Quotes about Marriage
The easiest part of marriage is falling in love and walking down the aisle. The most difficult part of marriage is 10 years later when the problems have ensued and issues have come about and you still find love. Marriage is not about the beginning, marriage is about the process and still being able to love through all things.by Rhonda Ann
Missing you is my hobby, caring for you is my job, making you happy is my duty, and loving you is my life.by Kelvin
I guarantee there’ll be tough times; I guarantee that at some point, one, or both of us is gonna wanna get out of this thing; But I also guarantee, that if I don’t ask you to be mine, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life… because I know in my heart, that you’re the only one for me.by Runaway Bride
Love is knowing you will spend every day, of every week, of every month, of every season, of every year for the rest of your life with this person, and thinking, ‘This is exactly what I want.by Christina
I’m not perfect. You’re not perfect. But two people can be perfect together, perfect for each other.by Valerie Lee
Being in love is a wonderful feeling, but being loved and appreciated in return can be the most wonderful experience that can happen to your life.by Cathy Bustos
Every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts that stood their ground.by Eva Marie
Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they
are always watching you.-Robert Fulghum
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.-Theodore Hesburgh
If the marriage ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.-Scott Gardner
I didn’t marry you because you were perfect. I didn’t even
marry you because I loved you. I married you because you
gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults.
And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect
people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage.
And when our children were growing up, it wasn’t a house that
protected them; and it wasn’t our love that protected them – it was that
promise.-Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth
To get the full value of joy You must have someone to divide it with.-Mark Twain
One of the nicest things you can say to your partner, “If I had it to do
over again, I’d choose you. Again.”-Unknown
My dad told me on the day of my wedding, ‘Never go in a place that you wouldn’t take your wife.’ -David Gibbs, Mt. Juliet, TN, married 51 years
Don’t be a buzz kill. When your spouse shares something exiting, match their enthusiasm.-StanCoMarriage
We heard this at a wedding: ‘If you are going to argue, argue naked.’ -Peg and Harry Williams, Nashville, TN
Research has shown a child who sees his mother mistreated is more damaged than
if the child himself is abused.-Steven Stosny
You need only do three things in this country to avoid poverty – finish high school,
marry before having a child, and marry after the age of 20. Only 8 percent of the families
who do this are poor; 79 percent of those who fail to do this are poor.
William Galston, Clinton White House
The principal objective of American government at every level should be to
see that children are born into intact families and that they remain so.-Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The secret to having a good marriage is to understand that marriage must
be total, it must be permanent, and it must be equal.-Frank Pittman
They say it takes a village to raise a child. That may be the case,
but the truth is that it takes a lot of solid, stable marriages to create a village.
Diane Sollee, Smartmarriages.org
Live so that when your children think of fairness, caring and
integrity, they think of you.
H. Jackson Brown, Jr
I got gaps; you got gaps; we fill each other’s gaps.
Rocky
What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how
compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.
Leo Tolstoy
Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.
James Thurber
The most important marriage skill is listening to your partner in a way that
they can’t possibly doubt that you love them.
Diane Sollee, smartmarriages.com
When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
Karl Menninger
Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.
David Augsburger
When asked his secret of love, being married fifty-four years to the same
person, he said, “Ruth and I are happily incompatible.”
Billy Graham
Any fool can have a trophy wife.
It takes a real man to have a trophy marriage.
Diane Sollee, smartmarriages.com
A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always
with the same person.
Mignon McLaughlin
“Was it love at first sight? It wasn’t then – but it sure is now.”
Ann Meara, New York Times
For most people, a life lived alone, with passing strangers or passing
lovers, is incoherent and ultimately unbearable. Someone must be
there to know what we have done for those we love.
Frank Pittman
The heart of marriage is memories.
Bill Cosby
Marriage, like a submarine, is only safe if you get all the way inside.
Frank Pittman
Commitment is making a choice to give up other choices.
Scott Stanley
People stay married because they want to, not because the doors are locked.
Paul Newman
Don’t just follow your heart because your heart can be deceived…
but LEAD your heart.
