On Being Married

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

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

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

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

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To keep the fire burning brightly there's one easy rule: Keep the two logs together, near enough to keep each other warm and far enough apart — about a finger's breadth — for breathing room. Good fire, good marriage, same rule. 
~Marnie Reed Crowell

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A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.
~George Eliot

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A dog is much like a married man, obeying his master's voice for the sake of his master's touch. 
~Robert Brault

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
~Gilbert K Chesterton

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Just as Amy and Jay had for decades slept nude together, inhaling each other's odors, her hands familiar with the man's body hair. Even her face creams and his night grunts would have entered into it. And shared cakes of soap and clothes closets and dinners — such a complex of intimacies. 
~Saul Bellow

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

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

We are told that people stay in love because of chemistry, or because they remain intrigued with each other, because of many kindnesses, because of luck. But part of it has got to be forgiveness and gratefulness.
~Ellen Goodman

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.
~Peter Ustinov

Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast. 
~Marlene Dietrich
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We pardon to the extent that we love.
~Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

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

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

Most marriages can survive "better or worse." The tester is all the years of "exactly the same." 
~Robert Brault

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

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

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

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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

Courtship to marriage is as a very witty prologue to a very dull play. ~William Congreve

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

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

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Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage. 
~Ambrose Bierce

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

The Delights of Wisdom concerning Conjugal Love: After Which Follow the Pleasures of Insanity. 
~Emanuel Swedenborg

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Marriage is more than four bare legs in a bed. 
~Hoshang N Akhtar

In love there are two things - bodies and words.
~Joyce Carol Oates

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Wedlock’s a lane where there is no turning.
~D M Mulock

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
~John Steinbeck

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

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

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As a man, I've learned that there is nothing easier in married life than pleasing your wife with your cooking. 
~Robert Brault

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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

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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

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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

Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.
-Ellen Key

God created sex. Priests created marriage. 
~Voltaire

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Many marriages are simply working partnerships between businessmen and housekeepers. 
~Mignon McLaughlin

The marriage of convenience has this to recommend it: we are better judges of convenience than we are of love. 
~Mignon McLaughlin

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

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As a general guideline, never marry anyone that you can't picture helping you go to the bathroom. 
~Robert Brault

Wives are young men's mistresses; companions for middle age; and old men's nurses. 
~Francis Bacon

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Men never know how tired they are till their wives sit them down for a nice long talk. 
~Mignon McLaughlin

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One thing you learn in a long marriage is how many sneezes to wait before saying, "Bless you."
~Robert Brault

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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

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It is easy to mistake being ready for a wedding with being ready for marriage. 
~Robert Brault

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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

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

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

You have to treat your wife like you treated her when you first met her and were trying to get her in bed. 
~Alice Cooper

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

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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

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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

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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

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

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Matrimony—the high sea for which no compass has yet been invented. 
~Heinrich Heine

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

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

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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

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A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.
~Jane Austen

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You know it’s never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It’s always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.
~Jodi Picoult

Love means to commit yourself without guarantee.
~Anne Campbell

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I didn't marry you because you were perfect. I didn't even marry you because I loved you. I married you because you gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage. And when our children were growing up, it wasn't a house that protected them; and it wasn't our love that protected them--it was that promise.
~Thornton Wilder

Turn your love into promises, that when you doubt your love, you may simply ask, "Am I keeping my promises?"
~Robert Breault

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Marriage is not a noun; it's a verb. It isn't something you get. It's something you do. It's the way you love your partner every day.
~Barbara De Angelis

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Marriage, like a submarine, is only safe if you get all the way inside.
~Frank Pittman

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All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
~John Berger

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People change and forget to tell each other.
~Lillian Hellman

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

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We accept the love we think we deserve.
~Stephen Chbosky

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If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don't, they never were.
~Khalil Gibran

What makes men indifferent to their wives is that they can see them when they please.
~Ovid

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The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.
~Mignon McLaughlin

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Marriage is like twirling a baton, turning hand springs or eating with chopsticks. It looks easy until you try it.
~Helen Rowland

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The best proof of love is trust.
~Joyce Brothers

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

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It's not beauty but fine qualities, my girl, that keep a husband.
~Euripides

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When I was young, I used to have successes with women because I was young. Now I have successes with women because I am old. Middle age was the hardest part.
~Arthur Rubinstein

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A happy wedlock is a long falling in love.
~Theodore Parker

Those Marriages generally abound most with Love and Constancy, that are preceded by a long Courtship.
~Joseph Addison

Hasty marriage seldom proveth well.
~William Shakespeare

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Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
~Zelda Fitzgerald

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Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.
~Oscar Wilde

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

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The art of love is largely the art of persistence.
~Albert Ellis

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Love is like Pi: natural, irrational, and very important.
~Lisa Hoffman

In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.
~Mignon McLaughlin

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Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives.
~Samuel Johnson

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A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.
~Charles Baudelaire

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A woman seldom asks advice before she has bought her wedding clothes.
~Joseph Addison

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It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
~George Santayana

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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

Marriage is a gamble, let's be honest.
~Yoko Ono

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Marriage, families, all relationships are more a process of learning the dance rather than finding the right dancer
~Paul Pearsall



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