My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.

RODNEY DANGERFIELD

If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.

KATHARINE HEPBURN

Seldom or never does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crisis. There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

C. G. JUNG

The trouble with some women is that they get all excited about nothing—and then marry him.

CHER

In Hollywood, all the marriages are happy. It's trying to live together afterwards that causes all the problems.

SHELLEY WINTERS

My boyfriend and I broke up. He wanted to get married and I didn't want him to.

RITA RUDNER

Marriage is based on the theory that when a man discovers a brand of beer exactly to his taste he should at once throw up his job and go to work in a brewery.

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

Love is an ideal thing; marriage is a real thing. A confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

In olden times sacrifices were made at the altar—a practice which is still continued.

HELEN ROWLAND

We declare that love cannot exist between two people who are married to each other. For lovers give to each other freely, under no compulsion; married people are in duty bound to give in to each other's desires.

MARIE, COUNTESS OF CHAMPAGNE

The whole point of marriage is to stop you getting anywhere near real life. You think it's a great struggle with the mystery of being. It's more like being smothered in warm cocoa. There's sex, but it's not what you think. Marvellous, for the first fortnight. Then every Wednesday. If there isn't a good late—night concert on the Third. Meanwhile you become a biological functionary. An agent of the great female womb, spawning away, dumping its goods in your lap for succour. Daddy, daddy, we're here and we're expensive,

MALCOM BRADBURY

Pitt the younger was a great British Prime Minister. He saved Europe from Napoleon, he was the pilot who weathered the storm. I don't know whether he'd have done it any better or quicker had he been married.

EDWARD HEATH

I have sacrificed everything in my life that I consider precious in order to advance the political career of my husband.

PAT NIXON

Husbands think we should know where everything is—like the uterus is a tracking device. He asks me, "Roseanne, do we have any Cheetos left?" Like he can't go over to that sofa cushion and lift it himself.

ROSEANNE

Passion, sexual passion, may lead to marriage, but cannot sustain marriage. The purpose of marriage is the raising of children, for which patience, not passion, is the necessary foundation.

EDWARD ABBEY

Venus, a beautiful, good-natured lady, was the goddess of love; Juno, a terrible shrew, the goddess of marriage: and they were always mortal enemies.

JONATHAN SWIFT

A good marriage, if there is such a thing, rejects the company and conditions of love. It tries to imitate those of friendship.

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

I would like to be like my father and all the rest of my ancestors who never married.

MOLIÈRE

Marriage, in life, is like a duel in the midst of a battle.

EDMOND ABOUT

There are some good marriages, but practically no delightful ones.

FRANÇOIS LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

Love is a reciprocity of soul and has a different end and obeys different laws from marriage. Hence one should not take the loved one to wife.

ALESSANDRO PICCOLOMINI

Passion and marriage are essentially irreconcilable. Their origins and their ends make them mutually exclusive. Their co-existence in our midst constantly raises insoluble problems, and the strife thereby engendered constitutes a persistent danger for every one of our social safeguards.

DENIS DE ROUGEMONT

Spouses are impediments to great enterprises.

FRANCIS BACON

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

It is most unwise for people in love to marry.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I feel sure that no girl could go to the altar, and would probably refuse, if she knew all.

QUEEN VICTORIA

I would not marry God.

MAXINE ELLIOTT telegram denying rumors of her marriage

It destroys one's nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.

BENJAMIN DISRAELI

What God hath joined together no man shall put asunder: God will take care of that.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

At the beginning of a marriage ask yourself whether this woman will be interesting to talk to from now until old age. Everything else in marriage is transitory: most of the time is spent in conversation.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

I have certainly seen more men destroyed by the desire to have a wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink or harlots.

W. B. YEATS

Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.

ISADORA DUNCAN

Love is an obsessive delusion that is cured by marriage.

DR. KARL BOWMAN

A word which should be pronounced "mirage."

HERBERT SPENCER

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

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

In our part of the world where monogamy is the rule, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

He had been building one of those piles of thought, as ramshackle and fantastic as a Chinese pagoda, half from words let fall by gentlemen in gaiters, half from the litter in his own mind, about duck shooting and legal history, about the Roman occupation of Lincoln and the relations of country gentlemen with their wives, when, from all this disconnected rambling, there suddenly formed itself in his mind the idea that he would ask Mary to marry him.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Nothing anybody tells you about marriage helps.

