“Marriage is that relation between man and woman in which the independence is equal, the dependence mutual, and the obligation reciprocal.”
“You can never be happily married to another until you get a divorce from yourself. A successful marriage demands a certain death to self.”
“Saw a wedding in the church. It was strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition.”
“The horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.”
“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.”
“When widows exclaim loudly against second marriages, I would always lay a wager than the man, If not the wedding day, is absolutely fixed on.”
“I hate to be a failure. I hate and regret the failure of my marriages. I would gladly give all my millions for just one lasting marital success.”
“The only thing that holds a marriage together is the husband being big enough to keep his mouth shut, to step back and see where his wife is wrong.”
“That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.”
“I'd marry again if I found a man who had 15 million and would sign over half of it to me before the marriage and guarantee he'd be dead within a year.”
“Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.”
“The marriage state, with and without the affection suitable to it, is the completest image of Heaven and Hell we are capable of receiving in this life.”
“Your marriage moves toward a state of isolation. Unless you lovingly and energetically nurture your marriage, you will begin to drift away from your mate.”
“You, that are going to be married, think things can never be done too fast: but we that are old, and know what we are about, must elope methodically, madam.”
“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.”
“Before marriage, a man will go home and lie awake all night thinking about something you said; after marriage, he'll go to sleep before you finish saying it.”
“Each coming together of man and wife, even if they have been mated for many years, should be a fresh adventure; each winning should necessitate a fresh wooing.”
“It resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated, often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.”
“My wife is always trying to get rid of me. The other day she told me to put the garbage out. I said to her I already did. She told me to go and keep an eye on it.”
“By taking a second wife he pays the highest compliment to the first, by showing that she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second time.”
“I have come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying, and for this reason, I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be blockhead enough to have me.”
“Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.”
“Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the way of our happy union.”
“There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.”
“We cannot do without it, and yet we disgrace and vilify the same. It may be compared to a cage, the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair to get out.”
“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?”
“When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.”
“The sum and substance of female education in America, as in England, is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life, and to pretend that they do not think so.”
“Every time a woman makes herself laugh at her husband's often-told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks at his woman and says ''What would I do without you?'' is already destroyed.”
“Two such as you with such a master speed cannot be parted nor be swept away from one another once you are agreed that life is only life forevermore together wing to wing and oar to oar.”