Quotes about Matrimony

Wedding of Prince William of Wales and Kate Middleton

Marriage is a lot of things; an alliance, a sacrament, a comedy, or a mistake; but it definitely is not a partnership because that implies equal gain. And every right thinking woman knows the profit in matrimony is by all odds hers. Phyllis McGinley 

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. LA Bruyere 

The wives who are not deserted, but who have to feed and clothe, comfort, scold and advise, are the true objects of commiseration; wives whose existence is given over to a ceaseless vigil of cantankerous affection. William McFee  

Marrying a man is like buying something you’ve been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn’t always go with everything else in the house. Jean Kerr

If you want your spouse to listen and pay strict attention to every word you say, talk in your sleep. Woody Allen 

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century. Mark Twain

Married love between man and woman is bigger than oaths guarded by right of nature. Aeschylus  

There’s one consolation about matrimony. When you look around you can always see somebody who did worse.  Warren H Goldsmith

Well married a man is winged; ill matched he is shackled. Henry Ward Beecher

That is partly why women marry; to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.  Elizabeth Bowen 

The bitterest creature under heaven is the wife who discovers that her husband’s bravery is only bravado, and that his strength is only a uniform, and that his power is a gun in the hands of a fool. Pearl S. Buck 

Matrimony is a good deal like a circus; there is not as much in it as represented in the advertisement. Edgar Watson Howe 

It is a woman’s business to get married as soon as possible, and a man’s to keep unmarried as long as he can. George Bernard Shaw  

Though women are angels, yet wedlock’s the devil. Byron

There isn’t a wife in the world who has not taken the exact measure of her husband, weighed him and settled him in her own mind, and knows him as well as if she had ordered him after designs and specifications of her own. Charles Dudley Warner 

To marry a woman you love and who loves you is to lay a wager with her as to who will stop loving the other first. Alfred Capus

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

A gentleman who had been very unhappy in matrimony, married immediately after his wife died. It was said that this was the triumph of hope over experience. Samuel Johnson 

A good husband is the best sort of plaster for the cure of a young woman’s ailments. Moliere 

Most of the beauty of women evaporates when they achieve domestic happiness at the price of their independence. Cyril Connolly

Many a man that could rule a hundred million strangers with an iron hand is careful to take off his shoes in the front hall when he arrives home late at night. Finley Peter Dunne

More belongs to matrimony than four legs in a bed. Thomas Fuller 

The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity. Goethe

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

There is nothing nobler or 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

There are six requisites in every happy marriage. The first is faith and the remaining five are confidence. Elbert Hubbard

Matrimony was all a woman’s idea, and for man’s acceptance of the pretty yolk it becomes us to be grateful. Phyllis Mc Ginley  

What is wedlock forced but a hell, an age of discord and continual strife? Whereas the contrary brings bliss and is a pattern of celestial peace. Shakespeare 

No man knows what the wife of his bosom is until he has gone with her through the fiery trials of this world. Washington Irving

He that loves not his wife and children feeds a lioness at home and broods a nest of sorrows. Jeremy Taylor

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

When marrying, one should ask oneself this question; do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this woman into your old age?  Nietzsche 

If a woman is to capture the lost companionship with man and child, she must once more forget herself, as she did in the old pioneer days, and follow them into the world. Pearl S. Buck

Matrimony is three parts love and seven parts forgiveness. Langdon Mitchell 

The fickleness of the woman I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me. George Bernard Shaw 

A husband is a man who two minutes after his head touches the pillow is snoring like an overloaded bus. Ogden Nash

In married life three is company and two is none. Oscar Wilde 

Matrimony is tolerable enough in its way if your easygoing and don’t expect too much from it. But it doesn’t bear thinking about. George Bernard Shaw 

It is a matter of life and death for married people to interrupt each other’s stories; for if they did not, they would burst. Logan Pearsall Smith

I read about divorce, and I can’t see why two people can’t get along together in harmony, and I see two people and I can’t see how either of them can live with the other. Franklin P. Adams  

We study ourselves three weeks, we love each other three months, we squabble three years, and we tolerate each other thirty years, and then the children start all over again. Hippolyte Taine 

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies. Oscar Wilde

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Francis Bacon

Quotes about People and Human Nature

Man is an animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. Ambrose Bierce 

It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly. Anatole France

The life force is vigorous. The delight that accompanies it counterbalances all the pains and hardships that confront men. It makes life worth living. Somerset Maugham 

It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen. Aristotle

What does reason demand of a man?  A very easy thing, to live in accord with his own nature. Seneca

It will be generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant examples. Charles Dickens

What characterizes man is the richness and subtlety, the variety and versatility of his nature. Ernst Cassirer 