Fireproof, the movie
Divorce is not healthy for children, or other living things.
Diane Sollee
Marriage is the hardest thing you will ever do. The secret is removing divorce as
an option. Anybody who gives themselves that option will get a divorce.
Will Smith (11 years into his second marriage)
I’m not advocating for loveless marriages. But it’s also the case that marriage
doesn’t make us happy every day. No marriage does, but your marriage serves
as so much more than just a vehicle for immediate individual adult needs. It makes
one world for your child, and children will tell you that means everything to them.
Elizabeth Marquardt, Between Two Worlds
Marriage, ultimately, is the practice of becoming passionate friends.
Harville Hendrix
Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship,
is conversation.Oscar Wilde
There is such pleasure in long-term marriage that I really would hate to be
my age and not have had a long-term marriage. Remember, sustaining a pleasurable,
long-term marriage takes effort, deliberateness and an intention to learn about
one another. In other words, marriage is for grown-ups.
Cokie Roberts, From This Day Forward
Friends don’t let friends get divorced.
Diane Sollee, smartmarriages.com
The grass looks greener . . . but it’s Astroturf.
From the report, “Does Divorce Make People Happy?”
As for his secret to staying married: “My wife tells me that if I ever
decide to leave, she is coming with me.”
Jon BonJovi
It’s you I like,
It’s not the things you wear.
It’s not the way you do your hair,
But it’s you I like.
The way you are right now
The way down deep inside you
Not the things that hide you
Not your diplomas…
They’re just beside you.
But it’s you I like,
Every part of you,
Your skin, your eyes, your feelings,
Whether old or new.
I hope that you’ll remember
Even when you’re feeling blue,
That it’s you I like,
It’s you yourself, it’s you
It’s you I like!
Mr Rogers
Dear Abby: Some months ago, you printed a letter from a reader
who was disturbed that the spark was gone from her marriage.
I asked my husband whether the spark is gone from our 18-year marriage.
His response: “A spark lasts only a second. It lights a fire. When
the flame burns down, we are left with the hottest part of the fire,
the embers, which burn the longest and keep the fire alive.”
Betty in Cap May, N.J.
The tenor of a marriage – or divorce – creates a kind of “emotional ecology” for children.
Just as a tree is affected by the quality of the air, water and soil in its
environment, the emotional health of children is determined by the quality of the
intimate relationships that surround them.
John Gottman, Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child
If we were asked to design a system for making sure that children’s basic
needs were met, we would probably come up with something quite similar
to the two-parent ideal. Such a design, in theory, would not only ensure that
children had access to the time and money of two adults, it also would provide
a system of checks and balances that promoted quality parenting. The fact
that both parents have a biological connection to the child would increase the
likelihood that the parents would identify with the child and be willing to sacrifice
for that child, and it would reduce the likelihood that either parent would abuse the child.
Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up With a Single Parent (Harvard, 1994)
The United States Administration for Children and Families (ACF) spends $46 billion per year operating 65 different social programs. If one goes down the list of these programs… the need for each is either created or exacerbated by
the breakup of families and marriages.
Wade Horn, Assistant Secretary, Administration for Children and Families (ACF/HHS) 2004
Marriage, the family unit, was the “original Department of Health, Education and Welfare.”
Michael Novak
Marriage is a public good, not just a private relationship. We have a public stake
in healthy marriages and two-parent families. Our society suffers with the collapse
of the relationship of the couple who brings a child into the world.
Bill Doherty, DrBillDoherty.org
When men and women fail to form stable marriages, the result is a vast
expansion of government attempts to cope with the terrible social needs that result.
There is scarcely a dollar that the state and federal government spends on social
programs that is not driven, in large part, by family fragmentation: crime, poverty,
drug abuse, teen pregnancy, school failure, mental and physical health problems.
Maggie Gallagher
Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.
Pat Conroy
The First Bond of Society is Marriage.
Cicero
When there is love in a marriage, there is harmony in the home; when there is harmony
in the home, there is contentment in the community; when there is contentment in the
community, there is prosperity in the nation; when there is prosperity in the nation,
there is peace in the world.
