Marriage And The Home Quotes

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May these Marriage And The Home Quotes on many subjects inspire you to never give up and keep working towards your goals. Who knows—success could be just around the corner.

Marriage (also called matrimony or wedlock) is a socially or religiously recognized union or legal contract between spouses that establishes rights and obligations between them, between them and their children, and between them and their in-laws. The definition of marriage varies according to different cultures, but it is principally an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged. In some cultures, marriage is recommended or considered to be compulsory before pursuing any sexual activity. When defined broadly, marriage is considered a cultural universal.

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Married couple

Marriage And The Home Quotes

The purpose of marriage is not pleasure; rather, it is to establish a family, ensure the nation’s permanency and continuation, save the individual from dispersed feelings and thoughts, and to control physical pleasures. Just as with many other matters related to the basic nature that God has given to each being, pleasure is a payment made in advance to invite and encourage to marriage. – M. Fethullah Gulen

One should not marry for reasons of dress, wealth, or physical beauty; rather, marry for spiritual beauty, honor and morality, and virtue and character. – M. Fethullah Gulen

If a couple wishes to divorce, the most intelligent criteria are of no use to those who did not (or could not) get married for the correct reasons. The important thing is not to escape from the fire in the home with the least harm, but to prevent a fire from ever starting there. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Some marriages based on logic and judgment were initiated by taking refuge in God. They are so sacred that, throughout a lifetime, they function just like a school, and their “students” guarantee the nation’s permanency and continuation. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Every union made in the name of marriage, but without careful thought, has left behind crying wives, orphans, and those who wound the family’s heart. – M. Fethullah Gulen

The soundest foundation for a nation is a family in which material and spiritual happiness flows, for such a family serves as a sacred school that raises virtuous individuals. If a nation can make its homes as enlightened and prosperous as its schools, and its schools as warm as its homes, it has made the greatest reform and has guaranteed the contentment and happiness of future generations. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Nations are based on homes and individuals. If homes are good, the nation is good; if homes are bad, the nation is bad. If only those who want the best for the nation would first work to reform the homes! – M. Fethullah Gulen

The word home is used according to the people in it. They are considered happy to the degree that they share human values. Yes, we can say that people live humanly with those in their home; a home becomes a home because of its inhabitants. – M. Fethullah Gulen

A home is a small nation, and a nation is a large home. One who successfully manages a home and who has raised its members to a level of humanity can manage a large organization with a little effort. – M. Fethullah Gulen

A disorderly house means that its people are slovenly and unhappy. The dirtiness, disorder, and irregularity of houses, shops, and streets show the local officials’ lack of sensitivity. – M. Fethullah Gulen

What is right is liked and esteemed even if defeated; what is unjust is loathsome and disliked even if victorious. – M. Fethullah Gulen

What is right is beautiful in character, and the one who is right is sweet. Even if the right falls into the mud, it remains pure and upright. Even if the unjust is washed with musk, it remains impure and disgusting. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Color and shape may change, but essence does not. Name and title may change, but character does not. Such changes have, and continue to, fool many people. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Those who oppresses the weak are defeated even if they are the victors; those who are right are victorious even if they are the losers. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Marriage And The Home Quotes

Marriage And The Home Quotes

Him that I love, I wish to be free – even from me. – Anne Morrow Linbergh

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom. – Simone de Beauvoir

If you’re always trying to be normal you will never know how amazing you can be. –  Maya Angelou

Love does not claim possession but gives freedom. – Rabindranath Tagore

Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something- and it is only such love that can know freedom. – Jiddu Krishnamurti

Think before you desire a thing. There is every possibility that it will be fulfilled, and then you will suffer. – Osho

When sex becomes conscious it is love, it is no longer lust. Love brings freedom, and lust simply creates prisons for you. – Rajneesh

Love and freedom are such hideous words. So many cruelties have been done in their name. – Joseph O’Connor

This isn’t going to be pretty. Rules will be broken. Friendships will be tested. And huge risks will be taken. But they’re small prices to pay for true love and freedom, right? – Lisi Harrison

Deep inside all of us a huge potential beckons, waiting to open us to the joy, genius, freedom and love within. – Brandon Bays

If your purpose is to liberate yourself and others into love and freedom, then you should do whatever magnifies the love and freedom in your life and in the lives of whom your actions affect. – David Deida

Freedom is the ultimate experience of life. There is nothing higher than that. And out of freedom many flowers blossom in you. – Osho

Love is the flowering of your freedom. Compassion, another flowering of your freedom. All that is valuable in life flowers in the innocent, natural state of your being. – Osho

I love to create, and to me, the ultimate freedom of expression is a blank canvas or a block of clay to capture whatever emotions your imagination gives it. – Daniel Boulud

Muslim wedding

Muslim wedding

Quotes From Wikiquote

  • While God created Adam, who was alone, He said, ‘It is not good for man to be alone. He also created a woman, from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith. Adam and Lilith immediately began to fight. She said, ‘I will not lie below,’ and he said, ‘I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.’ Lilith responded, ‘We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.’ But they would not listen to one another. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced the Ineffable Name and flew away into the air.
    • Adam and Lilith, in Alphabet of Sirach.
  • Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.
    • Henry Adams, Esther: A Novel (1884), Ch. VII.
  • Marriage as a community of interests unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties, and it is the perfidy of the world’s arrangements that no one, even if aware of it, can escape such degradation. The idea might therefore be entertained that marriage without ignominy is a possibility reserved for those spared the pursuit of interests, for the rich. But the possibility is purely formal, for the privileged are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second-nature—they would not otherwise uphold privilege.
    • Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951), E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 10.
  • Marriage? That’s for life! It’s like cement!
    • Woody Allen, What’s New, Pussycat?
  • “How excellent is the saying of one of old: ‘He that adventureth upon matrimony is like unto one who thrusteth his hand into a sack containing many thousands of serpents and one eel. Yet, if Fate so decree, he may draw forth the eel.’”
    • F. Anstey, The Brass Bottle (1900), Chapter 6
  • 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”.
    • Francis Bacon, “Of Marriage and Single Life”, in Fred A. Howe, ed., The Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral of Francis Bacon (1908), chapter 8, p. 20, 22. Based on the 1625 edition but with modernized spelling.
  • 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.
    • Southern Baptist Convention, Basic Beliefs 2013
  • No jealousy their dawn of love o’ercast,
    Nor blasted were their wedded days with strife;
    Each season looked delightful as it past,
    To the fond husband and the faithful wife.

    • James Beattie, The Minstrel (1771), Book I, Stanza 14.
  • The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength, each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence.
    • Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex.
  • 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.
    • Hilaire Belloc, Survivals and New Arrivals (1929), Ch. V.
  • A bad marriage is like an electrical thrilling machine: it makes you dance, but you can’t let go.
    • Ambrose Bierce, A Cynic Looks at Life, 1912.
  • Marriage, n. A community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
    • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911).
  • I’d rather die Maid, and lead apes in Hell
    Than wed an inmate of Silenus’ Cell.

    • Richard Brathwait, English Gentelman and Gentelwoman (1640), in a supplemental tract, The Turtle’s Triumph. Phrase “lead apes in hell” found in his Drunken Barnaby’s Journal. Bessy Bell. Massinger, City Madam, Act II, scene 2. Shirley, School of Compliments (1637).
  • 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.
    • Charles Bridges, An Exposition of Ecclesiastes, comment on Ecclesiastes 4:7-9.
  • Marriage and hanging go by destiny; matches are made in heaven.
    • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III, Section II. Mem. 5. Subs. 5.
  • ‘Cause grace and virtue are within
    Prohibited degrees of kin;
    And therfore no true Saint allows,
    They shall be suffer’d to espouse.

    • Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part III (1678), Canto I, line 1,293.
  • For talk six times with the same single lady,
    And you may get the wedding dresses ready.

    • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1818-24), Canto XII, Stanza 59.
  • There was no great disparity of years,
    Though much in temper; but they never clash’d,
    They moved like stars united in their spheres,
    Or like the Rhône by Leman’s waters wash’d,
    Where mingled and yet separate appears
    The river from the lake, all bluely dash’d
    Through the serene and placid glassy deep,
    Which fain would lull its river-child to sleep.

    • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1818-24), Canto XIV, Stanza 87.
  • That they may not become too complacent or delighted in married life, he makes them distressed by the shortcomings of their partners, or humbles them through willful offspring, or afflicts them with the want or loss of children. But, if in all these matters he is more merciful to them, he shows them by diseases and dangers how unstable and passing all mortal blessings are, that they may not be puffed up with vain glory.
    • John Calvin Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life pg. 69
  • 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.
    • Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming of Age.
  • 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.
  • The Talmud says that each soul’s bashert (predestined soulmate) is determined before its birth. The two may be born continents apart with seemingly nothing in common, but Divine destiny ensures that everyone’s path intersects with their bashert’s.
    [In rare instances, due to external spiritual factors which may intervene, it is possible for people to marry spouses who are not their basherts. Even in such instances, however, eventually the two original soulmates will marry — whether later on in life as a second marriage, or in a future incarnation of the two souls.]

    • “Why Marry?” Chabad.org, (archived Dec 24, 2007).
  • 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.
    • G. K. Chesterton: George Bernard Shaw. 1909.
  • 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.
    • Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal on Behalf (1833).
  • Prima societas in ipso conjugio est: proxima in liberis; deinde una domus, communia omnia.
    • The first bond of society is marriage; the next, our children; then the whole family and all things in common.
    • Cicero, De Officiis (44 B.C.), I. 17.
  • I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.
    • Wilkie Collins, No Name, Sc. IV. Ch. 8.
  • 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.
    • Confucius; as quoted in Sing Ging Su, (1922) The Chinese Family System, BiblioBazaar, pp. 54–5. ISBN 0-554-50635-1
  • The best way to remember your wife’s birthday is to forget it once.
    • Joseph Cossman, Wit On Target, 1998, p. 91.
  • The tragedy of marriage is that while all women marry thinking that their man will change, all men marry believing their wife will never change.
    • Len Deighton, London Match (London: Hutchinson, 1985) p. 18.
  • Any married man should forget his mistakes – no use two people remembering the same thing.
    • Duane Dewel, Wit On Target, 1998, p. 88.
  • Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
    • Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), p 197.
  • Young men not ought to marry yet, and old men never ought to marry at all.
    • Diogenes of Sinope, from Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, by Diogenes Laertus.
  • I have always thought that every woman should marry, and no man.
    • Benjamin Disraeli, Lothair (1870), chapter 30, p. 109.
  • 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.
    • Jeff Douglas line in the musical Brigadoon
  • 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.
    • Lord Eldon, C.J., Beard v. Webb (1800), 1 Bos. and Pull. 109; reported in James William Norton-Kyshe, Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904), p. 164.
  • Let women be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife, and Christ is the head of the Church.
    • Ephesians 5:22 as quoted by Pope Pius XI in Casti Conobubii, (1930)
  • But the main purpose of marriage will compel us to revise the institution so that we shall not waste any useful woman, expecially if she is a woman of notable ability. It is a significant fact that there are no ‘unwanted women’ in polygamous countries. These derelicts are to be found only in countries which are monogamous; and they represent, less today, perhaps, than formerly, sheer waste of mother-power. Even as things are, the ‘unwanted woman’ is still doomed to lead a solitary life, unless she has an illicit lover, and can contemplate old age and retirement only with dismay.
    • St. John Ervine, Bernard Shaw, His Life, Work and Friends (1956), p. 424. In this comment on Shaw’s play, “Getting Married”, Ervine summarizes one of the arguments in Shaw’s lengthy Preface to the play.
  • A man should marry four wives: A Persian to have some one to talk to; a Khurasani woman for his housework; a Hindu for nursing his children; a woman from Mawaraun nahr, or Transoxiana, to have some one to whip as a warning to the other three.
    • Ain-i-Akbari by Abul Fazl, trans. by H. Blochmann. I, 327. Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 7. Also cited in Herklot, Islam in India, 85-86.
  • 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.

    • John Ford, The Broken Heart (ca. 1625–33; printed 1633), Act II, scene 2, line 102.
  • A bachelor
    May thrive by observation on a little,
    A single life’s no burthen: but to draw
    In yokes is chargeable, and will require
    A double maintenance.

    • John Ford, The Fancies Chaste and Noble (1635-6; printed 1638), Act I, scene 3, line 82.
  • Where there’s marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.
    • Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard (1734).
  • If you help yourself to the benefits of being married when you are single, you’re likely to help yourself to the benefits of being single when you’re married.
    • Rabbi Manis Friedman, Doesn’t Anyone Blush Anymore? (1990); as quoted in Fishman, Sylvia Barack. A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community. UPNE. 1995.
  • My son is my son till he have got him a wife,
    But my daughter’s my daughter all the days of her life.

