Topic

Marriage

The most honestly examined topic in the collection. Schopenhauer is severe on both sides: halved rights, doubled duties; marrying in order to become repulsed of each other. Russell observes that love covers a variety of feelings. Emerson calls marriage the perfection of what love aimed at without knowing what it sought. Joubert advises only marrying someone you would also want as a friend. Lamb finds nothing more distasteful than newlywed self-satisfaction. Goethe puts it plainly: love is an ideal thing, marriage a real one, and confusion between the two is always punished. These quotes are not anti-marriage but anti-illusion — those who lasted longest seem to have expected the least.

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Marriage: The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two

Source: The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Wedding: A ceremony at which two persons undertake to become one, one undertakes to become nothing, and nothing undertakes to become supportable.

Source: The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry

Source: Miscellaneous Aphorisms (1911)

To get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with

Source: Following the Equator, ch. 48 (1897)

It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should refuse an offer of marriage

Source: Emma (1815)

Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance

Source: Pride and Prejudice (1813)

We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end

Marriage is the golden ring in a chain whose beginning is a glance and whose ending is Eternity

Love is a flower which turns into fruit at marriage

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.

Now join your hands, and with your hands your hearts

Condition for a good marriage is to find the right person and to be even the right person.

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin

God, the best maker of all marriages, combine your hearts in one, your realms in one

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband

Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other

Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory

Quarrels often arise in marriages when the bridal gifts are excessive

Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance