Marriage
149 quotes
Biography
"He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public…. He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question, when a man should marry—"A young man not yet, an elder man not at all"."
"A man ought not to marry without having studied anatomy, and dissected at least one woman."
"The fate of the home depends on the first night."
"Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster which devours everything, that is, familiarity."
"The husband and wife are of equal worth before God, since both are created in God's image. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family. A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation."
"Logically the Neo-Pagan should get rid of the institution of marriage altogether, but the very nature of human society, which is built up of cells each of which is a family, and the very nature of human generation, forbid such an extreme. Children must be brought up and acknowledged and sheltered, and the very nature of human affection, whereby there is the bond of affection between the parent and the child, and the child is not of one parent but of both, will compel the Neo-Pagan to modify what might be his logical conclusion of free love and to support some simulacrum of the institution of marriage."
"A bad marriage is like an electrical thrilling machine: it makes you dance, but you can't let go."
"Marriage, n. A community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two."
"The godly union of souls in mutual forebearance with each other's infirmities, and mutual stimulating each other's graces--this surely is a fragment of true happiness that has survived the Fall."
"A marriage so free, so spontaneous, that it would allow of wide excursions of the pair from each other, in common or even in separate objects of work and interest, and yet would hold them all the time in the bond of absolute sympathy, would by its very freedom be all the more poignantly attractive, and by its very scope and breadth all the richer and more vital -- would be in a sense indestructible."
"So why do we marry? According to Kabbala, the compulsion to rush into a lifelong commitment is an expression of the human soul's deepest ambitions. The subliminal signals emanating from the soul have caused the logic-defying institution of marriage to be an integral part of the human fabric since the dawn of time. The soul's desire to connect and commit makes the aspiration for marriage one of our most basic instincts."
"You cannot easily make a good drama out of the success or failure of a marriage, just as you could not make a good drama out of the growth of an oak tree or the decay of an empire. As Polonius very reasonably observed, it is too long. A happy love-affair will make a drama simply because it is dramatic; it depends on an ultimate yes or no. But a happy marriage is not dramatic; perhaps it would be less happy if it were."
"In the first place, an unjust law exists in this Commonwealth, by which marriages between persons of different color is pronounced illegal. I am perfectly aware of the gross ridicule to which I may subject myself by alluding to this particular; but I have lived too long, and observed too much, to be disturbed by the world's mockery. In the first place, the government ought not to be invested with power to control the affections, any more than the consciences of citizens. A man has at least as good a right to choose his wife, as he has to choose his religion. His taste may not suit his neighbors; but so long as his deportment is correct, they have no right to interfere with his concerns."
"Prima societas in ipso conjugio est: proxima in liberis; deinde una domus, communia omnia."
"I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income."
"Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner."
"Marriage is the union of two different surnames, in friendship and in love, in order to continue the posterity of the former sages, and to furnish those who shall preside at the sacrifices to heaven and earth, at those in the ancestral temple, and at those at the altars to the spirits of the land and grain."
"Any married man should forget his mistakes - no use two people remembering the same thing."
"Marriage is memory, marriage is time."
"Nuptiae sunt coniunctio maris et feminae et consortium omnis vitae, divini et humani iuris communicatio."
"Marriages are the union of male and female, a sharing of life and the communication of divine and human rights."
"Young men not ought to marry yet, and old men never ought to marry at all."
"There's nothing a woman hates more than her fiance's best friend. He knows all the secrets she's going to spend the rest of her life trying to find out."
"La chaîne du mariage est si lourde qu'il faut être deux pour la porter,—quelquefois trois."
"If the policy of the law has withheld from married women certain powers and faculties, the Courts of law must continue to treat them as deprived of those powers and faculties, until the legislature directs those Courts to do otherwise."