    • Proverb from Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia (1732).
  • They that marry ancient people, merely in expectation to bury them, hang themselves, in hope that one will come and cut the halter.
    • Thomas Fuller, The Holy State and the Profane State (1642), Book III. Of Marriage.
  • That the harshness of Inca and Aztec legislation toward homosexuality involved more than a reaction to indigenous [[w:Berdaches|berdaches is suggested by the equally severe penalties imposed on other violations of morals legislation. The Incas punished pimps and prostitutes severely, by death if the offense was repeated. Incest and adultery were capital offenses in both empires. Drunkenness was illegal under the Incas and a capital offense under the Aztecs. Abortion was also a capital offense under the Aztecs. Aztec youths lost their rights to land if they did not marry by a certain age. Inca men were also forced to marry.
    • David F. Greenberg, The Construction of HomosexualityUniversity of Chicago Press, (December 9, 1988), p. 167
  • You were born together, and together you shall be forever more. You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days. Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God. But let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup, but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread, but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
    • Khalil Gibran, The Prophet.
  • Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman’, for she was taken out of man.” For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.
    • Genesis 2:24 (TNIV)
  • Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
    • Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, “Marriage and Love”
  • The evil of marriage, as is it practiced in the European countries, extends further than we have yet described. The method is for a thoughtless and romantic youth of each sex, to come together, to see each other, for a few times, and under circumstances full of delusion and then to vow eternal attachment. What is the consequence of this? In almost every instance they find themselves deceived. They are reduced to make the best of an irretrievable mistake. They are led to conceive it their wiser policy, to shut their eyes upon realities, happy, if by any perversion of intellect, they can persuade themselves that they were right in their first crude opinion of each other. Thus the institution of marriage is made a system of fraud; and men who carefully mislead their judgement in the daily affair of their life, must be expected to have a crippled judgement in every other concern.
    • William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1784)
  • Marriage is the tomb of trust and love.
    • Olympe de Gouges, “Declaration of Rights of Women” (1791)
  • Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.
    •  Hebrews 13:4 (NIV)
  • The critical period in matrimony is breakfast-time.
    • A. P. Herbert, Uncommon Law (1935), p. 98.
  • However important it is that love shall precede marriage, it is far more important that it shall continue after marriage.
    • Samson Raphael Hirsch commentary on Genesis XXIV, 67 quoted by Joseph H. Hertz, Pentateuch, p. 87.
  • I believe in open marriage.
    • Goldie Hawn
  • In the marriage ceremony, that moment when falling in love is replaced by the arduous drama of staying in love, the words “in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, till death do us part” set love in the temporal context in which it achieves its meaning. As time begins to elapse, one begins to love the other because they have shared the same experience… Selves may not intertwine; but lives do, and shared memory becomes as much of a bond as the bond of the flesh.
    • Michael Ignatieff, “Lodged in the Heart and Memory”.
  • In reply he said: “Did YOU not read that he who created them from [the] beginning made them male and female and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother and will stick to his wife, and the two will be one flesh’?
    • Jesus, Matthew 19:4, New World Translation.
  • “I tell you the truth,” Jesus said to them, “no one who has left home or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age and, in the age to come, eternal life.”
    • Jesus, Luke 18:29–30 (NRSV)
  • At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.
    • Jesus, Matthew 22:30 (NIV)
  • Those who are engaged to marry are called to live chastity in continence. They should see in this time of testing a discovery of mutual respect, an apprenticeship in fidelity, and the hope of receiving one another from God. They should reserve for marriage the expressions of affection that belong to married love. They will help each other grow in chastity.
    • John Paul II, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2350, (1992)
  • 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.
    • Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George B. Hill, rev. and enl. ed., ed. L. F. Powell (1934), entry for 1770, vol. 2, p. 128.
  • Sir, it is so far from being natural for a man and a woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives that they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.
    • Samuel Johnson, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 31st March 1772.
  • Marriages would in general be as happy, if not more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor.
    • Samuel Johnson, reported in James Boswell, Life of Johnson (1776).
  • Marriage is the safe harbor men proffer from a tempest they themselves conjure into creation.
    • Arthur M. Jolly, in the play The Lady Demands Satisfaction, (2018)
  • Under the Constitution, same-sex couples seek in marriage the same legal treatment as opposite-sex couples, and it would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right.
    • Justice Anthony Kennedy, majority decision for Obergefell v. Hodges.
  • Is there anyone who thinks that the resolution can come later when it is really needed? So it is not needed then, not on the wedding day, when the eternal pledge is entered into? But then, later? Can he mean that there was no thought of leaving one another, but of enjoying the first gladness of their union-and so united, of finding support in the resolution? Then when toil and trouble come, and need, be it physical or spiritual, stands at the door, then the time is there? Aye, indeed, the time is there-the time for the resolved individual to muster up his resolution; but not just the time to form a resolution. It is true that distress and failure may help a man to seek God in a resolution; but the question is whether the conception is always the right one, whether it is joyful, whether it does not have a certain wretchedness, a secret wish that it were not necessary, whether it may not be out of humor, envious, melancholy, and so no ennobling reflection of the trials of life. There is in the state a loan association to which the indigent may apply. The poor man is helped, but I wonder if that poor man has a pleasant conception of the loan-association. And so there may also be a marriage which first sought God when in difficulty, alas, sought Him as a loan-association; and everyone who first seeks God for the first time when in difficulties, always runs this danger. Is then such a late resolution, which even if it were a worthy one, was not without shame and not without great danger, bought at the last moment, is that more beautiful, and wiser than the resolution at the beginning of marriage?
    • Søren Kierkegaard, Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Life, (1845) p. 72-73.
  • A married man risks every day, and every day the sword of duty hangs over his head, and the journal is kept up as long as the marriage keeps on, and the ledger of responsibility is never closed, and the responsibility is even more inspiring than the most glorious epic poet who must testify for the hero. Well, it is true that he does not take the risk for nothing-no, like for like; he risks everything for everything, and if because of its responsibility marriage is an epic, then because of its happiness it certainly also is an idyll. Marriage is the fullness of time. Love is the unfathomable ground that is hidden in darkness, but the resolution is the triumphant victor who, like Orpheus, fetches the infatuation of falling in love to the light of day, for the resolution is the true form of love, the true explanation and transfiguration; therefore marriage is sacred and blessed by God. It is civic, for by marriage the lovers belong to the state and the fatherland and the common concerns of their fellow citizens. It is poetic, inexpressively so, just as is falling in love, but the resolution is the conscientious translation that translates the enthusiasm into actuality, and this translator is so scrupulous, oh, so scrupulous!
    • Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way, Hong p. 117 (1845).
  • The husband is the chief of the family and the head of the wife. The woman, because she is flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone, must be subject to her husband and obey him; not, indeed, as a servant, but as a companion, so that her obedience shall be wanting in neither honor nor dignity. Since the husband represents Christ, and since the wife represents the Church, let there always be, both in him who commands and in her who obeys, a heaven-born love guiding both in their respective duties.
    • Pope Leo XIII Encyclical 1880 Arcanum. “Archived copy”. (Archived from the original on 2009-06-22).
  • He must be rich whom I could love,
    His fortune clear must be,
    Whether in land or in the funds,
    ‘Tis all the same to me.

    • Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The London Literary Gazette (10th November 1821), ‘Six Songs of Love, Constancy, Romance, Inconstancy, Truth, and Marriage – Matrimonial Creed’
  • As unto the bow the cord is,
    So unto the man is woman;
    Though she bonds him she obeys him,
    Though she draws him, yet she follows,
    Useless each without the other!

    • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha (1855), Part X, line 1.
  • But because among us there is such a shameful mess and the very dregs of all vice and lewdness, this commandment is directed also against all manner of unchastity, whatever it may be called; …, For flesh and blood remain flesh and blood, and the natural inclination and excitement have their course without let or hindrance, as everybody sees and feels. In order, therefore, that it may be the more easy in some degree to avoid unchastity, God has commanded the estate of matrimony, that every one may have his proper portion and be satisfied therewith …
  • Let me now say in conclusion that this commandment demands also that every one love and esteem the spouse given him by God. For where conjugal chastity is to be maintained, man and wife must by all means live together in love and harmony, that one may cherish the other from the heart and with entire fidelity. For that is one of the principal points which enkindle love and desire of chastity, so that, where this is found, chastity will follow as a matter of course without any command. Therefore also St. Paul so diligently exhorts husband and wife to love and honor one another.
    • Martin Luther, The Large Catechism, (1529)
  • In the majority of cases which are brought to me as a consulting psychologist for love and marital adjustment, there are self-deceptions to be uncovered as well as attempts to deceive other people. Beneath such love conflicts there is almost always a festering psychological core of dishonesty.
    • William Moulton Martson, Lie Detector Test, p. 119 [1]
  • Hail, wedded love, mysterious law; true source
    Of human offspring.

    • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book IV, line 750.
  • To the nuptial bower
    I led her, blushing like the morn; all Heaven,
    And happy constellations on that hour
    Shed their selectest influence; the earth
    Gave sign of gratulation, and each hill;
    Joyous the birds; fresh gales and gentle airs
    Whisper’d it to the woods, and from their wings
    Flung rose, flung odours from the spicy shrub.

    • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book VIII, line 510.
  • Therefore God’s universal law
    Gave to the man despotic power
    Over his female in due awe,
    Not from that right to part an hour,
    Smile she or lour.

