What a happy and holy fashion it is that those who love one another should rest on the same pillow.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.  ~H.L. Mencken, A Book of Burlesques, 1916


The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds - they mature slowly.  ~Peter De Vries


I love being married.  It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.  ~Rita Rudner


Marriage, n.  A community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all two.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911


Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.  ~George Bernard Shaw


Newlyweds become oldyweds, and oldyweds are the reasons that families work.  ~Author Unknown


Chains do not hold a marriage together.  It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.  ~Simone Signoret


Success in marriage does not come merely through finding the right mate, but through being the right mate.  ~Barnett R. Brickner


A long marriage is two people trying to dance a duet and two solos at the same time.  ~Anne Taylor Fleming


Never get married in the morning, because you never know who you'll meet that night.  ~Paul Hornung


More marriages might survive if the partners realized that sometimes the better comes after the worse.  ~Doug Larson


Divorce:  The past tense of marriage.  ~Author Unknown


One advantage of marriage is that, when you fall out of love with him or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you fall in again.  ~Judith Viorst


Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other.  Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.  ~Katherine Hepburn


A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce.  The trick is to find, and continue to find, grounds for marriage.  ~Robert Anderson, Solitaire & Double Solitaire


There is no such cozy combination as man and wife.  ~Menander


It destroys one's nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.  ~Benjamin Disraeli


The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation.  It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through eternity.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Never go to bed mad.  Stay up and fight.  ~Phyllis Diller, Phyllis Diller's Housekeeping Hints, 1966


In the opinion of the world, marriage ends all, as it does in a comedy.  The truth is precisely the opposite:  it begins all.  ~Anne Sophie Swetchine


In a time when nothing is more certain than change, the commitment of two people to one another has become difficult and rare.  Yet, by its scarcity, the beauty and value of this exchange have only been enhanced.  ~Robert Sexton


An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.  ~Pliny the Younger, Letters


If you made a list of the reasons why any couple got married, and another list of the reasons for their divorce, you'd have a hell of a lot of overlapping.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.  ~W. Somerset Maugham


If two stand shoulder to shoulder against the gods,
Happy together, the gods themselves are helpless
Against them while they stand so.
~Maxwell Anderson


After the chills and fever of love, how nice is the 98.6º of marriage!  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for granted relationship.  ~Iris Murdoch


English Law prohibits a man from marrying his mother-in-law.  This is our idea of useless legislation.  ~Author Unknown


A wedding anniversary is the celebration of love, trust, partnership, tolerance and tenacity.  The order varies for any given year.  ~Paul Sweeney


Matrimony is a process by which a grocer acquired an account the florist had.  ~Francis Rodman


Marriage is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.  ~Beverley Nichols


Valentine's Day is when a lot of married men are reminded what a poor shot Cupid really is.  ~Author Unknown


Love is a flower which turns into fruit at marriage.  ~Finnish Proverb


A dress that zips up the back will bring a husband and wife together.  ~James H. Boren


All marriages are happy.  It's the living together afterward that causes all the trouble.  ~Raymond Hull


One of the good things that come of a true marriage is, that there is one face on which changes come without your seeing them; or rather there is one face which you can still see the same, through all the shadows which years have gathered upon it.  ~George MacDonald


As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.  ~Socrates


Love seems the swiftest but it is the slowest of all growths.  No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.  ~Mark Twain


Never feel remorse for what you have thought about your wife; she has thought much worse things about you.  ~Jean Rostand, Le Mariage, 1927


Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.  ~Isadora Duncan


When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.  ~G.B. Shaw, Getting Married, 1908


A first-rate marriage is like a first-rate hotel:  expensive, but worth it.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Our wedding was many years ago.  The celebration continues to this day.  ~Gene Perret


Here's to matrimony, the high sea for which no compass has yet been invented!  ~Heinrich Heine


