Famous Quotes & Sayings

Michel de Montaigne

Getting married is very much like going to a restaurant with friends. You order what you want then when you see what the other person has, you wish you had ordered that.

Michel de Montaigne

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.

Michel de Montaigne

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

Michel de Montaigne

When a Roman was returning from a trip, he used to send someone ahead to let his wife know, so as not to surprise her in the act.

Michel de Montaigne

We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry just as much or more for our posterity, for our family. The practice and benefit of marriage concerns our race very far beyond us.

Michael Novak

Marriage, the family unit, was the "original Department of Health, Education and Welfare."

Michael Kinsley

The logic is often far-fetched - how does medical marijuana affect interstate commerce? - and some conservatives would like judges to start throwing out federal laws wholesale on commerce clause grounds. The court once again said no thanks.

Mark Twain

If husbands could realize what large returns of profit may be gotten out of a wife by a small word of praise paid over the counter when the market is just right, they would bring matters around the way they wish them much oftener than they usually do. Arguments are unsafe with wives, because they examine them; but they do not examine compliments. One can pass upon a wife a compliment that is three-fourths base

Marianne Williamson

A relationship is not meant to be the joining at the hip of two emotional invalids. The purpose of a relationship is not for two incomplete people to become one, but rather, for two complete people to join together for the greater glory of God.

Mario Cuomo

I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week.

Mae West

It's easy to get married, but hard to stay that way.

Mae West

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

Mae West

Some women pick men to marry--and others pick them to pieces.

Michael Herr

What is the difference between the Marine Corps and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult leadership.

Francois Rabelais

When undertaking marriage, everyone must be the judge of his own thoughts, and take counsel from himself.

Germaine Greer

A woman is never so happy as when she is being wooed. Then she is mistress of all she surveys, the cynosure of all eyes, until that day of days when she sails down the aisle, a vision in white, lovely as the stefanotis she carries, borne translucent on her father's manly arm to be handed over to her new father-surrogate. If she is clever, and if her husband has the time and the resources, she will insist on being wooed all her life; more likely she will discover that marriage is not romantic, that husbands forget birthdays and aniversaries and seldom pay compliments, are often perfunctory.

Germaine Greer

Marriage cannot be a job as it has become.

Gertrude Stein

What is marriage, is marriage protection or religion, is marriage renunciation or abundance, is marriage a stepping-stone or an end. What is marriage.

Gertrude Stein

More great Americans were failures than they were successes. They mostly spent their lives in not having a buyer for what they had for sale.

Havelock Ellis

Courtship, properly understood, is the process whereby both the male and the female are brought into that state of sexual tumescence which is a more or less necessary condition for sexual intercourse. The play of courtship cannot, therefore, be considered to be definitely brought to an end by the ceremony of marriage; it may more properly be regarded as the natural preliminary to every act of coitus.

Harry Kemp

And wilt thou sing the shadowy hosts that never march again?

George Washington

I am very glad to hear that the Gardener has saved so much of the St. foin seed, and that of the India Hemp. Make the most you can of both, by sowing them again in drills. . . Let the ground be well prepared, and the Seed (St. loin) be sown in April. The Hemp may be sown any where.

George Washington

A woman ... all beautiful and accomplished will, while her hand and heart are undisposed of, turn the heads and set the circle in which she moves on fire. Let her marry, and what is the consequence? The madness ceases and all is quiet again. Why? Not because there is any diminution in the charms of the lady, but because there is an end of hope.

George Washington

I never did, nor do I believe I ever shall, give advice to a woman who is setting out on a matrimonial voyage; first, because I never could advise one to marry without her own consent; and, secondly, I know it is to no purpose to advise her to refrain when she has obtained it. A woman very rarely asks an opinion or requires advice on such an occasion, till her resolution is formed; and then it is with the hope and expectation of obtaining a sanction, not that she means to be governed by your disapprobation, that she applies.

George Washington

I have always considered marriage as the most interesting event of one's life, the foundation of happiness or misery.

George Santayana

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

George Meredith

Heiresses are never jilted.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

... you can never be sure of what has passed between husband and wife or lover and mistress.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If married couples did not live together, happy marriages would be more frequent.

Friedrich Nietzsche

At the beginning of a marriage ask yourself whether this woman will be interesting to talk to from now until old age. Everything else in marriage is transitory: most of the time is spent in conversation.

John Paul Stevens

In the national debate about a serious issue, it is the expression of the minority's viewpoint that most demands the protection of the First Amendment. Whatever the better policy may be, a full and frank discussion of the costs and benefits of the attempt to prohibit the use of marijuana is far wiser than suppression of speech because it is unpopular.

John Milton

Let us no more contend, nor blame each other, blamed enough elsewhere, but strive, In offices of love, how we may lighten each other's burden.

John Milton

Nothing lovelier can be found In woman, than to study household good, And good works in her husband to promote.