Quotes to inspire and reflect

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person.

As vivacity is the gift of women, gravity is that of men.

It is truer to say that martyrs make faith than that faith makes martyrs.

To die in agony upon a cross / Does not create a martyr; he must first / Will his own execution.

If a man is in doubt whether it would be better for him to expose himself to martyrdom or not, he should not do it. He must be convinced that he has a delegation from heaven.

Our admiration is so given to dead martyrs that we have little time for living heroes.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

The martyr endured tortures to affirm his belief in truth but he never asserted his disbelief in torture.

[Married men] are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not.

The American girl makes a servant of her husband and then finds him contemptible for being a servant.

[T]he nineteenth-century wave of feminism was started by older women who had been through the radicalizing experience of getting married and becoming the legal chattel of their husbands (or the equally radicalizing experience of not getting married and being treated as spinsters).

Esther could not conceive. In every other way she was a good wife; she knew how to knit, sew a wedding gown, bake gingerbread and tarts, tear out the pip of a chicken, apply a cupping glass or leeches, even bleed a patient.

American married life is the doormat to the whorehouse.

Marriage is tolerable enough in its way if youre easygoing and dont expect too much from it. But it doesnt bear thinking about.

’Tis safest in matrimony to begin with a little aversion.

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

A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.

Man is for woman a means: the end is always the child.

This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight As, but I knew that’s what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard’s mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.

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

Marriage is an Athenic weaving together of families, of two souls with their individual fates and destinies, of time and eternity—everyday life married to the timeless mysteries of the soul.

[Marriage] can be compared to a cage: birds outside it despair to enter, and birds within, to escape.

The fundamental trouble with marriage is that it shakes a man’s confidence in himself, and so greatly diminishes his general competence and effectiveness. His habit of mind becomes that of a commander who has lost a decisive and calamitous battle. He never quite trusts himself thereafter.

Nothing is to me more distasteful than that entire complacency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a new-married couple,—in that of the lady particularly; it tells you that her lot is disposed of in this world; that you can have no hopes of her.

The men that women marry, / And why they marry them, will always be / A marvel and a mystery to the world.

There are few wives so perfect as not to give their husbands at least once a day good reason to repent of ever having married, or at least of envying those who are unmarried.

Always see a fellow’s weak point in his wife.

It is not from reason and prudence that people marry, but from inclination.

It is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilised society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.

A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience.

I would advise no man to marry who is not likely to propagate understanding.

He had married on the rebound from the rotten time he had in college, and Frances took him on the rebound from his discovery that he had not been everything to his first wife.

A man who marries a woman to educate her falls a victim to the same fallacy as the woman who marries a man to reform him.

Choose a wife rather by your ear than your eye.

Maidens! why should you worry in choosing whom you shall marry? / Choose whom you may, you will find you have got somebody else.

Marry, and with luck / it may go well. But when a marriage fails, f then those who marry live at home in hell.

You can bear your own faults, and why not a fault in your wife?

All qther woes a woman bears are minor / But lose her husband!—might as well be dead.

One man should love and honor one: / A bride- bed / Theirs alone till life’s done.

A rare spoil for a man / Is the winning of a good wife; very / Plentiful are the worthless women.

Marriage is the perfection which love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought.

A man’s wife has more power over him than the state has.

Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.

As Thoreau nearly said: “Most wives lead lives of quiet disapprobation.”

Every woman should marry—and no man.

I suppose I shall marry eventually. One does that, one drifts into stability.

Marriage indeed may qualify the fury of his passion, but it very rarely mends a man’s manners.