Quotes to inspire and reflect

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Every woman should marry—and no man.

Show me one couple unhappy merely on account of their limited circumstances, and I will show you ten who are wretched from other causes.

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

Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.

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.

When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.

But I had not quite fixed whether to make him [Don Juan] end in Hell—or in an unhappy marriage,—not knowing which would be the severest.

One was never married, and that’s his hell; another is, and that’s his plague.

In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.

When a match has equal partners / then I fear not.

[I]t had been from the first her great mistake—to meet him, to marry him, to love him as she so bitterly had. Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men.

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

The capacity of women to make unsuitable marriages must be considered as the cornerstone of society.

A bad manner spoils everything, even reason and justice; a good one supplies everything, gilds a No, sweetens truth, and adds a touch of beauty to old age itself.

I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it improperly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up.

A man without ceremony had need of great merit in its place.

There is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual.

Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste.

Manners make the fortune of the ambitious youth.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.

Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners.

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

Manners maketh man. Yes, but they make woman still more.

Society is smoothed to that excess, / That manners hardly differ more than dress.

Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with man is Man.

The noblest work of God? Man. Who found it out? Man.

I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant.

The fish in the water is silent, the animal on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing. / But Man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.

What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad.

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe!

A man has many parts, he is virtually everything, and you are free to select in him that part which pleases you.

For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.

Alas for this mad melancholy beast man! What phantasies invade it, what paroxysms of perversity, hysterical senselessness, and mental bestiality break out immediately, at the very slightest check on its being the beast of action.

Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish.

Man, in good earnest, is a marvelous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.