The reason for much matrimony is patrimony.  ~Ogden Nash


I figure that the degree of difficulty in combining two lives ranks somewhere between rerouting a hurricane and finding a parking place in downtown Manhattan.  ~Claire Cloninger, "When the Glass Slipper Doesn't Fit and the Silver Spoon is in Someone Else's Mouth"


A man's wife has more power over him than the state has.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals


Marriage: that I call the will of two to create the one who is more than those who created it.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Three rings of marriage are the engagement ring, the wedding ring, and the suffering.  ~Author Unknown


Though marriage makes man and wife one flesh, it leaves 'em still two fools.  ~William Congreve


Marriage ceremony:  an incredible metaphysical sham of watching God and the law being dragged into the affairs of your family.  ~O.C. Ogilvie


A man in love is incomplete until he has married.  Then he's finished.  ~Zsa Zsa Gabor


One should never know too precisely whom one has married.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Bigamy is having one husband or wife too many.  Monogamy is the same.  ~Oscar Wilde


Spouse:  someone who'll stand by you through all the trouble you wouldn't have had if you'd stayed single.  ~Author Unknown


Marriage means commitment.  Of course, so does insanity.  ~Author Unknown


Like good wine, marriage gets better with age - once you learn to keep a cork in it.  ~Gene Perret


Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution.  ~Mae West


My wife says I never listen to her.  At least I think that's what she said.  ~Author Unknown


I never knew what real happiness was until I got married.  And by then it was too late.  ~Max Kauffman


Don't smother each other.  No one can grow in shade.  ~Leo Buscaglia


Don't marry the person you think you can live with; marry only the individual you think you can't live without.  ~James C. Dobson


I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.  ~Lord Byron


The chief reason why marriage is rarely a success is that it is contracted while the partners are insane.  ~Joseph Collins


We have the greatest pre-nuptial agreement in the world.  It's called love.  ~Gene Perret


It takes a loose rein to keep a marriage tight.  ~John Stevenson


Mistress:  something between a mister and a mattress.  ~Author Unknown


Mother-in-law:  a woman who destroys her son-in-law's peace of mind by giving him a piece of hers.  ~Author Unknown


Bachelor:  the only man who has never told his wife a lie.  ~Author Unknown


Wedding rings:  the world's smallest handcuffs.  ~Author Unknown


How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.  ~Oscar Wilde


Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.  ~Stephen Leacock, Literary Lapses, 1910


The most dangerous food is wedding cake.  ~American Proverb


Strange to say what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition.  ~Samuel Pepys


Home cooking:  where many a man thinks his wife is.  ~Author Unknown


Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


Marriage is not a word - it is a sentence.  ~Author Unknown


Our marriage has always been a 50-50 proposition - with the possible exception of closet space.  ~Gene Perret


There is so little difference between husbands you might as well keep the first.  ~Adela Rogers St. Johns


When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her.  ~Sacha Guitry, Elles et toi, 1948


It isn't tying himself to one woman that a man dreads when he thinks of marrying; it's separating himself from all the others.  ~Helen Rowland, Violets and Vinegar


Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.  ~Marlene Dietrich


Only choose in marriage a man whom you would choose as a friend if he were a woman.  ~Joseph Joubert


Never strike your wife - even with a flower.  ~Hindu Proverb


The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.  ~Peter Devries


The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.  ~Brendan Behan


So heavy is the chain of wedlock that it needs two to carry it, and sometimes three.  ~Alexandre Dumas, fils


Marriage is three parts love and seven parts forgiveness of sins.  ~Langdon Mitchell


Bride, n.  A woman with a fine prospect behind her.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911


If your husband and a lawyer were drowning and you had to choose, would you go to lunch or to a movie?  ~Author Unknown


What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.  ~George Levinger


Love-matches are made by people who are content, for a month of honey, to condemn themselves to a life of vinegar.  ~Countess of Blessington


Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage.  ~Sydney J. Harris


That quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge from a great weariness or a great danger.  ~George Eliot


The husband who doesn't tell his wife everything probably reasons that what she doesn't know won't hurt him.  ~Leo J. Burke