The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.  James Agate

Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius.  Josh Billings

To educate the masses politically is to make the totality of the nation a reality to each citizen. It is to make the history of the nation part of the personal experience of each of its citizens. Frantz Fanon

A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless. W. H. Auden  

The public prefers to be reassured. There are those whose job this is. There are only too many. Andre Gide 

We don’t cut our nails to disarm ourselves. On the contrary; just to make us look more civilized, so we can hold our own in a far more desperate struggle than the one our ancestors fought with nothing but their claws. Luigi Pirandello  

I have never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.  Alan Bennett

How good is man’s life, the mere living, how fit to employ all the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy. Robert Browning 

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.  Ralph Waldo Emerson

To be natural means to dare to be as immoral as nature is. Nietzsche 

Observe any meetings of people, and you will always find their eagerness and impetuosity rise or fall in proportion to their numbers. Lord Chesterfield 

Society is always trying in some way or another to grind us down to a single flat surface. Oliver Wendell Holmes 

The people like neither the true nor the simple; they like novels and charlatans. Edmond and Jules De Concourt  

A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.  Adlai Stevenson

Who can endure the crassness of the common herd? Are folk not presumptuous, warped and absurd; putting barriers between self and the thing they should see, self-measuring by self the whole community. LA Fontaine  

We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of god. Humanity is just a work in progress. Tennessee Williams 

None of us can estimate what we do, when we do it from instinct. Luigi Pirandello 

Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the state. Emerson

Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life. Edward Dahlberg 

I guess there is about as much human nature in some folks as there is in others, if not more. Edward Noyes Westcott 

Before man made us citizens; great nature made us men. James Russell Lowell 

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death; multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror. D. H. Lawrence 

We hold the view that the people make the best judgment in the long run. John F. Kennedy  

Alas for this mad melancholy beast man. What fantasies 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.  Nietzsche 

Scenery is fine, but human nature is finer. John Keats

Averageness is a quality we must put up with. Men march toward civilization in column formation, and by the time the van has learned to admire the masters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from the totem pole. Frank Moore Colby

Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them. Nathaniel Hawthorne 

In the crowd herd or gang, it is a mass-mind that operates; which is to say, a mind without subtlety, a mind without compassion, a mind finally uncivilized. Robert Lindner  

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. Tagore

The citizen is a variety of man; whether a degenerate or a primitive variety. Remy De Gourmont

We ride through life on the beast within us. Beat the animal, but you can’t make it think.  Luigi Pirandello

Man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. Herman Melville

Nature is rarely allowed to enter the sacred portals of civilized society. Hendrik Willem Van Loon 

We have been god-like in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves. Arnold Toynbee 

Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. Lord Chesterfield 

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

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.  Oscar Wilde

The social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to real star patterns. Thomas Hardy

I am the people, the mob, the mass, the crowd. Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?  Carl Sandburg

Know, man has all that nature has, but more; and in that more lie all his hopes of good. Matthew Arnold 

Whenever man forgets that man is an animal, the result is always to make him less humane. Joseph Wood Krutch 

By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to wide apart. Confucius 

Man is a passion which brings a will into play, which works intelligence. Henri Frederic Amiel 

It is obvious that the best qualities in man must atrophy in a standing-room-only environment. Stewart L. Udall

Quotes about God

Abstract of a Godly image 

God’s merits are so transcendent that it is not surprising his faults should be in reasonable proportion.  Samuel Butler

One can search the brain with a microscope and not find the mind, and can search the stars with a telescope and not find God. Gustave White

There is a sort of transcendental ventriloquism through which men can be made to believe that something which was said on earth came from heaven.  George Christoph Lichtenberg   

Let us weigh the gain and the loss, in wagering that god is. Consider these alternatives: if you win, you win all; if you lose, you lose nothing.  Do not hesitate, then, to wager that he is. Pascal

My own mind is the direct revelation which I have from god and far least liable to mistake in telling his will of any revelation. Emerson

An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of, we blind them as quickly as possible.   Russell Hoban

As the poet said, “Only God can make a tree” probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.   Woody Allen

Death is God’s way of telling you not to be such a wise guy. Majel Bloom

We are ignorant of the beyond because this ignorance is the condition of our own life.  Just as ice cannot know fire except by melting, by vanishing.  Jules Renard

Dionysius the Elder, being asked whether he was at leisure, he replied, “God forbid that it should ever befall me!”  Plutarch

The certainty of a god giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity.  Albert Camus 

Even God lends a hand to honest boldness.  Menander

Forgetfulness is a gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.  Ambrose Bierce 

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains; it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.   C S Lewis

Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.  Socrates

I’m not denying’ that women are foolish; God Almighty made them to match men.  George Eliot

No religion has ever given a picture of deity which men could have imitated without the grossest immorality.  Santayana  

