This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Every marriage is, in itself and by itself, a sacrament." - Pope Leo XIII, born Vincenzo Gioacchino Raffaele Luigi Pecci NULL
"A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude. Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"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?" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Sexual boredom, that predator of marriages, is generally ascribed to overfamiliarity; but I think it mighty more aptly be blamed on the lack or failure of true intimacy... Sex thrives on the dynamics between novelty and intimacy... What is inalienably shared... for brief encounters, in which little is genuinely discovered or given, tend to emphasize people’s sameness rather than their individuality, and hence to obliterate the novelty that is sought. Intimacy, which demands time and trust, is available almost exclusively through marriage and long friendship." - Robert Grudin
"The one word above all others that makes marriage successful is "ours"." - Robert Quillen, fully Verni Robert Quillen
"A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers." - Robert Quillen, fully Verni Robert Quillen
"Creating the unity to run an effective business or a family or a marriage requires great personal strength and courage. No amount of technical administrative skill in laboring for the masses can make up for lack of nobility of personal character in developing relationships. It is a t a very essential, one-on-one level, that we live the primary laws of love and life." - Stephen Covey, fully Stephen Richards Covey
"For man, marriage is regarded as a station; for women, as a vocation." - Suzanne LaFollette, fully Suzanne Clara La Follette
"Keep thy eyes wide open before marriage; and half shut afterward." - Thomas Fuller
"We can end the impossible quest for the perfect structure - the happy family, the completely satisfying marriage, the unbroken friendship. We can find some purpose in the failures, the intimacies that never got off the ground, the possibilities that never took flesh. The soul does not share the spirit’s love of perfection and wholeness, but finds value in fragmentation, incompleteness, and unfulfilled promise." - Thomas Moore
"Wisdom is the marriage of intellect's longing for truth and soul's acceptance of the labryinthine nature of the human condition." - Thomas Moore
"Friendship is the marriage of souls, and this marriage is subject to divorce." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Apparently, it is the nature of all human relationships to aspire to be permanent. To propose temporariness as a goal in such relationships is to bring them under the rule of aims and standards that prevent them form beginning. Neither marriage, nor kinship, nor friendship, nor neighborhood can exist with a life expectancy that is merely convenient." - Wendell Berry
"Happiness in marriage... is not only marrying the right partner, it is being the right partner." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"When love became devotion instead of possession, marriage reached the climax of its slow ascent from brutality." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others." - William Hazlitt
"I believe marriage to be the best and most important relation that can exist between two human beings. If it has not often been realized hitherto, that is chiefly because husband and wife have regarded themselves as each other’s policeman. If marriage is to achieve its possibilities, husbands and wives must learn to understand that whatever the law may say, in their private lives they must be free." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"It is... possible for a civilized man and woman to be happy in marriage, although if this is to be the case a number of conditions must be fulfilled. There must be a feeling of complete equality on both sides; there must be no interference with mutual freedom; there must be the most complete physical and mental intimacy; and there must be a certain similarity in regard to standards of values." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce." - Freeman John Dyson
"Without love, marriage becomes, for man or for woman, a source of gratification, of conflict, of fear and pain. Love comes into being only when the self is absent. Without love, relationship is sorrow, however physically exciting it might be; such relationship breeds contention and frustration, habit and routine. Without love there can be no chastity, and sex becomes an all-consuming problem." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious. " - Jean Cocteau
"When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity. " - Joseph Campbell
"The problem of unmet expectations in marriage is primarily a problem of stereotyping. Each and every human being on this planet is a unique person. Since marriage is inevitably a relationship between two unique people, no one marriage is going to be exactly like any other. Yet we tend to wed with explicit visions of what a “good” marriage ought to be like. Then we suffer enormously from trying to force the relationship to fit the stereotype and from the neurotic guilt and anger we experience when we fail to pull it off." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I've been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface. A bright little flashing fish of hope has flicked silver fins and the water is bright and suddenly I am returned to a state of love again — till next time. I've learned that there will always be a next time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won't stay submerged. And each time something has been learned under the waters; something has been gained; and a new kind of love has grown. The best I can ask for is that this love, which has been built on countless failures, will continue to grow. I can say no more than that this is mystery, and gift, and that somehow or other, through grace, our failures can be redeemed and blessed." -
"The marriage bed is the most degenerating influence in the social order." - Margaret Sanger, fully Margaret Higgins Sanger Slee
"The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. The door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked, the marriage that failed. Or that lovely poem that didn't get written because someone knocked on the door." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"It is not possible for one person to meet all of another's needs and marriage partners who expect this soon find each other wanting." - Merle Shain
"You tend to have far more real, intense friendships when you are single, perhaps because you can be more honest when you do not have the marriage or someone else's feelings to protect." - Merle Shain
"If one of the problems of marriage is that safety can lead to complacency, then one of the advantages of being single is that one is never safe enough to grow complacent, and constantly having to prove oneself often leads to growth." - Merle Shain