MAX SIEGEL

Not all women give most of their waking thoughts to the problem of pleasing men. Some are married.

EMMA LEE

I've sometimes thought of marrying, and then I've thought again.

NOËL COWARD

I cannot see myself as a wife-ugly word.

GRETA GARBO

I was in rare fettle and the heart had touched a new high. I don't know anything that braces one up like finding you haven't got to get married after all.

P. G. WODEHOUSE

The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.

PETER DEVRIES

INTERVIEWER: Aren't you forgetting you're married? MAE WEST: Hmmm-I'm doing my best.

I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.

GEORGE BURNS

Before marriage, a man declares that he would lay down his life to serve you; after marriage, he won't even lay down his newspaper to talk to you.

HELEN ROWLAND

I should never have married, but I didn't want to live without a man. Brought up to respect the conventions, love had to end in marriage. I'm afraid it did.

BETTE DAVIS

Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.

THORNTON WILDER

Take it from me, marriage isn't a word—it's a sentence.

KING VIDOR

Only choose in marriage a woman whom you would choose as a friend if she were a man.

JOSEPH JOUBERT

People marry for a variety of reasons, and with varying results; but to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows—marriage does.

GROUCHO MARX

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

We do not squabble, fight or have rows. We collect grudges. We're in an arms race, storing up warheads for the domestic Armageddon.

HUGH LEONARD

If you want to read about love and marriage you've got to buy two separate books.

ALAN KING

ERIC: She's a lovely girl . . . I'd like to marry her, but her family objects. ERNIE: Her family? ERIC: Yes, her husband and four kids.

ERIC MORECAMBE

ERNIE WISE

Alcestis had exercised a mysterious attraction and then an unmysterious repulsion on two former husbands, the second of whom had to resort to fatal coronary disease to get away from her.

KINGSLEY AMIS

I'd like to get married because I like the idea of a man being required by law to sleep with me every night.

CARRIE SNOW

Marriage is really tough because you have to deal with feelings and lawyers.

RICHARD PRYOR

When a girl marries she exchanges the attentions of many men for the inattention of one.

HELEN ROWLAND

A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished.

ZSA ZSA GABOR

The act of getting married, stripped of the necessity to have a secure setting to raise children, seems to me no less grim than registering your emotions with the government.

HARRY SHEARER

I want a man who's kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?

ZSA ZSA GABOR

Even under the best of circumstances men are hard creatures to trap. Women who flatter themselves into thinking they've trapped one are like people who believe they can get rid of the cockroaches in their kitchen. They're in for a big surprise late one night when they turn on the light.

HARRY SHEARER

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

Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution yet.

MAE WEST

I'd marry again if I found a man who had $15 million and would sign over half of it to me before the marriage, and guarantee that he'd be dead within a year.

BETTE DAVIS

We sleep in separate rooms, we have dinner apart, we take separate vacations—we're doing everything we can to keep our marriage together.

RODNEY DANGERFIELD

I hate to be a failure. I hate and regret the failure of my marriages. I would gladly give all my millions for just one lasting marital success.

J. PAUL GETTY

It is ridiculous to think you can spend your entire life with just one person. Three is about the right number. Yes, I imagine three husbands would do it.

CLARE BOOTHE LUCE

I think every woman is entitled to a middle husband she can forget.

ADELA ROGERS ST. JOHN

LADY ASTOR: If you were my husband, Winston, I'd put poison in your tea. WINSTON CHURCHILL: If I were your husband, Nancy, I'd drink it.

WIFE: Mr. Watt next door blows his wife a kiss every morning as he leaves the house. I wish you'd do that. HUSBAND: But I hardly know the woman!

ALFRED MCFOTE

The chief cause of unhappiness in married life is that people think that marriage is sex attraction, which takes the form of promises and hopes and happiness—a view supported by public opinion and by literature. But marriage cannot cause happiness. Instead, it is always torture, which man has to pay for satisfying his sex urge.

LEO TOLSTOY

Why do you always, when you mention my name in your diaries, speak so ill of me? Why do you want all future generations and our descendants to hold my name in contempt? Are you afraid that your glory after death will be diminished unless you show me to have been your torment and yourself as a martyr, bearing a cross in the form of your wife?