You can never be happily married to another until you get a divorce from yourself.  Successful marriage demands a certain death to self.  ~Jerry McCant


Married life teaches one invaluable lesson:  to think of things far enough ahead not to say them.  ~Jefferson Machamer


It's easy to understand love at first sight, but how do we explain love after two people have been looking at each other for years?  ~Author Unknown


The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.  ~Honore de Balzac, The Physiology of Marriage


Never marry for money.  Ye'll borrow it cheaper.  ~Scottish Proverb


Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who'll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness?  It means you're in the wrong house, that's what it means.  ~Henny Youngman


The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.  ~Gabriel García Márquez


She cried, and the judge wiped her tears with my checkbook.  ~Tommy Manville


By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.  ~Socrates


A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.  ~Ruth Bell Graham


Pity all newlyweds.  She cooks something nice for him, and he brings her flowers, and they kiss and think:  How easy marriage is.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


One man's folly is another man's wife.  ~Helen Rowland


Women hope men will change after marriage but they don't; men hope women won't change but they do.  ~Bettina Arndt, Private Lives, 1986


Marriage halves our griefs, doubles our joys, and quadruples our expenses.  ~English Proverb


Wedlock is the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise lounge.  ~Mrs Patrick Campbell


Before marriage, a girl has to make love to a man to hold him.  After marriage, she has to hold him to make love to him.  ~Marilyn Monroe


A perfect marriage is one in which "I'm sorry" is said just often enough.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Marriage must constantly fight against a monster which devours everything:  routine.  ~Honore de Balzac


Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.  ~H.L. Mencken


In marriage there are no manners to keep up, and beneath the wildest accusations no real criticism.  Each is familiar with that ancient child in the other who may erupt again.... We are not ridiculous to ourselves.  We are ageless.  That is the luxury of the wedding ring.  ~Enid Bagnold, Autobiography, 1969


Many marriages are simply working partnerships between businessmen and housekeepers.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


The highest happiness on earth is marriage.  ~William Lyon Phelps


A fellow ought to save a few of the long evenings he spends with his girl till after they're married.  ~Kin Hubbard


Two mothers-in-law.  ~Lord John Russell, on being asked what he would consider a proper punishment for bigamy


Though women are angels, yet wedlock's the devil.  ~Byron, Hours of Idleness


A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.  ~Joey Adams


A question asked in a Surrey school exam went:  "Why do cocks crow early every morning?"  A twelve-year-old replied:  "My dad says they have to make the most of it while the hens are asleep."  ~Quoted in the Peterborough Daily Telegraph, 1983


A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.  ~H.L. Mencken


Marriage is a meal where the soup is better than the dessert.  ~Austin O'Malley


One shouldn't be too inquisitive in life
Either about God's secrets or one's wife.
~Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales


Most wives think of their husbands as bumbling braggarts with whom they happen to be in love.  ~Jackie Gleason


For two people in a marriage to live together day after day is unquestionably the one miracle the Vatican has overlooked.  ~Bill Cosby, Love and Marriage


I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy.  First, let her think she's having her own way.  And second, let her have it.  ~Lyndon B. Johnson


Marriage is a ghastly public confession of a strictly private intention.  ~Ian Hay


Some marriages break up, and some do not, and in our world you can usually explain the former better than the latter.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


My mother said it was simple to keep a man, you must be a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom.  I said I'd hire the other two and take care of the bedroom bit.  ~Jerry Hall


The marriage state, with or without the affection suitable to it, is the completest image of Heaven and Hell we are capable of receiving in this life.  ~Richard Steele, The Spectator


Adultery is the application of democracy to love.  ~Henry Louis Mencken, "Sententiae," A Book of Burlesques, 1920


A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.  ~Andre Maurois


Marriage:  A legal or religious ceremony by which two persons of the opposite sex solemnly agree to harass and spy on each other for ninety-nine years, or until death do them join.  ~Elbert Hubbard


In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other.  In the later years, you fight because you do.  ~Joan Didion