"A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"People often feel unable to get out of a distasteful or unhappy situa- tion. They assume they are trapped in a job, in a community, in a marriage, family, or a way of life. They do not see the alternatives of looking for a new job or improving the one they have, of moving out of the community, of changing their marriage patterns, of break- ing off a relationship, or of loving and disciplining their children more effectively. They limit their perception of the problem, not seeing possible options or an obvious solution. They use one narrow approach and repeat this approach over and over even though it obviously does not resolve or change the situation." - Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward
"None of this can actually be happening. If it makes you more comfortable, you could simply think if it as metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you - even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers and triumphs overall opposition. Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world. So none of this is happening. Such things could not occur. Never a word of it is literally true. Even so, the next thing that happened, happened like this..." - Neil Gaiman, fully Neil Richard Gaiman
"Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you - even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition." - Neil Gaiman, fully Neil Richard Gaiman
"Man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct . The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal." - Nikola Tesla
"Life is insecurity and nothing is wrong in it. In fact, life cannot be otherwise. Death is secure, life is insecure. Marriage is secure, love is insecure. Marriage is dead, love is alive. The more alive you are the more your life remains in insecurity, because the livelier person will be exploring the unknown, he will be adventurous. It is life’s nature, its law, its very intrinsic soul. But the priest has exploited it. He has given you consolations, securities, insurances, not only for this life but for future lives too. He says, “Don’t be worried. If you follow a certain code of conduct, if you cultivate a certain character, if you follow the commandments given in the scriptures, then you need not be afraid. Then God is going to reward you. You will be punished only if you go against the convention, against the tradition." - Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
"What maintains the marriage and what is it? Only the knowledge of the hearts, that is its beginning and end." - Paracelsus, aka 'Paracelsus the Great', born Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim NULL
"Love makes fools, marriage cuckolds and patriotism malevolent imbeciles. " - Paul Léautaud
"That is what marriage really means helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible and autonomous beings who do not run away from life." - Paul Tournier
"When I had nothing more to lose, I was given everything. When I ceased to be who I am, I found myself. When I experienced humiliation and yet kept on walking, I understood that I was free to choose my destiny. Perhaps there's something wrong with me, I don't know, perhaps my marriage was a dream I couldn't understand while it lasted. All I know is that even though I can live without her, I would still like to see her again, to say what I never said when we were together: I love you more than I love myself. If I could say that, then I could go on living, at peace with myself, because that love has redeemed me. " - Paulo Coelho
"A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love. " - Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu
"The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character." - Peter De Vries
"Too many mergers resemble the marriage of two cripples who become twice as old, twice as bureaucratic and twice as undynamic." - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
"The Church teaches that a valid marriage bond is indissoluble, that is, it’s unable to be broken: “The love of the spouses requires, of its very nature, the unity and indissolubility of the spouses’ community of persons, which embraces their entire life: ‘so they are no longer two, but one flesh." - Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Marìa Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli NULL
"For Posidonius, ouranos, heaven, offers the paradigm for man. The stars teach ethics. The individual who pursues his duties without emotional involvement in them and without the correlative expectation of results, who recognizes honesty as the good and the hallmark of the wise man, and who seeks to honour the higher daimon in himself discovers a fidelity within the soul which is both its overarching oikeiosis and its link to the World-Soul. He sees that the principles of physics can be translated into the laws of psychology from which are derived ethics and the rules of right conduct. Without wavering in his loyalty to the deepest insights of the Stoic tradition, Posidonius exemplified in his own life and thought the ability of the philosopher to penetrate afresh and more precisely the mystery of the kosmos and the less ordered realm in which human beings dwell. His fearlessness of method and the marriage of observation and abstract thought influenced the generations which came immediately after him, and inspired a number of thinkers in the dawn of the European Enlightenment. [paraphrased]" - Posidonius, aka Posidonius of Rhodes or Posidonius of Apameia (meaning "of Poseidon") NULL
"Marriage isn't a love affair. It isn't even a honeymoon. It's a job. A long hard job, at which both partners have to work, harder than they've worked at anything in their lives before. If it's a good marriage, it changes, it evolves, but it does on getting better. I've seen it with my own mother and father. But a bad marriage can dissolve in a welter of resentment and acrimony. I've seen that, too, in my own miserable and disastrous attempt at making another person happy. And it's never one person's fault. It's the sum total of a thousand little irritations, disagreements, idiotic details that in a sound alliance would simply be disregarded, or forgotten in the healing act of making love. Divorce isn't a cure; it's a surgical operation, even if there are no children to consider. " - Rosamunde Pilcher, also pen name Jane Fraser
"It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls. It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution. It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small. It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war. It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes. It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation. It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will. If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, it is that human rights are women's rights - and women's rights are human rights. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely - and the right to be heard. " - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"Marriage has got historic, religious and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time, and I think a marriage is as a marriage always has been, between a man and a woman." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"Even hooligans marry, though they know that marriage is for a little while. It is alimony that is forever." - Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt