Quotes to inspire and reflect

Man is for woman a means: the end is always the child.

If married couples did not live together, happy marriages would be more frequent.

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.

[Marriage] can be compared to a cage: birds outside it despair to enter, and birds within, to escape.

The fundamental trouble with marriage is that it shakes a man’s confidence in himself, and so greatly diminishes his general competence and effectiveness. His habit of mind becomes that of a commander who has lost a decisive and calamitous battle. He never quite trusts himself thereafter.

The men that women marry, / And why they marry them, will always be / A marvel and a mystery to the world.

There are few wives so perfect as not to give their husbands at least once a day good reason to repent of ever having married, or at least of envying those who are unmarried.

Nothing is to me more distasteful than that entire complacency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a new-married couple,—in that of the lady particularly; it tells you that her lot is disposed of in this world; that you can have no hopes of her.

It is not from reason and prudence that people marry, but from inclination.

Always see a fellow’s weak point in his wife.

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.

I would advise no man to marry who is not likely to propagate understanding.

A man who marries a woman to educate her falls a victim to the same fallacy as the woman who marries a man to reform him.

A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience.

Maidens! why should you worry in choosing whom you shall marry? / Choose whom you may, you will find you have got somebody else.

He had married on the rebound from the rotten time he had in college, and Frances took him on the rebound from his discovery that he had not been everything to his first wife.

Choose a wife rather by your ear than your eye.

You can bear your own faults, and why not a fault in your wife?

One man should love and honor one: / A bride- bed / Theirs alone till life’s done.

Marry, and with luck / it may go well. But when a marriage fails, f then those who marry live at home in hell.

A rare spoil for a man / Is the winning of a good wife; very / Plentiful are the worthless women.

All qther woes a woman bears are minor / But lose her husband!—might as well be dead.

A man’s wife has more power over him than the state has.

Marriage is the perfection which love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought.

As Thoreau nearly said: “Most wives lead lives of quiet disapprobation.”

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.

I suppose I shall marry eventually. One does that, one drifts into stability.

Every woman should marry—and no man.

Marriage indeed may qualify the fury of his passion, but it very rarely mends a man’s manners.

Show me one couple unhappy merely on account of their limited circumstances, and I will show you ten who are wretched from other causes.

Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.

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.

But I had not quite fixed whether to make him [Don Juan] end in Hell—or in an unhappy marriage,—not knowing which would be the severest.

When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.

One was never married, and that’s his hell; another is, and that’s his plague.

In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.

[I]t had been from the first her great mistake—to meet him, to marry him, to love him as she so bitterly had. Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men.

When a match has equal partners / then I fear not.

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

The capacity of women to make unsuitable marriages must be considered as the cornerstone of society.

I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it improperly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up.

A bad manner spoils everything, even reason and justice; a good one supplies everything, gilds a No, sweetens truth, and adds a touch of beauty to old age itself.

There is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual.

A man without ceremony had need of great merit in its place.

Manners make the fortune of the ambitious youth.

Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.