Marriage Quotes, Sayings
This collection of marriage quotes and sayings covers a range of topics, including what makes a good marriage, the ups and downs of marriage, how to have a happy marriage, and enjoying the journey along the way with your soulmate.
For some ideas on how to best use these sayings, be sure to check out our tips at the bottom of the page.
Marriage quotes to live by
Let’s start with ten of our favorite marriage quotes and sayings.
10 best marriage quotes
1.) Marriage: Love is the reason. Lifelong friendship is the gift. Kindness is the cause. Til’ death do us part is the length.
Fawn Weaver
2.) Grow old along with me. The best is yet to be—the last of life for which the first was made.
Robert Browning
3.) Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it be rather a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
4.) A perfect marriage is just two imperfect people who refuse to give up on each other.
Unknown
5.) A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
Mignon McLaughlin
6.) A happy marriage is about three things: memories of togetherness, forgiveness of mistakes, and a promise to never give up on each other.
Surabhi Surendra
7.) A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
8.) Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.
Aristotle
9.) By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.
Socrates
10.) To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.
Mark Twain
Good marriage quotes
Sensual pleasures have the fleeting brilliance of a comet; a happy marriage has the tranquility of a lovely sunset.
Ann Landers
Happy marriages begin when we marry the ones we love, and they blossom when we love the ones we marry.
Tom Mullen
The secret to a happy marriage is if you can be at peace with someone within four walls, if you are content because the one you love is near to you, either upstairs or downstairs, or in the same room, and you feel that warmth that you don’t find very often, then that is what love is all about.
Bruce Forsyth
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
There is no more lovely, friendly, and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.
Martin Luther
Marriage is a mosaic you build with your spouse. Millions of tiny moments that create your love story.
Jennifer Smith
There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But who wants easier?
Marry Oliver
Being someone’s first love may be great, but to be their last is beyond perfect.
Unknown
See Most Romantic Outlander Moments.
Happiness marriage quotes
The secret of a happy marriage is finding the right person. You know they’re right if you love to be with them all the time.
Julia Child
A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.
Ruth Bell Graham
Happy marriages begin when we marry the ones we love, and they blossom when we love the ones we married.
Tim Mullen
One day, in your search for happiness, you discover a partner by your side, and you realize that your happiness has come to help you search.
Robert Brault
Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.
Honore de Balzac
True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Happiness is only real when shared.
Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
To find someone who will love you for no reason, and to shower that person with reasons, that is the ultimate happiness.
Robert Brault
What a happy and holy fashion it is that those who love one another should rest on the same pillow.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Marriage is the highest state of friendship. If happy, it lessens our cares by dividing them, at the same time that it doubles our pleasures by mutual participation.
Samuel Richardson
A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.
Andre Maurois
Famous marriage quotes
Happy is the man who finds a true friend, and far happier is he who finds that true friend in his wife.
Franz Schubert
I have come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying, and for this reason, I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be blockhead enough to have me.
Abraham Lincoln
The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.
Audrey Hepburn
To keep your marriage brimming, with love in the wedding cup, whenever you’re wrong, admit it; whenever you’re right, shut up.
Ogden Nash
After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
Mark Twain, Diaries of Adam & Eve
Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
Oscar Wilde
The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret.
Henny Youngman
My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.
Winston Churchill
People are weird. When we find someone with weirdness that is compatible with ours, we team up and call it love.
Dr. Seuss
There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.
Homer, The Odyssey
Short marriage sayings
The highest happiness on earth is marriage.
William Lyon Phelps
The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.
Audrey Hepburn
Where there is love there is life.
Mahatma Gandhi
We loved with a love that was more than love.
Edgar Allan Poe
Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.
Oscar Wilde
Love those who love you.
Voltaire
In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities.
Janos Arnay
If I get married, I want to be very married.
Audrey Hepburn
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.
William Shakespeare
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
Emily Brontë
Great love affairs start with Champagne.
Honoré de Balzac
Love is a friendship set to music.
Joseph Campbell
To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.
David Viscott
Where there is love, there is life.
Mahatma Gandhi
Love is like a friendship caught on fire.
Bruce Lee
When a marriage works, nothing on Earth can take its place.
Helen Gahagan Douglas
Marriages are like fingerprints; each one is different and each one is beautiful.
Maggie Reyes
Positive marriage quotes
Being in a long marriage is a little bit like that nice cup of coffee every morning — I might have it every day, but I still enjoy it.
Stephen Gaines
To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow — this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.
Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.
André Maurois
Love’s about finding the one person who makes your heart complete. Who makes you a better person than you ever dreamed you could be. It’s about looking in the eyes of your wife and knowing all the way to your bones that she’s simply the best person you’ve ever known.
Julia Quinn, The Viscount Who Loved Me
Beautiful marriage quotes
Marriage is like watching the color of leaves in the fall; ever changing and more stunningly beautiful with each passing day.
Fawn Weaver
Sexiness wears thin after a while and beauty fades, but to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that is a treat.
Joanne Woodward
Have you never met a woman who inspires you to love? Until your every sense is filled with her? You inhale her, you taste her, you see your unborn children in her eyes and know that your heart has at last found a home. Your life begins with her, and without her it must surely end.
Don Juan, Don Juan DeMarco
It was finally becoming clear to her that love wasn’t about finding someone perfect to marry. Love was about seeing through to the truth of a person, and accepting all their shades of light and dark. Love was an ability.
Lisa Kleypas
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate then when I fall asleep your eyes close.
Pablo Neruda
The bride and groom–May their joys be as bright as the morning, and their sorrows but shadows that fade in the sunlight of love.
Minna Thomas Antrim, A Book of Toasts
The best wedding toasts for raising a glass to the new couple.
Funny marriage quotes
Some people claim that marriage interferes with romance. There’s no doubt about it. Anytime you have a romance, your wife is bound to interfere.
Groucho Marx
They say all marriages are made in heaven, but so are thunder and lightning.
Clint Eastwood
The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It’s followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.
Nora Ephron
Before you marry a person you should first make them use a computer with slow Internet to see who they really are.
Will Ferrell
The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.
Gabriel García Márquez
Getting divorced just because you don’t love a man is almost as silly as getting married just because you do.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
Marriage is like trading in the adoration of many for the sarcasm of one.
Mae West
Love is a lot like a backache; It doesn’t show up on X-Rays, But you know it’s there.
George Burns
“I am” is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that “I do” is the longest sentence?
George Carlin
Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who’ll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you’re in the wrong house, that’s what it means.
Henny Youngman
An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her.
Agatha Christie
I love being married. It’s so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.
Rita Rudner
Humorous one-liners about marriage
One should always be in love. That’s the reason one should never marry.
Oscar Wilde
I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.
Groucho Marx
My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.
Rodney Dangerfield
A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he’s finished.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
Marriage is a fine institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.
Mae West
Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
Oscar Wilde
My husband and I have never considered divorce… murder sometimes, but never divorce.
Joyce Brothers
Men are my hobby, if I ever got married I’d have to give it up.
Mae West
Check out Popular Toasts for Any Occasion.
Cynical takes about marriage
Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.
Katharine Hepburn
Getting married is like trading in the adoration of many for the sarcasm of one.
Mae West
Marriage lets you annoy one special person for the rest of your life.
Unknown
The trouble with some women is that they get all excited about nothing—and then marry him.
Cher
Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary
There are some who want to get married and others who don’t. I have never had an impulse to go to the altar. I am a difficult person to lead.
Greta Garbo
Why does a woman work ten years to change a man, then complain he’s not the man she married?
Barbra Streisand
I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.
Nikola Tesla
Some people ask the secret of our long marriage. We take time to go to a restaurant two times a week. A little candlelight, dinner, soft music, and dancing. She goes Tuesdays, I go Fridays.
Henny Youngman
Love and marriage quotes
Happy marriages begin when we marry the ones we love and they blossom when we love the ones we marry.
Tom Mullen
If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.
Michel de Montaigne
Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get–only with what you are expecting to give–which is everything.
Katharine Hepburn
If you love ’em in the morning with their eyes full of crust; if you love ’em at night with their hair full of rollers, chances are, you’re in love.
Miles Davis
Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.
Boris Pasternak
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
Lao Tzu
Love is absolute loyalty. People fade, looks fade, but loyalty never fades. You can depend so much on certain people; you can set your watch by them. And that’s love, even if it doesn’t seem very exciting.
Sylvester Stallone
I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me.
Roy Croft
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Robert Heinlein
Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.
Maya Angelou
More love quotes
Two hearts in love need no words.
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by the imagination.
Voltaire
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow—this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.
Elizabeth Gilbert
When someone else’s happiness is your happiness, that is love.
Lana Del Ray
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.
Alexander Smith
Love is an act of endless forgiveness; a tender look which becomes a habit.
Peter Ustinov
You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.
Dr. Seuss
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away.
Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Romantic marriage quotes
The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
Rumi
Look, you want to know what marriage is really like? Fine. You wake up, she’s there… you come back from work, she’s there… you fall asleep, she’s there… you eat dinner, she’s there. You know? I mean, I know that sounds like a bad thing, but it’s not.
Ray Romano, Everybody Loves Raymond
When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.
Meg Ryan, When Harry Met Sally
Once upon a time, there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
True love stories never have endings.
Richard Bach
Your absence has not taught me to be alone, it merely has shown that when together we cast a single shadow on the wall.
Doug Fetherling
There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.
Ronald Reagan
If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, So I never have to live without you.
A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
Never marry the one you can live with, marry the one you cannot live without.
Unknown
You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.
Oscar Wilde
Marriage wisdom for the new couple
Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.
Simone Signoret
The greatest marriages are built on teamwork. A mutual respect, a healthy dose of admiration, and a never-ending portion of love and grace.
Fawn Weaver
The essence of marriage is companionship, and the woman you face across the coffee urn every morning for ninety-nine years must be both able to appreciate your jokes and to sympathize with your aspirations.
Elbert Hubbard
If you love a flower, don’t pick it up. Because if you pick it up, it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. It is about appreciation.
Osho
There must be a stronger foundation than mere friendship or sexual attraction. Unconditional love, agape love, will not be swayed by time or circumstances.
Stephen Kendrick, The Love Dare
The happy State of Matrimony is, undoubtedly, the surest and most lasting Foundation of Comfort and Love… the Cause of all good Order in the World, and what alone preserves it from the utmost Confusion.
Benjamin Franklin
The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant—in a word, real.
C.S. Lewis
More wise words
They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.
Tom Bodett
A great marriage is not when the ‘perfect couple’ comes together. It is when an imperfect couple learns to enjoy their differences.
Dave Meurer
Marriage, ultimately, is the practice of becoming passionate friends.
Harville Hendrix
Love at first sight is easy to understand; it’s when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.
Sam Levenson
This is what marriage really means: helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible beings who do not run away from life.
Paul Tournier
We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love–true love.
Robert Fulghum, True Love
‘Never go to bed angry’ and other good advice
A marriage is not a noun; it’s a verb. It isn’t something you get. It’s the way you love your partner every day.
Barbara De Angelis
Marriage is not just spiritual communion, it is also remembering to take out the trash.
Joyce Brothers
Marriage has no guarantees. If that’s what you’re looking for, go live with a car battery.
Erma Bombeck
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Marriage flourishes when the couple works together as a team: when both husband and wife decide that winning together is more important than keeping score. Good marriages don’t just happen. They are a product of hard work.
Michelle Obama
Love me when I least deserve it, because that’s when I really need it.
Swedish proverb
The best way to get most husbands to do something is to suggest that perhaps they’re too old to do it.
Ann Bancroft
Don’t ever stop dating your wife and don’t ever stop flirting with your husband.
Unknown
Marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.
Leo Tolstoy
More marriage advice quotes
Have a short memory and a lot of forgiveness.
Gabrielle Reece
Be generous in the bedroom. Share your sandwich.
Homer Simpson, The Simpsons
Let the wife make the husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave.
Martin Luther
Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.
Fred Rogers
Marriage stands the test of times when both you and your spouse work towards making things better. And we are tested the most when we face adversities. If you can sail through the adversities as one, as a team, then you have won half the battle.