Marriage isn't all that it's cracked up to be.  Let me tell you, honestly.  Marriage is probably the chief cause of divorce.  ~Larry Gelbart, M*A*S*H, "Bulletin Board," original airdate 14 January 1975, spoken by the character Frank Burns


When a girl marries she exchanges the attentions of many men for the inattention of one.  ~Helen Rowland


In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin - consideration for their feelings.  As it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.  ~Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal, 1974


Before marriage, a man declares that he would lay down his life to serve you; after marriage, he won't even lay down his newspaper to talk to you.  ~Helen Rowland


Being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck.  If you live through it, you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left.  ~Jean Kerr, Mary, Mary, 1960


Marriage changes passion - suddenly you're in bed with a relative.  ~Author Unknown


It is not marriage that fails; it is people that fail.  All that marriage does is to show people up.  ~Harry Emerson Fosdick


A wedding is just like a funeral except that you get to smell your own flowers.  ~Grace Hansen


The view that a peptic ulcer may be the hole in a man's stomach through which he crawls to escape from his wife has fairly wide acceptance.  ~John Allan Dalrymple Anderson


Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner.  ~Charles Caleb Colton


I've been married to one Marxist and one Fascist, and neither one would take the garbage out.  ~Lee Grant


Often the difference between a successful marriage and a mediocre one consists of leaving about three or four things a day unsaid.  ~Harlan Miller


The man who never in his life
Has washed the dishes with his wife
Or polished up the silver plate -
He still is largely celibate.
~Christopher Morley, Washing the Dishes


A love that lasts for twenty years may be better than love, but it isn't love.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


God created sex.  Priests created marriage.  ~Voltaire


To avoid mistakes and regrets, always consult your wife before engaging in a flirtation.  ~E.W. Howe


The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret.  ~Henny Youngman


Marriage is a mistake every man should make.  ~George Jessel


I guess walking slow getting married is because it gives you time to maybe change your mind.  ~Virginia Cary Hudson, O Ye Jigs & Juleps, 1962  (Thanks, Charlene)


A husband is what is left of the lover after the nerve has been extracted.  ~Helen Rowland


My husband and I divorced over religious differences.  He thought he was God, and I didn't.  ~Author Unknown


Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other never forgets them.  ~Ogden Nash


Husbands are like fires.  They go out when unattended.  ~Zsa Zsa Gabor


The concern that some women show at the absence of their husbands, does not arise from their not seeing them and being with them, but from their apprehension that their husbands are enjoying pleasures in which they do not participate, and which, from their being at a distance, they have not the power of interrupting.  ~Michel de Montaigne


But married once, a man is stak'd or pown'd, and cannot graze beyond his own hedge.  ~Philip Massinger, Fatal Dowry, 1632


Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.  ~François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld


Why do married men gain weight while bachelors don't?  Bachelors go to the refrigerator, see nothing they want, then go to bed.  Married guys go to the bed, see nothing they want, then go to the refrigerator.  ~Author Unknown


I never married because there was no need.  I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband.  I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night.  ~Marie Corelli


Women seem to be all right on bargains till it comes to picking out a husband.  ~Kin Hubbard


After a few years of marriage, a man can look right at a woman without seeing her - and a woman can see right through a man without looking at him.  ~Helen Rowland


A man without a wife is like a vase without flowers.  ~African Proverb


Why get married?  For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state.  If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.  ~Quentin Crisp, "The Art of Celibacy"


Wives are young men's mistresses; companions for middle age; and old men's nurses.  ~Francis Bacon, "Of Marriage and Single Life," Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, 1625


Marriage:  A word which should be pronounced "mirage."  ~Herbert Spencer


By the time you're his
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
~Dorothy Parker


A woman ought to look up to her husband, if only a half-inch.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


A woman who loves her husband is merely paying her bills.  A woman who loves her lover gives alms to the poor.  ~Paul-Jean Toulet


Love requires a willingness to die; marriage, a willingness to live.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Give up all hope of peace so long as your mother-in-law is alive.  ~Juvenal, Satires


