Matrimony Quotes

It’s probably not just by chance that I’m alone. It would be very hard for a man to live with me, unless he’s terribly strong. And if he’s stronger than I, I’m the one who can’t live with him. … I’m neither smart nor stupid, but I don’t think I’m a run-of-the-mill person. I’ve been in business without being a businesswoman, I’ve loved without being a woman made only for love. The two men I’ve loved, I think, will remember me, on earth or in heaven, because men always remember a woman who caused them concern and uneasiness. I’ve done my best, in regard to people and to life, without precepts, but with a taste for justice.

~ Coco Chanel

I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.

~ Martha Gellhorn

Oh, Lizzy! do anything rather than marry without affection.

~ Jane Austen

Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

[O]ur honeymoon will shine our life long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.

~ Charlotte Brontë

I disapprove of matrimony as a matter of principle.... Why should any independent, intelligent female choose to subject herself to the whims and tyrannies of a husband? I assure you, I have yet to meet a man as sensible as myself! (Amelia Peabody)

~ Elizabeth Peters

A mother gives you a life, a mother-in-law gives you her life.

~ Amit Kalantri

Never marry when under the guise you need to 'see if it'll work', but rather marry because in your mind you want to make it work.

~ Criss Jami

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~ Irina Binder

They say all marriages are made in heaven, but so are thunder and lightning.

~ Clint Eastwood

Yes, faith; it is my cousin's duty to make curtsy and say 'Father, as it please you.' But yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsy and say 'Father, as it please me.

~ William Shakespeare

LEONATOWell, then, go you into hell?BEATRICENo, but to the gate; and there will the devil meet me, like an old cuckold, with horns on his head, and say 'Get you to heaven, Beatrice, get you to heaven; here's no place for you maids:' so deliver I up my apes, and away to Saint Peter for the heavens; he shows me where the bachelors sit, and there live we as merry as the day is long.

~ William Shakespeare

LEONATOWell, niece, I hope to see you one day fitted with a husband.BEATRICENot till God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a pierce of valiant dust? to make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? No, uncle, I'll none: Adam's sons are my brethren; and, truly, I hold it a sin to match in my kindred.

~ William Shakespeare

If [God] send me no husband, for the which blessing I am at him upon my knees every morning and evening ...

~ William Shakespeare

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.

~ Wallace Stegner

In modern times couples are more concerned about loyalty than love.

~ Amit Kalantri

Some women marry houses.

~ Anne Sexton

[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

~ Michel De Montaigne

After one divorce and other on the way I am seriously considering a ME-rriage now and .t's going to be epic! I will ask my hand in meTRInomy, for it will become a trigamy. And me, my higher self and third I will live happily ever after life...We will live in threesomeness!

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.

~ Charles Dickens

(Response to King Erik XIV of Sweden's proposal of marriage:)[W]hile we perceive ... the zeal and love of your mind towards us is not diminished, yet in part we are grieved that we cannot gratify your Serene Highness with the same kind of affection. And that indeed does not happen because we doubt in any way of your love and honour, but, as often we have testified both in words and writing, that we have never yet conceived a feeling of that kind of affection towards anyone.We therefore beg your Serene Highness again and again that you be pleased to set a limit to your love, that it advance not beyond the laws of friendship for the present nor disregard them in the future. ... We certainly think that if God ever direct our hearts to consideration of marriage we shall never accept or choose any absent husband how powerful and wealthy a Prince soever. But that we are not to give you an answer until we have seen your person is so far from the thing itself that we never even considered such a thing. I have always given both to your brother ... and also to your ambassador likewise the same answer with scarcely any variation of the words, that we do not conceive in our heart to take a husband but highly commend this single life, and hope that your Serene Highness will no longer spend time in waiting for us.

~ Elizabeth I

For marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

If I follow the inclination of my nature, it is this: beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married.

~ Elizabeth I

There are some who want to get married and others who don't. I have never had an impulse to go to the altar. I am a difficult person to lead.

~ Greta Garbo

[I]n the end this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.

~ Elizabeth I

Which crime has the female sex committed to be sentenced to the harsh necessity which consists of being locked up all life either as a prisoner or a slave? I call the nuns prisoners and the married women slaves.

~ Christina Queen Of Sweden

The rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed ... or find a still greater man to marry her. ... The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

[I]t is not by being richer or more powerful that a man becomes better; one is a matter of fortune, the other of virtue. Nor should she deem herself other than venal who weds a rich man rather than a poor, and desires more things in her husband than himself. Assuredly, whomsoever this concupiscence leads into marriage deserves payment rather than affection.

~ Héloïse D'argenteuil

How many women are there ... who because of their husbands' harshness spend their weary lives in the bond of marriage in greater suffering than if they were slaves among the Saracens?

~ Christine De Pizan

There are certain phrases potent to make my blood boil -- improper influence! What old woman's cackle is that?Are you a young lady?I am a thousand times better: I am an honest woman, and as such I will be treated.

~ Charlotte Brontë

No: I shall not marry Samuel Fawthrop Wynne.I ask why? I must have a reason. In all respects he is more than worthy of you.She stood on the hearth; she was pale as the white marble slab and cornice behind her; her eyes flashed large, dilated, unsm

~ Charlotte Brontë

[In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation of the woman.

~ Antonia Fraser

What tale do you like best to hear?' 'Oh, I have not much choice! They generally run on the same theme - courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe - marriage.

~ Charlotte Brontë

I say this explicitly, that it is impossible for me to marry. That is the way it is for me. My temper is a mortal enemy to this horrible yoke, which I would not accept, even if I thus would become the ruler of the world.

~ Christina Queen Of Sweden

A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

To prove to [her friend, Swedish diplomat Count] Gyllenborg that she was not superficial, Catherine composed an essay about herself, so that he would see whether I knew myself or not. The next day, she wrote and handed to Gyllenborg an essay titled 'Portrait of a Fifteen-Year-Old Philosopher.' He was impressed and returned it with a dozen pages of comments, mostly favorable. I read his remarks again and again, many times [Catherine later recalled in her memoirs]. I impressed them on my consciousness and resolved to follow his advice. In addition, there was something else surprising: one day, while conversing with me, he allowed the following sentence to slip out: 'What a pity that you will marry! I wanted to find out what he meant, but he would not tell me.

~ Robert K. Massie

People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.

~ Thomas Hardy

To catch a husband is an art, to hold him is a job.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

Wooing, wedding, and repenting is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque-pace: the first suit is hot and hasty like a Scotch jig--and full as fantastical; the wedding, mannerly modest, as a measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes repentance and with his bad legs falls into the cinque-pace faster and faster, till he sink into his grave.

~ William Shakespeare

And such is your definition of matrimony and dancing. Taken in that light, certainly their resemblance is not striking; but I think I could place them in such a view. You will allow that in both man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal; that in both it is an engagement between man and woman, formed for the advantage of each; and that when once entered into, they belong exclusively to each other till the moment of its dissolution; that it is their duty each to endeavor to give the other no cause for wishing that he or she had bestowed themselves elsewhere, and their best interest to keep their own imaginations from wandering towards the perfections of their neighbors, or fancying that they should have been better off with any one else.

~ Jane Austen