Unknown
You don’t love someone because they’re perfect; you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.
Jodi Picoult
Check out these funny marriage advice quotes.
Marriage quotes for newlyweds
Think not because you are now wed, that all your courtship’s at an end.
Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza
To keep your marriage brimming, with love in the wedding cup, whenever you’re wrong, admit it; whenever you’re right, shut up.
Ogden Nash
Love love and cherish life. Also, just eat the cake.
Aaron Paul
The real act of marriage takes place in the heart, not in the ballroom or church or synagogue. It’s a choice you make–not just on your wedding day, but over and over again–and that choice is reflected in the way you treat your husband or wife.
Barbara de Angelis
Love is more than three words mumbled before bedtime. Love is sustained by action, a pattern of devotion in the things we do for each other everyday.
Nicholas Sparks, The Wedding
Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.
Benjamin Franklin
Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.
André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name
A marriage doesn’t have to be perfect, but you can be perfect for each other.
Jessica Simpson
Grow old together: advice for a long-lasting marriage
The only way love can last a lifetime is if it’s unconditional. The truth is this: love is not determined by the one being loved but rather by the one choosing to love.
Stephen Kendrick, The Love Dare
The beauty of marriage is not always seen from the very beginning—but rather as love grows and develops over time.
Fawn Weaver
I want to try with someone who loves me enough to try with me – I want to grow old looking at the same face every morning – I want to grow old looking at the same face every night at the dinner table – I want to be one of those old couples you see still holding hands and laughing after fifty years of marriage. That’s what I want. I want to be someone’s forever.
Rachel Gibson, The Trouble With Valentine’s Day
Treat marriage like a diamond necklace; if broken, fix it, but do not throw it away.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A long-lasting marriage is built by two people who believe in—and live by—the solemn promise they made.
Darlene Schacht
What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life—to strength each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?
George Eliot
When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Unto us all our days are love’s anniversaries, each one in turn hath ripen’d something of our happiness.
Robert Bridges
Marriage quotes from movies and TV
Outlander
Ye are Blood of my Blood, and Bone of my Bone, I give ye my Body, that we Two might be One. I give ye my Spirit, ’til our Life shall be Done.
Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
The Notebook
So it’s not gonna be easy. It’s going to be really hard; we’re gonna have to work at this everyday, but I want to do that because I want you. I want all of you, forever, everyday. You and me… everyday.
Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds.
Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I’ve led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough.
Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
Marriage quotes from books and literature
Come, let’s be a comfortable couple and take care of each other! How glad we shall be, that we have somebody we are fond of always, to talk to and sit with.
Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
Oh, Lizzy! do anything rather than marry without affection.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest — blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
I ask you to pass through life at my side—to be my second self, and best earthly companion.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Shakespeare
The sight of lovers feedeth those in love.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It
When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.
William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
Doubt thou the stars are fire – Doubt that the sun doth move – Doubt truth to be a liar – But never doubt I love.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Hear my soul speak. Of the very instant that I saw you, did my heart fly at your service.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
I know no ways to mince it in love, but directly to say ‘I love you.’
William Shakespeare, Henry V
From the Bible
Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the Lord.
Proverbs 18:22
Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house: thy children like olive plants round about thy table.
Psalm 128:3
Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 9:9
How to use these marriage quotes:
- Wedding vows – Use a special quote to capture the perfect expression of your love when you tie the knot.
- Blessings and wishes for newlyweds: Share wisdom for a long and happy marriage with a toast to the couple on their wedding day. For more wedding toast ideas, see the Best Man and Bridesmaid links below.
- Wedding speeches – Add a finishing touch to bridesmaid and best man speeches with a funny or encouraging marriage quote.
- Message for wedding cards and gifts: At a loss for what to say in your greeting card to the new couple? A marriage quote is a fun way to say congratulations.
- Anniversaries: Recognize a marriage that has stood the test of time with a quote in an anniversary card or social media post.
Thank you for reading this list of marriage quotes and sayings. You may also enjoy these wedding toast lists:
By Greg Johnson | Published 6/1/2021