SONYA TOLSTOY in a letter to her husband

In 1910, eighty-two-year-old Leo Tolstoy flees from his wife and dies in a railway station of exposure.

JON WINOKUR

Men and women, women and men. It will never work.

ERICA JONG

There's a story about President and Mrs. Coolidge visiting a poultry show. The guide says to Mrs. Coolidge, "You know, ma'am, the rooster here performs his services up to eight or nine times a day," to which the First Lady replied, "Please see to it that the President is given that information!" A while later the President's party came through the same exhibit and the guide told him, "Sir, Mrs. Coolidge said to be sure to tell you that the rooster there performs his services up to eight or nine times a day." Coolidge thought for a moment and asked, "Same chicken each time?" "No, Mr. President, different chickens each time." "Then see to it that Mrs. Coolidge is given that information!"

ORSON BEAN

In 453, Attila the Hun died from a nosebleed on his wedding night.

JON WINOKUR

If you call him your Master will hear you. Seven bars on the door will not hold him. Seven fires burning bright only bring him delight. You can live the life you dream.

JUDY COLLINS

Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. A lot of people don't have the courage to do it.

HELEN HAYES

I'm at an age where I think more about food than sex. Last week I put a mirror over my dining room table.

RODNEY DANGERFIELD

Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years wrinkle the face, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, self-interest, fear, despai-these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust.

WATTERSON LOWE

A boy becomes an adult three years before his parents think he does, and about two years after he thinks he does.

LEWIS B. HERSHEY

I'm an experienced woman; I've been around . . . Well, all right, I might not've been around, but I've been . . . nearby.

MARY RICHARDS THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW

From birth to age 18, a girl needs good parents, from 18 to 35 she needs good looks, from 35 to 55 she needs a good personality, and from 55 on she needs cash.

SOPHIE TUCKER

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.

G. K. CHESTERTON

The children despise their parents until the age of forty, when they suddenly become just like them—thus preserving the system.

QUENTIN CREWE

Is life so wretched? Isn't it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddied. You are the one who must grow up.

DAG HAMMARSKJÖLD

Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.

GLORIA STEINEM

The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more.

COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH

You grow up the day you have your first real laugh—at yourself.

ETHEL BARRYMORE

The principles of Washington's farewell address are still sources of wisdom when cures for social ills are sought. The methods of Washington's physicians, however, are no longer studied.

THURMAN ARNOLD

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

VOLTAIRE

It is true that I am carrying out various methods of treatment recommended by doctors and dentists in the hope of dying in the remote future in perfect health.

GEORGE SANTAYANA

One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one makes.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Each man's memory is his private literature.

ALDOUS HUXLEY

I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound—if I can remember any of the damn things.

DOROTHY PARKER

By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet.

COLETTE

MRS. MALAPROP: Illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.

RICHARD SHERIDAN

Our memories are card indexes consulted, and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

CYRIL CONNOLLY

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

CLIFTON FADIMAN

When it comes to women, modern men are idiots. They don't know what they want, and so they never want, permanently, what they get. They want a cream cake that is at the same time ham and eggs and at the same time porridge. They are fools. If only women weren't bound by fate to play up to them.

D. H. LAWRENCE

I require three things in a man: he must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.

DOROTHY PARKER

Men are my hobby; if I ever got married I'd have to give it up.

MAE WEST

One good Husband is worth two good wives, for the scarcer things are the more they're valued.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Before marriage, a man declares that he would lay down his life to serve you; after marriage, he won't even lay down his newspaper to talk to you.

HELEN ROWLAND

His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.

MAE WEST

I have a big flaw in that I am attracted to thin, tall, good-looking men who have one common denominator. They must be lurking bastards.

EDNA O'BRIEN

He speaks to me as if I were a public meeting.

QUEEN VICTORIA about Gladstone

I have had my belly full of great men (forgive the expression). I quite like to read about them in the pages of Plutarch, where they don't outrage my humanity. Let us see them carved in marble or cast in bronze, and hear no more about them. In real life they are nasty creatures, persecutors, temperamental, despotic, bitter and suspicious.

GEORGE SAND

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

H. L. MENCKEN

It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.

SALLY KEMPTON

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a little.