    • John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671), line 1,053.
  • Marry women who will love their hus­bands and be very prolific, for I want you to be more numerous than any other people.
    • Quoted from T.P. Hughes: Dictionary of Islam, p.314, who refers to book 13 of Mishkatu’l Masa­bih (“nic­hes for lamps [of the tradition]”, a compilation of Sunni tradit­ions by the 12th-century Imam Husain al-Baghaw­i, expanded in the 14th century by Shaykh Waliuddin). Quoted from Elst, Koenraad. (1997) The Demographic Siege
  • “The best wedding is that upon which the least trouble and expense is bestowed.”
    • sayings of Muhammad on the subject of marriage, quoted from T.P. Hughes: Dictionary of Islam.
  • “The worst of feasts are marriage feasts, to which the rich are invited and the poor left out, and he who abandons the acceptation of an invitation, then verily disobeys God and His Prophet.”
    • sayings of Muhammad on the subject of marriage, quoted from T.P. Hughes: Dictionary of Islam.
  • “When anyone demands your daughter in marriage, and you are pleased with his disposition and his faith, then give her to him; for if you do not so, then there will be strife and contention in the world.”
    • sayings of Muhammad on the subject of marriage, quoted from T.P. Hughes: Dictionary of Islam.
  • “A woman may be married either for her money, her reputation, her beauty, or her religion; then look out for a religious woman, for if you do marry other than a religious women, may your hands be rubbed with dirt”
    • sayings of Muhammad on the subject of marriage, quoted from T.P. Hughes: Dictionary of Islam.
  • “All young men who have arrived at the ago of puberty should marry, for marriage prevents sins. He who cannot marry should fast.”
    • sayings of Muhammad on the subject of marriage, quoted from T.P. Hughes: Dictionary of Islam.
  • “When a Muslim marries he perfects half his religion, and he should practice abstinence for the remaining half.”
    • sayings of Muhammad on the subject of marriage, quoted from T.P. Hughes: Dictionary of Islam.
  • “Beware! make not large settlements upon women; because, if great settlements were a cause of greatness in the world and of righteousness before God, surely it would be most proper for the Prophet of God to make them.”
    • Sayings of Muhammad on the subject of marriage, quoted from T.P. Hughes: Dictionary of Islam.
  • “When any of you wishes to demand a woman in marriage, if he can arrange it, let him see her first.”
    • Sayings of Muhammad on the subject of marriage, quoted from T.P. Hughes: Dictionary of Islam.
  • “A woman ripe in years shall have her consent asked in marriage, and if she remain silent her silence is her consent, and if she refuse she shall not be married by force.” … “A widow shall not be married until she be consulted, nor shall a virgin be married until her consent be asked.” The Companions said,” in what manner is the permission of virgin?” He replied, “Her consent is by her silence.”
    • Sayings of Muhammad on the subject of marriage, quoted from T.P. Hughes: Dictionary of Islam.
  • “If a woman marries without the consent of her guardian, her marriage is null and void…; then, if her marriage hath been consummated, the woman shall take her dower; if her guardians dispute about her marriage, then the king is her guardian.”
    • Sayings of Muhammad on the subject of marriage, quoted from T.P. Hughes: Dictionary of Islam.
  • The Doctor: Ook, sorry, I’ve got a bit of a complex life. Things don’t always happen to me in quite the right order. Gets a bit confusing at times, especially at weddings. I’m rubbish at weddings, especially my own.
    • Doctor Who Blink, written by Steven Moffat
  • There’s a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told,
    When two, that are link’d in one heavenly tie,
    With heart never changing, and brow never cold,
    Love on thro’ all ills, and love on till they die.

    • Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh (1817), Light of the Harem, Stanza 42.
  • That is why a man will leave his father and his mother and he must stick to his wife and they must become one flesh.
    • Moses, Genesis 2:24.
  • Marriage is wonderful when it lasts forever, and I envy the old couples in When Harry Met Sally who reminisce tearfully about the day they met 50 years before. I no longer believe, however, that a marriage is a failure if it doesn’t last forever. It may be a tragedy, but it is not necessarily a failure. And when a marriage does last forever with love alive, it is a miracle.
    • Peggy O’Mara, Mothering, Fall 1989.
  • In the majority of cases which are brought to me as a consulting psychologist for love and marital adjustment, there are self-deceptions to be uncovered as well as attempts to deceive other people. Beneath such love conflicts there is almost always a festering psychological core of dishonesty.
    • William Moulton Martson, Lie Detector Test, p. 119
  • Even cohabitation has been corrupted – by marriage.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), §123.
  • When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche in: William Safire, Leonard Safir Words of Wisdom, Simon and Schuster, 15-Apr-1990, p. 237
  • Here’s the advice I give everyone about marriage — is she someone you find interesting? … You will spend more time with this person than anyone else for the rest of your life, and there is nothing more important than always wanting to hear what she has to say about things … Does she make you laugh? And I don’t know if you want kids, but if you do, do you think she will be a good mom? Life is long. These are the things that really matter over the long term.
    • Barack Obamas marriage advice to Dan Pfeiffer in Yes We Still Can, chapter 9, (19 June 2018); as quoted in “Barack Obama says these are the three questions you must ask someone before you marry them”, by Narjas Zatat, The Independent, (7 July 2018).
  • Let the husband render to his wife the affection owed her, and likewise also the wife to her husband.
    • Paul of Tarsus, First Epistle to the Corinthians 7:3.
  • The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband. And in like manner the husband also hath not power of his own body, but the wife.
    • Paul of Tarsus, First Epistle to the Corinthians 7:4.
  • Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.
    • Paul of Tarsus, First Epistle to the Corinthians 7:9 NLT.
  • The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife.
    • Paul of Tarsus, First Epistle to the Corinthians 7:32-33 ESV.
  • This particular doctrine, often expounded by the magisterium of the Church, is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act.
    The reason is that the fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman. And if each of these essential qualities, the unitive and the procreative, is preserved, the use of marriage fully retains its sense of true mutual love and its ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood to which man is called. We believe that our contemporaries are particularly capable of seeing that this teaching is in harmony with human reason.

    • Pope Paul VI (25 July 1968). “Humanae Vitae: Encyclical of Pope Paul VI on the Regulation of Birth, sec 12”. Rome: Vatican. Retrieved 25 November 2008.
  • No woman marries for money: they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him.
    • Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living1941-04-14
  • When a woman marries she belongs to another man; and when she belongs to another man there is nothing more you can say to her.
    • Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living, The winter of ’41-’42.
  • Il matrimonio bisogna che sia un vero castigo, poichè fa diventar savi anche i matti.
    • Translation: Matrimony must be like a sound flogging, for it makes the veriest block-heads learn something.
    • Alessandro Pepoli, La Scomessa, Act III., Sc. IV. — (Desiderio.). Translation reported in Harbottle’s Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 316.
  • We have already seen how the ideology of national honour derives from authoritarian ideology and the latter from the sex-negation regulation of sexuality. Neither Christianity nor National Socialism attacks the institution of compulsive marriage: for the former, apart from its function of procreation, marriage is a ‘complete, life-long union’; for the National Socialists it is a biologically rooted institution for the preservation of racial purity. Outside of compulsive marriage, there is no sexuality for either of them.
    • Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (1933), p. 119.
  • A husband is what is left of a lover, after the nerve has been extracted.
    • Helen Rowland, A Guide to Men.
  • There is not infrequently, in marriage, a suggestion of purchase, of acquiring a woman on condition of keeping her in a certain standard of material comfort. Often and often, a marriage hardly differs from prostitution except by being harder to escape from.
    • Bertrand Russell, Proposed Roads To Freedom (1918).
  • [C]hildren are what makes marriage important. But for children, there would be no need of any institution concerned with sex, but as soon as children enter in, the husband and wife, if they have any offspring, are compelled to realise that their feelings towards each other are no longer what is of most importance.
    • Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals (1929), Ch. 6, concluding lines.
  • We got married: society’s solution to loneliness, lust and laundry.
    • Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man, 1971, p. 99.
  • “Those among you who can support a wife should marry, for it restrains eyes from casting evil glances and preserves one from immorality” (3231).
    • Sahih Muslim. Quoted from Ram Swarup, Understanding Islam through Hadis, 1983. [2]
  • It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
    • George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Society, Scribner’s, 1905, p. 45.
  • Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other.
    • Arthur Schopenhauer (Heiraten heißt das Mögliche tun, einander zum Ekel zu werden.).
  • Evidence of the destructiveness of unrealistic expectations can be found in the literature on cognition and marriage. For example, people who feel that their relationship standards (e.g., how alike they believe they should be, the degree to which they should engage in acts of caring and concern for each other) are unmet are more inclined to report more negative cognitive and affective reactions to marital problems (Baucom et al., 1996). Further, research on relationship beliefs indicates that idealistic and unrealistic beliefs, like “mind reading is expected” (partners who truly care about and know one another should be able to sense each other’s needs and preferences without overy communication), “sexual perfectionism” (one must be a “perfect” sexual partner) and “disagreement is destructive” (disagreements in marriage are a sign of impending doom) are positively associated with marital distress (eidelson & Epstein, 1982; Epstein & Eidelson, 1981) and negatively associated with the desire to maintain the relationship (Eidelson & Epstein, 1982).
    • Chris Segrin, Robin L. Nabi, “Does Television Viewing Cultivate Unrealistic Expectations About Marriage?”, in Journal of Communication 52(2): June 2002, p. 248.
  • If you shall marry,
    You give away this hand, and that is mine;
    You give away heaven’s vows, and those are mine;
    You give away myself, which is known mine.

    • William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well (1600s), Act V, scene 3, line 169.
  • 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.
    • William Shakespeare, As You Like It (c.1599-1600), Act IV, scene 1, line 147.
  • I will fasten on this sleeve of thine:
    Thou art an elm, my husband, I, a vine.

    • William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors (1592-1594), Act II, scene 2, line 175.
  • Men’s vows are women’s traitors! All good seeming,
    By thy revolt, O husband, shall be thought
    Put on for villany; not born where ‘t grows,
    But worn a bait for ladies.

    • William Shakespeare, Cymbeline (1611), Act III, scene 4, line 55.
  • Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
    Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
    She married.

    • William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1600-02), Act I, scene 2, line 154.
  • The instances that second marriage move
    Are base respects of thrift, but none of love.

    • William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1600-02), Act III, scene 2, line 192.
  • God, the best maker of all marriages,
    Combine your hearts in one.

    • William Shakespeare, Henry V (c. 1599), Act I, scene 2, line 387.
  • He is the half part of a blessed man,
    Left to be finished by such as she;
    And she a fair divided excellence,
    Whose fulness of perfection lies in him.

    • William Shakespeare, King John (1598), Act II, scene 1, line 437.
  • A world-without-end bargain.
    • William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1595-6), Act V, scene 2, line 799.
  • Hanging and wiving goes by destiny.
    • William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (late 1590s), Act II, scene 9, line 83. Same in Schole House for Women. (1541).
  • As are those dulcet sounds in break of day
    That creep into the dreaming bridegroom’s ear
    And summon him to marriage.

    • William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (late 1590s), Act III, scene 2, line 51.
  • Happiest of all, is, that her gentle spirit
    Commits itself to yours to be directed,
    As from her lord, her governor, her king.

    • William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (late 1590s), Act III, scene 2, line 162.
  • I will marry her, sir, at your request; but if there be no great love in the beginning, yet heaven may decrease it upon better acquaintance I hope, upon familiarity will grow more contempt: I will marry her; that I am freely dissolved, and dissolutely.
    • William Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597; published 1602), Act I, scene 1, line 253.
  • But earthlier happy is the rose distill’d,
    Than that which with’ring on the virgin thorn
    Grows, lives and dies in single blessedness.

    • William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595-96), Act I, scene 1, line 76.
  • I would not marry her, though she were endowed with all that Adam had left him before he transgressed: she would have made Hercules have turned spit, yea, and have cleft his club to make the fire too. I would to God some scholar would conjure her; for certainly, while she is here, a man may live as quiet in hell as in a sanctuary.
    • William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (1598-99), Act II, scene 1, line 258.
  • No, the world must be peopled. When I said, I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.
    • William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (1598-99), Act II, scene 1, line 353.
  • Let husbands know,
    Their wives have sense like them: they see, and smell,
    And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
    As husbands have.

    • William Shakespeare, Othello (c. 1603), Act IV, scene 3, line 94.
  • She is not well married that lives married long:
    But she’s best married that dies married young.

    • William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597), Act IV, scene 5, line 77.
  • She is your treasure, she must have a husband;
    I must dance barefoot on her wedding day
    And for your love to her lead apes in hell.

    • William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593-94), Act II, scene 1, line 32.
  • If she deny to wed, I’ll crave the day
    When I shall ask the banns and when be married.

    • William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593-94), Act II, scene 1, line 180.
  • Who wooed in haste, and means to wed at leisure.
    • William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593-94), Act III, scene 2, line 11.
  • She shall watch all night:
    And if she chance to nod I’ll rail and brawl
    And with the clamour keep her still awake.
    This is the way to kill a wife with kindness.

    • William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593-94), Act IV, scene 1, line 218.
  • Thy husband commits his body
    To painful labour, both by sea and land,And craves no other tribute at thy hands,
    But love, fair looks, and true obedience;
    Too little payment for so great a debt.

    • William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593-94), Act V, scene 2, line 152.
  • Let still the woman take
    An elder than herself: so wears she to him,
    So sways she level in her husband’s heart:
    For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,
    Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,
    More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn
    Than women’s are.

    • William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (c. 1601-02), Act II, scene 4, line 29.
  • Then let thy love be younger than thyself,
    Or thy affection cannot hold the bent:
    For women are as roses, whose fair flower
    Being once display’d, doth fall that very hour.

    • William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (c. 1601-02), Act II, scene 4, line 37.
  • Now go with me and with this holy man
    Into the chantry by: there, before him,
    And underneath that consecrated roof,
    Plight me the full assurance of your faith.

    • William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (c. 1601-02), Act IV, scene 3, line 23.
  • Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
    • George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, IV.
  • The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.
    • This has also been paraphrased as: Confusing monogamy with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other error.
  • George Bernard Shaw Man and Superman (1903)
  • Let’s say you’re a 6-month-old girl, no evidence whatsoever of any abuse. They’re simply saying, ‘You, in this culture, may grow up to be a child bride when you’re 14. Therefore we’re going to remove you now when you’re 6 months old. Or, ‘You’re a 6-month-old boy; 25, 30 years, 40 years from now you’re going to be a predator, so we’re going to take you away now.
    • Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff regarding the 2008 police raid on YFZ Ranch raid.
  • Marge: Homer, is this the way you pictured married life?
    Homer: Yup, pretty much. Except we drove around in a van solving mysteries.

    • The Simpsons and others.
  • Marriage is like a coffin and each kid is another nail.
    • Homer Simpson (The Simpsons-How I Spent My Strummer Vacation).
  • I have always been convinced that if a woman once made up her mind to marry a man nothing but instant flight could save him.
    • W. Somerset Maugham, Collected short stories 1, “The escape”, p. 309.
  • Jabir b. Abdillah reported that once he was on an expedition with the Prophet salla Allahu ʿalayhi wa sallam, and when they were close to the city of Madinah, he sped on his mount. The Prophet salla Allahu ʿalayhi wa sallam asked him why he was in such a hurry to return home. Jabir replied, “I am recently married!” The Prophet salla Allahu ʿalayhi wa sallam asked, “To an older lady or a younger one?” [the Arabic could also read: “To a widow or a virgin?”], to which he replied, “A widow.”The Prophet salla Allahu ʿalayhi wa sallam said, “But why didn’t you marry a younger girl, so that you could play with her, and she could play with you, and you could make her laugh, and she could make you laugh?”He said, “O Messenger of Allah! My father died a martyr at Uhud, leaving behind daughters, so I did not wish to marry a young girl like them, but rather an older one who could take care of them and look after them.” The Prophet salla Allahu ʿalayhi wa salam replied, “You have made the correct choice.”Jabir continues, “So when we were about to enter the city, the Prophet salla Allahu ʿalayhi wa sallam said to me, “Slow down, and enter at night, so that she who has not combed may comb her hair, and she who has not shaved may shave her private area.” Then he said to me, “When you enter upon her, then be wise and gentle.”
    • Muhammad narrated Jabir bin ‘Abdullah [Reported by al-Bukhari and Muslim, with various wordings, in their two Sahihs]
  • A man expects an angel for a wife; [yet] he knows that she is like himself — erring, thoughtless and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling radiancy of better things. … You may safely go to school with hope; but ere you marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: that hope and love address themselves to a perfection never realized, and yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of infirmities … and yet you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that, while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce find one but, by some generous reading, will become to you a lesson, a model and a noble spouse through life. So thinking, you will constantly support your own unworthiness and easily forgive the failings of your friend. Nay, you will be wisely glad that you retain the … blemishes; for the faults of married people continually spur up each of them, hour by hour, to do better and to meet and love upon a higher ground.
    • Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque.
  • [M]arriage is a natural right into which the question of color does not enter except as an individual preference expressed by the parties to the marriage. It is so recognized by the laws of all nations except our own.
    • Gordon A. Stewart, “Our Marriage and Divorce Laws”, 23 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 224, 234 (1883)
  • Marry a wife according to your choice.
    Have children to your heart’s content.