We were happily married for eight months.  Unfortunately, we were married for four and a half years.  ~Nick Faldo


Men never know how tired they are till their wives sit them down for a nice long talk.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


The reason they're called the opposite sex is because every time you think you have your wife fooled - it's just the opposite!  ~Walter Winchell


Originally marriage meant the sale of a woman by one man to another; now most women sell themselves though they have no intention of delivering the goods listed in the bill of sale.  ~Robert Graves


If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse - as a man shoots himself.  ~H.L. Mencken


My wife tells me she doesn't care what I do when I'm away, as long as I'm not enjoying it.  ~Lee Trevino


To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.
~Ogden Nash


"What's for dinner?" is the only question many husbands ask their wives, and the only one to which they care about the answer.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Hubert Humphrey talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages.  ~Barry Goldwater


People do not marry people, not real ones anyway; they marry what they think the person is; they marry illusions and images.  The exciting adventure of marriage is finding out who the partner really is.  ~James L. Framo, "Explorations in Marital & Family Therapy"


Men have a much better time of it than women.  For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.  ~H.L. Mencken


I dreamed of a wedding of elaborate elegance,
A church filled with family and friends.
I asked him what kind of a wedding he wished for,
He said one that would make me his wife.
~Author Unknown


No man expects a great deal from marriage.  He is quite satisfied if his wife is a good cook, a good valet, an attentive audience, and a patient nurse.  ~Author Unknown


Think not because you are now wed
That all your courtship's at an end.
~Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza


Alimony is like buying oats for a dead horse.  ~Arthur Baer


I came from a big family.  As a matter of fact, I never got to sleep alone until I was married.  ~Lewis Grizzard


There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.  ~Martin Luther


Alimony - The ransom that the happy pay to the devil.  ~H.L. Mencken, "Sententiae," A Book of Burlesques, 1920


If marriage were outlawed, only outlaws would have in-laws.  ~Author Unknown


Getting divorced just because you don't love a man is almost as silly as getting married just because you do.  ~Zsa Zsa Gabor


I've sometimes thought of marrying, and then I've thought again.  ~Noel Coward, 1956


Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage:  "Ye who enter here leave all hope behind."  ~Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love


Wasn't marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded.  Wasn't it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt.  ~Edna Ferber, Show Boat, 1926


"I am" is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language.  Could it be that "I do" is the longest sentence?  ~Author Unknown


Affairs are just as disillusioning as marriage, and much less restful.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Marriage is a lottery in which men stake their liberty and women their happiness.  ~Virginie des Rieux, Epigrams


Wedlock is a padlock.  ~John Ray, English Proverbs


The marriage of convenience has this to recommend it:  we are better judges of convenience than we are of love.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.  ~Samuel Lichtenberg


The best way to remember your wife's birthday is to forget it once.  ~H.V. Prochnow


Marriage is like pleading guilty to an indefinite sentence.  Without parole.  ~John Mortimer, The Trials of Rumpole


One of the best things about marriage is that it gets young people to bed at a decent hour.  ~M.M. Musselman


Marriage is like a bank account.  You put it in, you take it out, you lose interest.  ~Irwin Corey


If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.  ~Katharine Houghton Hepburn


The total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.  ~Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals


Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State- and church-begotten weed, marriage?  ~Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love


What we love about love is the fever, which marriage puts to bed and cures.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Between a man and his wife nothing ought to rule but love.  ~William Penn


On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.  ~Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love


Marriage is a wonderful invention: then again, so is a bicycle repair kit.  ~Billy Connolly


Marriage is good for those who are afraid to sleep alone at night.  ~St. Jerome, Attack on Jovinian


[M]y mother once told me that if a married couple puts a penny in a pot for every time they make love in the first year, and takes a penny out every time after that, they'll never get all the pennies out of the pot.  ~Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City, 1978


The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous; the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.  ~H.L. Mencken


A great poet has seldom sung of lawfully wedded happiness, but of free and secret love; and in this respect, too the time is coming when there will no longer be one standard of morality for poetry and another for life.  To anyone tender of conscience, the ties formed by a free connection are stronger than the legal ones.  ~Ellen Key, quoted by Sprading in Liberty and the Great Libertarians


Any married man should forget his mistakes - no use two people remembering the same thing.  ~Duane Dewel


Men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage - they've experienced pain and bought jewelry.  ~Rita Rudner


Then marriage may be said to be past in all quietnesse, when the wife is blind, and the husband deafe.  ~Thomas Heywood, "Dialogues"


Come, let's be a comfortable couple and take care of each other!  How glad we shall be, that we have somebody we are fond of always, to talk to and sit with.  ~Charles Dickens


A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.  ~Michel de Montaigne, Essays


Getting married is a lot like getting into a tub of hot water.  After you get used to it, it ain't so hot.  ~Minnie Pearl


Love is grand; divorce a hundred grand.  ~Author Unknown


It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.  ~Balzac, Physiologie du mariage, 1829


A single man has not nearly the value he would have in a state of union.  He is an incomplete animal.  He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors.  ~Benjamin Franklin


And when will there be an end of marrying?  I suppose, when there is an end of living!  ~Tertullian


The surest way to be alone is to get married.  ~Gloria Steinem


[W]hen you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.  ~Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally


It's a funny thing that when a man hasn't anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married.  ~Robert Frost


I never even believed in divorce until after I got married.  ~Diane Ford


Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the common-sensical reply that we don't have as much money.  That was a true but incomplete answer.  In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.  ~Gloria Steinem


Courtship to marriage is as a very witty prologue to a very dull play.  ~William Congreve, The Old Bachelor, 1693


If you want to read about love and marriage, you've got to buy two separate books.  ~Alan King


They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.  ~Alexander Pope, The Wife of Bath, 1713


Marriage is like a phone call in the night: first the ring, and then you wake up.  ~Evelyn Hendrickson


When the one man loves the one woman and the one woman loves the one man, the very angels desert heaven and come and sit in that house and sing for joy.  ~The Brahma Sutras


Love is one long sweet dream, and marriage is the alarm clock.  ~Author Unknown


If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.  ~Anton Chekov


The Wedding March always reminds me of the music played when soldiers go into battle.  ~Heinrich Heine


The trouble with some women is that they get all excited about nothing - and then marry him.  ~Cher


If you haven't seen your wife smile at a traffic cop, you haven't seen her smile her prettiest.  ~Kin Hubbard


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 Men, 1850


When a man opens the car door for his wife, it's either a new car or a new wife.  ~Prince Philip


You should never kiss a girl unless you have enough bucks to buy her a big ring and her own VCR, 'cause she'll want to have videos of the wedding.  ~Jim, age 10


It gives me a headache to think about that stuff.  I'm just a kid.  I don't need that kind of trouble.  ~Kenny, age 7, when asked if it's better to be single or married


Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she's a householder.  ~Thornton Wilder


No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.  ~H.L. Mencken


Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.  ~Michel de Montaigne


I'd marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars and would sign over half of it to me before the marriage, and guarantee he'd be dead within the year.  ~Bette Davis


Men should keep their eyes wide open before marriage, and half-shut afterwards.  ~Madeleine de Scudery


Marrying for love may be a bit risky, but it is so honest that God can't help but smile on it.  ~Josh Billings


Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows - marriage does.  ~Groucho Marx


Why does a woman work ten years to change a man's habits and then complain that he's not the man she married?  ~Barbra Streisand


No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.  ~Benjamin Disraeli


In olden times sacrifices were made at the altar, a custom which is still continued.  ~Helen Rowland, Reflections of a Bachelor Girl, 1909


He's the kind of man a woman would have to marry to get rid of.  ~Mae West


The concept of two people living together for 25 years without a serious dispute suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.  ~A.P. Herbert


Never get married in college; it's hard to get a start if a prospective employer finds you've already made one mistake.  ~Elbert Hubbard