C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Wedlock (See Marriage)
Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine.
Wedlock joins nothing, if it joins not hearts.
A world-without-end bargain.
The band of conjugal love is adamantine.
Marriage with peace is the world’s paradise.
Marriage is not, like the hill of Olympus, wholly clear, without clouds.
Hail, wedded love, mysterious law, true source of human offspring!
Body and soul like peevish man and wife, united jar, and yet are loath to part.
Humble wedlock is far better than proud virginity.
No navigator has yet traced lines of latitude and longitude on the conjugal sea.
As soon as a woman becomes ours, we are no longer theirs.
A husband is a plaster that cures all the ills of girlhood.
The very difference of character in marriage produces a harmonious combination.
A man finds himself seven years older the day after his marriage.
If she be not honest, chaste, and true, there’s no man happy.
There is a French saying: “Love is the dawn of marriage, and marriage is the sunset of love.”
We must be careful that the bond of wedlock does not become bondage.
The bitterest satires and noblest eulogies on married life have come from poets.
Conjugal love is the metempsychosis of woman.
Since all the maids are good and lovable, from whence come the evil wives?
It is a mistake to consider marriage merely a scheme of happiness; it is also a bond of service.
It destroys one’s nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.
Mutual complacency is the atmosphere of conjugal love.
For any man to match above his rank is but to sell his liberty.
There are few husbands whom the wife cannot win in the long run, by patience and love.
When a man and woman are married, their romance ceases and their history commences.
I believe it will be found that those who marry late are best pleased with their children; and those who marry early, with their partners.
The treasures of the deep are not so precious as are the concealed comforts of a man locked up in woman’s love.
To all married men be this caution, which they should duly tender as their life: Neither to doat too much, nor doubt a wife.
The happiness of married life depends upon the power of making small sacrifices with readiness and cheerfulness.
The character of a woman rapidly develops after marriage, and sometimes seems to change, when in fact it is only complete.
If you will learn the seriousness of life, and its beauty also, live for your husband; make him happy.
A happy marriage is a new beginning of life, a new starting-point for happiness and usefulness.
They that marry ancient people merely in expectation to bury them, hang themselves in hopes that some one will come and cut the halter.
It was in his own home that Fielding knew and loved her (Amelia); from his own wife that he drew the most charming character in English fiction.
To protect ourselves against the storms of passion, marriage with a good woman is a harbor in the tempest; but with a bad woman it is a tempest in the harbor.
The land of marriage has this peculiarity: that strangers are desirous of inhabiting it, while its natural inhabitants would willingly be banished from thence.
However old a conjugal union, it still garners some sweetness. Winter has some cloudless days, and under the snow some flowers still bloom.
The early months of marriage often are times of critical tumult,—whether that of a shrimp pool or of deeper water,—which afterwards subside into cheerful peace.
Husband and wife,—so much in common, how different in type! Such a contrast, and yet such harmony, strength and weakness blended together.
Men who marry wives very much superior to themselves are not so truly husbands to their wives as they are unawares made slaves to their position.
Socrates, who is by all accounts the undoubted head of the sect of the hen-pecked, owed, and acknowledged that he owed, a great part of his virtue to the exercise his useful wife constantly gave him.
Rarest of all things on earth is the union in which both, by their contrasts, make harmonious their blending; each supplying the defects of the helpmate, and completing by fusion, one strong human soul.
Husband and wife have so many interests in common that when they have jogged through the ups and downs of life a sufficient time, the leash which at first galled often grows easy and familiar.
She is not a brilliant woman; she is not even an intellectual one; but there is such a thing as a genius for affection, and she has it. It has been good for her husband that he married her.
He said—and his observation was just—that a man on whom heaven hath bestowed a beautiful wife should be as cautious of the men he brings home to his house as careful of observing the female friends with whom his spouse converses abroad.
If a superior woman marry a vulgar or inferior man, he makes her miserable, but seldom governs her mind or vulgarizes her nature; and if there be love on his side, the chances are that in the end she will elevate and refine him.
No unity can last, in married life, unless the fellowship of hearts is accompanied by the fellowship of minds. As a woman loses the charms of her youth, her husband must perceive that her mind is developing, and love must be perpetuated by esteem.
If the man be really the weaker vessel, and the rule is necessarily in the wife’s hands, how is it then to be? To tell the truth, I believe that the really loving, good wife never finds it out. She keeps the glamor of love and loyalty between herself and her husband, and so infuses herself into him that the weakness never becomes apparent either to her or to him or to most lookers-on.