    • Sumerian proverb, Collection I at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, 3rd millennium BCE.
  • Marrying is human. Having children is divine.
    • Sumerian proverb, Collection I at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, 3rd millennium BCE.
  • When I married a malicious husband, when I bore a malicious son, an unhappy heart was assigned to me.
    • Sumerian proverb, Collection I at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, 3rd millennium BCE.
  • For his pleasure he got married. On his thinking it over he got divorced.
    • Sumerian proverb, Collection II at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, 3rd millennium BCE.
  • Marriage was not originated by human law. When God created Eve, she was a wife to Adam; they then and there occupied the status of husband to wife and wife to husband. . . . It would be sacrilegious to apply the designation “a civil contract” to such a marriage. It is that and more – a status ordained by God.
    • Supreme Court of Texas, Grigsby v. Reib, 153 S.W. 1124, 1129-30 (Tex.Sup.Ct. 1913).
  • As the husband is the wife is; thou art mated with a clown,
    And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.

    • Alfred Tennyson, Locksley Hall (1835, published 1842), Stanza 24.
  • But happy they, the happiest of their kind!
    Whom gentler stars unite, and in one fate
    Their Hearts, their Fortunes, and their Beings blend.

    • James Thomson, The SeasonsSpring (1728), line 1,111.
  • “Don’t get married, young man … I urge you. As long as a woman isn’t sure of you she’s sweet as pie, you can twist her round your little finger. But the minute you put a ring around her finger — it’s all over! She begins kicking like a mule — and you can’t do a thing about it. It’s a law of nature, young man! Reason won’t get you anywhere with them. Am I right or not?”
    • David Vogel, Married Life
  • Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of equals.
    • Judge Vaughn Walker, in the written decision of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, overturning California Proposition 8 (2008); page 115 (labelled page 113).
  • Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.
    • Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance (1893), act III, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (1923), vol. 7, p. 263 . Lord Illingworth is speaking.
  • A bride burns her bridges, having fallen in love, and drowns in marriage.
    • David Woodard, Breed the Unmentioned (1985)
  • ‘Tis my maxim, he’s a fool that marries; but he’s a greater that does not marry a fool.
    • William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1775), Act I, scene 1, line 502.
  • You are of the society of the wits and railleurs … the surest sign is, since you are an enemy to marriage,—for that, I hear, you hate as much as business or bad wine.
    • William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1775).
  • I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being, neither white, black, brown nor red. When you are dealing with humanity as one family, there’s no question of integration or intermarriage. It’s just one human being marrying another human being, or one human being living around and with another human being.
    • Malcolm X, Interview for the Pierre Berton Show. Toronto, Canada, (19 January 1965).
  • Body and soul, like peevish man and wife,
    United jar, and yet are loth to part.

    • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night II, line 175.

  • He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
    • Francis Bacon, EssaysOf Marriage and Single Life.
  • To have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.
    • Book of Common PrayerSolemnization of Matrimony.
  • To love, cherish, and to obey.
    • Book of Common PrayerSolemnization of Matrimony.
  • With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.
    • Book of Common PrayerSolemnization of Matrimony.
  • He that said it was not good for man to be alone, placed the celibate amongst the inferior states of perfection.
    • Robert Boyle, Works, Volume VI, p. 292. Letter from Mr. Evelyn.
  • Cursed be the man, the poorest wretch in life,
    The crouching vassal, to the tyrant wife,
    Who has no will but by her high permission;
    Who has not sixpence but in her possession;
    Who must to her his dear friend’s secret tell;
    Who dreads a curtain lecture worse than hell.
    Were such the wife had fallen to my part,
    I’d break her spirit or I’d break her heart.

    • Robert Burns, The Henpecked Husband.
  • Una muger no tiene.
    Valor para el consejo, y la conviene Casarse.

    • A woman needs a stronger head than her own for counsel—she should marry.
    • Calderon, El Purgatorio de Sans Patricio, III. 4.
  • To sit, happy married lovers; Phillis trifling with a plover’s
    Egg, while Corydon uncovers with a grace the Sally Lunn,
    Or dissects the lucky pheasant—that, I think, were passing pleasant
    As I sit alone at present, dreaming darkly of a dun.

    • Charles Stuart Calverley, In the Gloaming (Parody on Mrs. Browning).
  • We’ve been together now for forty years,
    An’ it don’t seem a day too much;
    There ain’t a lady livin’ in the land
    As I’d swop for my dear old Dutch.

    • Albert Chevalier, My Old Dutch.
  • Man and wife,
    Coupled together for the sake of strife.

    • Charles Churchill, The Rosciad (1761), line 1,005.
  • Oh! how many torments lie in the small circle of a wedding ring.
    • Colley Cibber.
  • Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure,
    Marry’d in haste, we may repent at leisure.

    • William Congreve, The Old Bachelor, Act V, scene 1.
  • Misses! the tale that I relate
    This lesson seems to carry—
    Choose not alone a proper mate,
    But proper time to marry.

    • William Cowper, Pairing Time Anticipated (Moral).
  • Wedlock, indeed, hath oft compared been
    To public feasts, where meet a public rout,
    Where they that are without would fain go in,
    And they that are within would fain go out.

    • Sir John Davies, Contention Betwixt a Wife, etc.
  • At length cried she, I’ll marry:
    What should I tarry for?
    I may lead apes in hell forever.

    • Charles Dibdin, Tack and Tack.
  • The wictim o’ connubiality.
    • Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers (1836), Chapter XX.
  • Every woman should marry—and no man.
    • Benjamin Disraeli, Lothair, Chapter XXX.
  • Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in.
    • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative MenMontaigne.
  • Magis erit animorum quam corporum conjugium.
    • The wedlock of minds will be greater than that of bodies.
    • Erasmus, Procus et Puella.
  • You are of the society of the wits and railers;… the surest sign is, you are an enemy to marriage, the common butt of every railer.
    • David Garrick, The Country Girl, Act II. 1. Play taken from Wycherly’s Country Wife.
  • The husband’s sullen, dogged, shy,
    The wife grows flippant in reply;
    He loves command and due restriction,
    And she as well likes contradiction.
    She never slavishly submits;
    She’ll have her way, or have her fits.
    He his way tugs, she t’other draws;
    The man grows jealous and with cause.

    • John Gay, Cupid, Hymen, and Plutus.
  • It is not good that the man should be alone.
    • Genesis, II. 18.
  • Bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.
    • Genesis, II. 23.
  • Denn ein wackerer Mann verdient ein begütertes Mädchen.
    • For a brave man deserves a well-endowed girl.
    • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hermann und Dorothea, III. 19.
  • So, with decorum all things carry’d;
    Miss frown’d, and blush’d, and then was—married.

    • Oliver Goldsmith, The Double Transformation, Stanza 3.
  • Le divorce est le sacrement de l’adultere.
    • Divorce is the sacrament of adultery.
    • G. F. Guichard.
  • An unhappy gentleman, resolving to wed nothing short of perfection, keeps his heart and hand till both get so old and withered that no tolerable woman will accept them.
    • Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse.
  • I should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.
    • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Professor at the Breakfast Table.
  • Yet while my Hector still survives, I see
    My father, mother, brethren, all in thee.

    • Homer, The Iliad, Book VI, line 544. Pope’s translation.
  • Andromache! my soul’s far better part.
    • Homer, The Iliad, Book VI, line 624. Pope’s translation.
  • Felices ter et amplius
    Quos irrupta tenet copula, nec malis
    Divulsus querimoniis
    Suprema citius solvet amor die.