Chinese proverb frequently quoted by David and Vera Mace
There is nothing more admirable than two people who see eye-to-eye
keeping house as man and wife, confounding their enemies, and delighting
their friends.
Homer, 9th century BC
“Remember, you married her, you didn’t hire her!” – said to critical, controlling husband.
Dr Phil
The happy State of Matrimony is, undoubtedly, the surest and most lasting Foundation
of Comfort and Love . . . the Cause of all good Order in the World, and what alone
preserves it from the utmost Confusion . . .
Benjamin Franklin, Rules and Maxims for Promoting Matrimonial Happiness, 1730
Love the family! Defend and promote it as the basic cell of human
society; nurture it as the prime sanctuary of life. Give great care to the
preparation of engaged couples and be close to young married couples, so
that they will be for their children and the whole community an eloquent
testimony of God’s love.
Pope John Paul II, 2001
People get married without doing their homework. Too many people are getting married
at the infatuation level and when hard times come, it falls apart. We’ve fallen in love
with the wedding industry when what we need is a marriage industry.
Bridget Brennan, Director SLHMC
If we are serious about renewing fatherhood, we must be serious about
renewing marriage. . . . Healthy marriages are not always possible.
But we must remember, they are incredibly important for children.
Our hearts know this and our nation must recognize this.
None of us is perfect. And so no marriage and no family is perfect.
After all, we all are human. Yet, we need fathers and families precisely
because we are human. We all live, it is said, in the shelter of one
another. And our urgent hope is one of the oldest hopes of humanity,
to turn the hearts of children toward their parents, and the hearts of
parents toward their young.
George W Bush, June 7, 2001
As the family goes, so go the children.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each
other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children’s prospects.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
When the family collapses, it is the children that are usually damaged.
When it happens on a massive scale, the community itself is crippled.
President Lyndon B. Johnson
Getting married is a way to show family and friends that you have a successful personal life. It’s like the
ultimate merit badge.
Andrew Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round, 2009
Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.
Albert Schweitzer
I am convinced that if we as a society work diligently in every other area of life and neglect
the family, it would be analogous to straightening deck chairs on the Titanic.
Stephen Covey
Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up.
Joseph Barth
Marriage is one long conversation, checkered with disputes.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The first duty of love is to listen.
Paul Tillich
Fidelity is the single most important element in solidly enduring marriages.
Frank Pittman
Union gives strength.
Aesop
Between husband and wife friendship seems to exist by nature, for man is naturally disposed to pairing.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Love is no assignment for cowards.
Ovid
Love is not something people feel, but something people try to express no matter how they feel.
Frank Pittman
If you live to be a hundred, I want
To live to be a hundred minus one day,
So I never have to live without you.
Winnie the Pooh
A happy wedlock is a long falling in love.
Theodore Parker
The divorce rate would be lower if instead of marrying for better or worse
people would marry for good.
Ruby Dee
We waste time looking for he perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
Tom Robbins
It is sometimes essential for a husband and a wife to quarrel – they get to
know each other better.
Goethe
The success of marriage comes not in finding the “right” person, but in the
ability of both partners to adjust to the real person they ineveitably realize they
married.
John Fischer
I have no way of knowing whether or not you married the wrong person, but I
do know that many people have a lot of wrong ideas about marriage and what
it takes to make that marriage happy and successful. I’ll be the first to
admit that it’s possible that you did marry the wrong person. However, if
you treat the wrong person like the right person, you could well end up
having married the right person after all. On the other hand, if you marry
the right person, and treat that person wrong, you certainly will have ended
up marrying the wrong person. I also know that it is far more important to
be the right kind of person than it is to marry the right person. In short,
whether you married the right or wrong person is primarily up to you.
Zig Ziglar
Many marriages would be better if the husband and the wife clearly
understood that they are on the same side.
Zig Ziglar
A good marriage is the union of two good forgivers.
Ruth Bell Graham
The challenge is to help couples turn “I Do” into “We Can.”
Scott Stanley,
If you didn’t want to be improved, you shouldn’t have gotten married.
Nancy (Mrs Scott) Stanley
It’s true what they say – all the good men are married. But it’s marriage that makes them good.
Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor’s Wife
In marriage, as in all things, the perfect can be the enemy of the good.
unknown
The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only
their kind of love to give, not our kind.
Mignon McLauglin
Real giving is when we give to our spouses what’s important to them,
whether we understand it, like it, agree with it, or not.
Michele Weiner-Davis, Divorce Busting
When there are kids involved, there’s no such thing as divorce.
Carl Whitaker
Love is a feeling, Marriage is a contract, and a Relationship is work.
Lori Gordon, pairs.com
All those “and they lived happily ever after” fairy tale endings need to be
changed to “and they began the very hard work of making their marriages happy.”
Linda Miles, The New Marriage
Stephen Covey was asked after a speech about how to forgive someone who
has committed adultery. He said the question made him think of the old prayer,
“Oh Lord, let me forgive those who sin differently than I do.”
Stephen Covey, author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
A happy wife equals a happy life.
Unknown
To get divorced because love has died, is like selling your car
because it’s run out of gas.
Diane Sollee, smartmarriages.com
Do not pray to marry the one that you love,
but to love the one that you marry.
Spencer Kimball
Choose your love, then love your choice.
Unknown
Love is a four-letter word spelled T-I-M-E.
Unknown
Marriage is a career which brings about more benefits than many others.
Simone de Beauvoir
Coming together is the beginning.
Keeping together is progress.
Working together is success.
Henry Ford
There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a
door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side
of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.
Ronald Reagan
Having someone wonder where you are when you don’t come home
at night is a very old human need.
Margaret Mead
When a guy is happily married, no matter what happens at work,
no matter what happens [during] the rest of the day, there’s a shelter
when you get home. There’s a knowledge, knowing that you can
hug somebody without them throwing you downstairs and saying,
‘Get your hands off me.'”
Danny Perosa, NPR “Story Corps” Morning Edition
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
The man who puts into the marriage only half
of what he owns will get that out.
Ronald Reagan
Love doesn’t sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread;
re-made everyday, made new.
Unknown
There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or
company than a good marriage.
Martin Luther
No road is long with good company.
Turkish proverb
Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed
is always to try just one more time.
You win or the relationship wins.
Terry Hargrave, The Essential Humility of Marriage
Lust fades, so you’d better be with someone who can stand you.
The Story of Us
The conception of two people living together for twenty-five years without having a cross word suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.
A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.
Alan Patrick Herbert
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. Andre Maurois (1885 – 1967)
A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one’s husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it. Ann Landers (1918 – 2002)
I used to believe that marriage would diminish me, reduce my options. That you had to be someone less to live with someone else when, of course, you have to be someone more. Anne Morrow Lindbergh
All marriages are mixed marriages.
Candice Bergen (1946 – )
There’s only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I’ll get married again.
Chantal Saperstein
A great marriage is not when the ‘perfect couple’ comes together. It is when an imperfect couple learns to enjoy their differences. Clint Eastwood (1930 – )
Though we marry as adults, we don’t marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we’re creative. Dave Meurer, “Daze of Our Wives”
Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing, 2011
Marriage. It’s like a cultural hand-rail. It links folks to the past and guides them to the future.
I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie. Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, Our Wedding, 1992
What is right for one couple is wrong for another. I would say that there are many more important factors to a happy marriage.
Edith Wharton (1862 – 1937)
Man’s best possession is a sympathetic wife.
Eucharista Ward, Match For Mary Bennet, 2009
One man’s folly is another man’s wife.
Euripides (484 BC – 406 BC), Alcestis, 438 B.C.
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. Helen Rowland (1876 – 1950)
Don’t waste too much time trying’ to be a better man, ‘ cause you ain’t never gonna be one without a good woman.
Mae West (1892 – 1980)
A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love
Pearl Buck (1892 – 1973)
“The perfect marriage begins when each partner believes they got better than they deserve.”
Source Unknown
“True love endures, if it does not, then it was never true.”
Source Unknown
A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
Mickey Rooney (1920 -2011)