand pound in lead to your marriage, and not in goldsmith's ware.

—Middleton,Thomas

In so far as the familyas an institution turns women into darling littleslaves andmenintotheirchief providers and unweaned dependents, the problem of a satisfactory marriage remains incapable of purely private solution.

—Mills, C(harles) Wright

His designs were strictly honourable, as the phrase is; that is, to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage.

—Fielding, Henry

So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.

—Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia ne¤  e Stephen

Even if we take marriage at its lowest, even if we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recognised by the police.

—Stevenson, Robert Louis

There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.

—Diana, Princess of Wales

'He never listens' is universal in the institution of marriage.

—Mackaye, Dorothy Disney

Virginity, albeit some highly prize it, Compared with marriage, had you tried them both, Differs as much as wine and water doth.

—Marlowe, Christopher

For in what stupid age or nation Was marriage ever out of fashion?

—Butler, Samuel

: What do you think of marriage? : I take't, as those that deny purgatory, It locally contains or heaven, or hell; There's no third place in't.

—Webster,John

Butthislove ofoursisimmoderate, inordinate, and notto be comprehended inany bounds.It will notcontainitself within the union of marriage or apply to one object, but is a wandering, extravagant, a domineering, a boundless, an irrefragable, a destructive passion.

—Burton, Robert pseudonym DemocritusJunior

The Old Testament makes woman a mere after-thought in creation; the author of evil; cursed in her maternity; a subject in marriage; and all female life, animal and human, unclean.

—Stanton, Elizabeth ne¤  e  Cady

   A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.

—Eliot, George pseudonym of  MaryAnn Evans