    • Happy and thrice happy are they who enjoy an uninterrupted union, and whose love, unbroken by any complaints, shall not dissolve until the last day.
    • Horace, Carmina, I, 13, 17.
  • I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem, and to be given away by a Novel.
    • John Keats, Letters to Fanny Brawne, Letter II.
  • Ay, marriage is the life-long miracle,
    The self-begetting wonder, daily fresh.

    • Charles Kingsley, Saint’s Tragedy, Act II, scene 9.
  • You should indeed have longer tarried
    By the roadside before you married.

    • Walter Savage Landor, ‘To One Ill-mated.
  • Sure the shovel and tongs
    To each other belongs.

    • Samuel Lover, Widow Machree.
  • Take heede, Camilla, that seeking al the Woode for a streight sticke, you chuse not at the last a crooked staffe.
    • John Lyly, Euphues.
  • Marriage is destinie, made in heaven.
    • John Lyly’s Mother Bombie. Same in Clarke, Paræmologia, p. 230. (Ed. 1639).
  • Cling closer, closer, life to life,
    Cling closer, heart to heart;
    The time will come, my own wed Wife,
    When you and I must part!
    Let nothing break our band but Death,
    For in the world above
    ‘Tis the breaker Death that soldereth
    Our ring of Wedded Love.

    • Gerald Massey, On a Wedding Day, Stanza 11.
  • And, to all married men, be this a caution,
    Which they should duly tender as their life,
    Neither to doat too much, nor doubt a wife.

    • Philip Massinger, Picture, Act V, scene 3.
  • The sum of all that makes a just man happy
    Consists in the well choosing of his wife:
    And there, well to discharge it, does require
    Equality of years, of birth, of fortune;
    For beauty being poor, and not cried up
    By birth or wealth, can truly mix with neither.
    And wealth, when there’s such difference in years,
    And fair descent, must make the yoke uneasy.

    • Philip Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, Act IV, scene 1.
  • What therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder.
    • Matthew, XIX. 6.
  • A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
    • H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949).
  • Par un prompt désespoir souvent on se marie.
    Qu’on s’en repent après tout le temps de sa vie.

    • Men often marry in hasty recklessness and repent afterward all their lives.
    • Molière, Les Femmes Savantes (1672), V. 5.
  • Women when they marry buy a cat in the bag.
    • Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book III, Chapter V.
  • Il en advient ce qui se veoid aux cages; les oyseaux qui en sont dehors, desesperent d’y entrer; et d’un pareil soing en sortir, ceulx qui sont au dedans.
    • It happens as one sees in cages: the birds which are outside despair of ever getting in, and those within are equally desirous of getting out.
    • Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book III, Chapter V.
  • Drink, my jolly lads, drink with discerning,
    Wedlock’s a lane where there is no turning;
    Never was owl more blind than a lover,
    Drink and be merry, lads, half seas over.

    • Dinah Craik, Magnus and Morna, scene 3.
  • Hac quoque de causa, si te proverbia tangunt,
    Mense malos Maio nubere vulgus ait.

    • For this reason, if you believe proverbs, let me tell you the common one: “It is unlucky to marry in May.”
    • Ovid, Fasti, V, 489.
  • Si qua voles apte nubere, nube pari.
    • If thou wouldst marry wisely, marry thine equal.
    • Ovid, Heroides, IX, 32.
  • Some dish more sharply spiced than this
    Milk-soup men call domestic bliss.

    • Coventry Patmore, Olympus.
  • The garlands fade, the vows are worn away;
    So dies her love, and so my hopes decay.

    • Alexander Pope, Autumn, line 70.
  • Grave authors say, and witty poets sing,
    That honest wedlock is a glorious thing.

    • Alexander Pope, January and May, line 21.
  • There swims no goose so gray, but soon or late
    She finds some honest gander for her mate.

    • Alexander Pope, Wife of BathHer Prologue, from Chaucer, line 98.
  • Before I trust my Fate to thee,
    Or place my hand in thine,
    Before I let thy Future give
    Color and form to mine,
    Before I peril all for thee,
    Question thy soul to-night for me.

    • Adelaide Ann Procter, A Woman’s Question.
  • A prudent wife is from the Lord.
    • Proverbs, XIX. 14.
  • Advice to persons about to marry—Don’t.
    • “Punch’s Almanack.” (1845). Attributed to Henry Mayhew.
  • Le mariage est comme une forteresse assiégée; ceux qui sont dehors veulent y entrer et ceux qui sont dedans en sortir.
    • Marriage is like a beleaguered fortress; those who are without want to get in, and those within want to get out.
    • Quitard, Études sur les Proverbes Français, p. 102.
  • Widowed wife and wedded maid.
    • Walter Scott, The Betrothed, Chapter XV.
  • Marriage is a desperate thing.
    • John Selden, Table Talk, Marriage.
  • To disbelieve in marriage is easy: to love a married woman is easy; but to betray a comrade, to be disloyal to a host, to break the covenant of bread and salt, is impossible.
    • Bernard Shaw, Getting Married.
  • What God hath joined together no man shall ever put asunder: God will take care of that.
    • Bernard Shaw, Getting Married.
  • The whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women.
    • Bernard Shaw, Epistle Dedicatory to Man and Superman.
  • Lastly no woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is not for nothing that this “ignoble tobagie” as Michelet calls it, spreads all over the world.
    • Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque, Part I.
  • Under this window in stormy weather
    I marry this man and woman together;
    Let none but Him who rules the thunder
    Put this man and woman asunder.

    • Jonathan Swift, Marriage Service from His Chamber Window.
  • The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.
    • Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects.
  • Celibate, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in a perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity.
    • Jeremy Taylor, Sermon, XVII, The Marriage Ring, Part I.
  • Marriages are made in Heaven.
    • Alfred Tennyson, Aylmer’s Field, line 188.
  • Remember, it is as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman.
    • William Makepeace Thackeray, Pendennis, Book I, Chapter XXVIII.
  • This I set down as a positive truth. A woman with fair opportunities and without a positive hump, may marry whom she likes.
    • William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Chapter IV.
  • What woman, however old, has not the bridal-favours and raiment stowed away, and packed in lavender, in the inmost cupboards of her heart?
    • William Makepeace Thackeray, Virginians, Book I, Chapter XXVIII.
  • Thrice happy is that humble pair,
    Beneath the level of all care!
    Over whose heads those arrows fly
    Of sad distrust and jealousy.

    • Edmund Waller, Of the Marriage of the Dwarfs, line 7.
  • The happy married man dies in good stile at home, surrounded by his weeping wife and children. The old bachelor don’t die at all—he sort of rots away, like a pollywog’s tail.
    • Artemus Ward, Draft in Baldinsville.
  • ‘Tis just like a summer bird cage in a garden: the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair, and are in a consumption, for fear they shall never get out.
    • John Webster, White Devil, Act I, scene 2.
  • Why do not words, and kiss, and solemn pledge,
    And nature that is kind in woman’s breast,
    And reason that in man is wise and good,
    And fear of Him who is a righteous Judge,—
    Why do not these prevail for human life,
    To keep two hearts together, that began
    Their spring-time with one love.

    • William Wordsworth, Excursion, Book VI.

Law of husband and wife

  • In the eye of the law no doubt, man and wife are for many purposes one: but that is a strong figurative expression, and cannot be so dealt with as that all the consequences must follow which would result from its being literally true.
    • William Henry Maule, J., Wenman v. Ash (1853), C. B. 844.
  • When a woman marries, her husband is the head of the family.
    • Parker, C.J., Inhabitants of St. Katherine v. St. George (1714), Fortesc. 218.
  • A woman is to comfort her husband.
    • Holt, C.J., Russell v. Corne (1703), 2 Raym. 1032.
  • If such cruelty shall be sanctioned, and wives shall not be allowed necessaries, England will lose the happy reputation in all foreign kingdoms, which her inhabitants have achieved by their respect for this sex, the most excelling in beauty, which, as in this climate it far transcends that of the women in all other lands, so has this Kingdom surpassed all other countries in its tenderness and consideration for their welfare.
    • Per Cur, Manby v. Scott (1672), 1 Levinz, 4; 2 Sm. L. C. (8th ed.) 458.
  • Dissentions existing between man and wife are in all events very unfortunate: when they become the subject of consideration to third persons, they are very unpleasant, and if the case requires that the conduct of each party should be commented upon in public, it is a most painful task to those to whose lot it falls to judge on them. The subject therefore is always to be handled with as much delicacy as it will admit of; but the infirmities of human nature have given rise to cruelties and other ill-treatment on the part of husbands, and to cases in which this Court has thought it indispensably necessary to interpose.
    • Buller, J., Fletcher v. Fletcher (1788), 2 Cox, Eq. Cas. 102.
  • By the laws of England, by the laws of Christianity, and by the constitution of society, when there is a difference of opinion between husband and wife, it is the duty of the wife to submit to the husband.
    • Molina, V.-C., In re Agar-Ellis; Agar-Ellis v. Lascelles (1878), L. R. 10 C. D. 55.
  • The naturalest and first conjunction of two towards the making a farther society of continuance, is of the husband and wife, each having care of the family: the man to get, to travel abroad, to defend; the wife to save, to stay at home, and distribute that which is gotten for the nurture of the children and family; is the first and most natural but primate apparence of one of the best kind of commonwealths, where not one always, but sometime, and in some things, another bears a rule; which to maintain, God hath given the man greater wit, better strength, better courage to compel the woman to obey, by reason or force; and to the woman, beauty, fair countenance, and sweet words to make the man obey her again for love. Thus each obeyeth and commandeth the other, and the two together rule the house, so long as they remain together in one.
    • Sir Thomas Smith, “Commonwealth of England,” Bk. I., c. 11, f. 23; quoted by Hyde, J., Manby v. Scott (1600), 1 Mod. 140, who added “I wish, with all my heart, that the women of this age would learn thus to obey, and thus to command their husbands: so will they want for nothing that is fit, and these kind of flesh-flies shall not suck up or devour their husbands’ estates by illegal tricks”.
  • There may by possibility be cases where cruelty may lead up directly to the wife’s adultery.
    • Dr. Lushington, Dillon v. Dillon (1841), 3 Curt. 94.
  • A woman commits adultery in order to gratify her own unlawful passion: she does not think about the annoyance to her husband when she abandons herself to her lover.
    • Brett, M.R., Fearon v. Earl of Aylesford (1884), L. R. 14 Q. B. D. 797.
  • If I might be permitted to borrow an illustration from poetry, the distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation is nowhere more strikingly shown than by a poet who, more than most other men, has sounded the depths of human feeling, and who supposes the question put to the husband of an adulteress:
    “Then did you freely, from your heart forgive?”
    to which he replies:
    “Sure, as I hope before my Judge to live;
    Sure, as the Saviour died upon the tree
    For all who sin—for that dear wretch and me,
    Whom never more, on earth, will I forsake or see.”
    Grabbe’s ” Tales of the Hall,” b. 12.

    • Lord Chelmsford, L.C., Keats v. Keats and another (1859), 7 W. R. 378; 5 Jur. (N. S.) Part 1 (1859), p. 178.
  • When people understand that they must live together, except for a very few reasons known to the law, they learn to soften by mutual accommodation that yoke which they know they cannot shake off; they become good husbands, and good wives, from the necessity of remaining husbands and wives; for necessity is a powerful master in teaching the duties which it imposes.1 If it were once understood, that upon mutual disgust married persons might be legally separated, many couples, who now pass through the world with mutual comfort, with attention to their common offspring and to the moral order of civil society, might have been at this moment living in a state of mutual unkindness—in a stage of estrangement from their common offspring—and in a state of the most licentious and unreserved immorality.
    • Sir William Scott, Evans v. Evans (1790), 1 Hagg. Con. Rep. 36, 37.
  • The cock swan is an emblem or representation of an affectionate and true husband to his wife above all other fowls; for the cock swan holdeth himself to one female only, and for this cause nature hath conferred on him a gift beyond all others; that is, to die so joyfully, that he sings sweetly when he dies; upon which the poet saith:
    “Dulcia defecta modulatur carmina lingua,
    Cantator, cygnus, funeris ipse sui, &c.”

    • Edward Coke, The Case of Swans (1600), 4 Rep. 85.
  • There is not one of us who cannot recall to memory the experience of some case in which a woman submitted to the worst of treatment, treatment degrading and humiliating, and allowed it to continue rather than permit her name to become the subject of a public scandal.
    • Lord Fitzgerald, G. v. M. (1885), L. R. 10 Ap. Ca. 208.
  • The reason why the law will not suffer a wife to be a witness against her husband is to preserve the peace of families.
    • Lord Hardioicke, Barker v. Dixie (1735), Ca. temp. Lord Hardwicke, 265.
  • The husband is not liable for the criminal conduct of his wife.
    • Wilmot, J., Lockwood v. Coysgarne (1764), 3 Burr. Part IV. 1681.

Law of marriage

  • Nothing is more natural than to marry.
    • Sir Henry Hobart, 1st Baronet, C.J., Sheffield v. Ratcliffe (1617), Lord Hobart’s Rep. 342.
  • The holy state of matrimony was ordained by Almighty God in Paradise, before the Fall of Man, signifying to us that mystical union which is between Christ and His Church; and so it is the first relation: and when two persons are joined in that holy state, they twain become one flesh1; and so it is the nearest relation.
    • Hyde, J., Manby v. Scott (1659), 1 Mod. Rep. 125.
  • Marriage in the contemplation of every Christian community is the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.
    • Lush, L.J., Harvey v. Farnie (1880), L. R. 6 Pro. D. 53.
  • Matrimony is a sacrament.
    • Abney, J., Richards v. Dovey (1746), Willes’ Rep. 623.
  • In the Christian Church marriage was elevated in a later age to the dignity of a sacrament.
    • Sir William Scott, Dalrymple v. Dalrymple (1811), 2 Hagg. Con. Rep. 64.
  • Marriage, in its origin, is a contract of natural law; it may exist between two individuals of different sexes, although no third person existed in the world, as happened in the case of the common ancestors of mankind: It is the parent, not the child of civil society. “Principium urbis et quasi seminarium reipublicce.”
    • Sir William Scott, Dalrymple v. Dalrymple (1811), 2 Hagg. Con. Rep. 63.
  • It will appear, no doubt, that at various periods of our history there have been decisions as to the nature and description of the religious solemnities necessary for the completion of a perfect marriage, which cannot be reconciled together; but there will be found no authority to contravene the general position, that at all times, by the common law of England, it was essential to the constitution of a full and complete marriage, that there must be some religious solemnity; that both modes of obligation should exist together, the civil and the religious.
    • Nicholas Conyngham Tindal, C.J., R. v. Millis (1844), 10 CI. & Fin. 655.
  • A contract executed without any part performance.
    • Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux, R. v. Millis (1844), 16 C1.& Fin. 719.
  • Our law considers marriage in the light of a contract, and applies to it with some exceptions, the ordinary principles which apply to other contracts.
    • Steph. Com., Vol. II. (8th ed.), Book 3, c. 2. p. 238.
  • If people are drunk or delirious,
    The marriage of course would be bad;
    Or if they’re not sober and serious,
    But acting a play or charade.
    It’s bad if it’s only a cover
    For cloaking a scandal or sin,
    And talking a landlady over,
    To let the folks lodge in her inn.

    • Lord Neaves, The Tourist’s Matrimonial Guide through Scotland, quoted in an unidentiied case before Mr. Justice Barnes, (July, 1899).
  • A marriage contract compels a woman to work for a man. This is voluntary servitude so long as a woman loves a man. But when she does not love him it becomes involuntary servitude, which the consititution does not permit in the United States.
    • Mrs Henriette Johnstone-Wood, 1909 (via Chronicling America).

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