I figure that if God actually does exist, He’s big enough to understand an honest difference of opinion.   Isaac Asimov

It is god that accomplishes all term to hopes, who overtakes the flying eagle, out-passes the dolphin in the sea; who bends under his strength the man with thoughts too high.  Pindar 

The skirts of gods drag in our mud. We feel the touch and take it to be a kiss.  Christopher Fry

Theology is an attempt to explain a subject by men who do not understand it. The intent is not to tell the truth but to satisfy the questioner.  Elbert Hubbard 

If a small child asks you where rain comes from, I think a reasonable response is simply that “God is crying.” And, if he asks you why God is crying, the only possible answer is “Probably because of something you did.”  Stephen H. Pinter

In God’s wilderness lies the hope of the world; the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilisation drops off and wounds heal ere we are aware.  John Muir

No one has the capacity to judge god. We are drops in that limitless ocean of mercy. Mohandas K. Gandhi 

Earth’s crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with god. Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

The Bible is the one supreme source of revelation of the meaning of life, the nature of God and spiritual nature and need of men. It is the only guide of life which really leads the spirit in the way of peace and salvation.   Woodrow Wilson

The gods gave man fire and he invented fire engines. They gave him love and he invented marriage.  Jen Jones Proverbs

The superior man is quiet and calm, waiting for the appointments of heaven, while the mean man walks in dangerous paths, looking for lucky occurrences.  Confucius   

The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being.  Emerson 

When men and women cease to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They believe in anything.  G. K. Chesterton

Everyone, whether he is self-denying or self-indulgent, is seeking after the beloved. Every place may be the shrine of love, whether it be mosque or synagogue. Hafiz  

Our love for god is tested by the question of whether we seek him or his gifts. Ralph W. Sockman 

Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They worship us and are always bothering us to do something for them. Oscar Wilde

The man whom heaven helps has friends enough. Euripides 

We should find god in what we do know, not in what we don’t; not in outstanding problems, but in those we have already solved. Dietrich Bonhoeffer 

Every man thinks god is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is. Jean Anouilh 

If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none.  If there is grandeur in you, you will find grandeur in porters and sweeps. Emerson

God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and want. Heraclitus 

The theologian who has no joy in his work is not a theologian at all. Sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking are intolerable in this science. Karl Barth 

The way of god in complex, he is hard for us to predict. He moves the pieces and they come somehow into a kind of order. Euripides 

I found him in the shining of the stars. I marked him in the flowering of his fields, but in his ways with men I find him not. Alfred Lord Tennyson 

No reason can be given for the nature of god, because that nature is the ground of rationality.  Alfred North Whitehead 

If God did not exist, it would be necessary for humankind to invent him. Voltaire

The cure for false theology is mother-wit.  Forget your books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour. Emerson 

Do not speak of god much. After a very little conversation on the highest nature, thought deserts us and we run into formalism. Emerson

What is the meaning of life? That was all; a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with the years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.  Virginia Woolf

It is not for me to attempt to fathom the inscrutable workings of Providence.   Earl of Birkenhead

To see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that god is not rich. He keeps up appearances, it is true, but I feel the pinch. He gives a revolution as a merchant, whose credit is low, gives a ball. Victor Hugo

You cannot plumb the depths of the human heart, nor find out what a man is thinking; yet how do you expect to search out god, who made all these things, and find out his mind or comprehend his thoughts?  Bible; Judith 8.14

It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all god will not help him. H. L. Mencken 

Your idol is shattered in the dust to prove that god’s dust is greater than your idol. Tagore

There are many scapegoats for our blunders, but the most popular one is providence.   Mark Twain

If every great gnat that flies were an archangel, all that could but tell me that there is a god; and the poorest worm that creeps tells me that.  John Donne 

If god were not a necessary being of himself, he might seem to be made for the use and benefit of men.  John Tillotson 

Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.  Alfred Lord Tennyson 

Unloose the cords of thine heart, and consider not the sky’s secret; for the thought of no geometrician hath ever untied that knot. Hafiz 

Our dream dashes itself against the great mystery like a wasp against a window pane.  Less merciful than men, god never opens the window.  Jules Renard

Instead of complaining that god had hidden himself, you will give him thanks for revealing so much of himself. Pascal

Quotes about Judgment

Judges Wooden gavel

It is not likely that any complete life has ever been lived which was not a failure in the secret judgement of the person that lived it. Mark Twain

Nothing, it appears to me, is of greater value in a man than the power of judgment; and the man who has may be compared to a chest filled with books, for he is the son of nature and the father of art. Pietro Aretino 

A much-talking judge is like an ill-tuned cymbal. Francis Bacon

An English judge, growing weary of the barrister’s long-winded summation, leaned over the bench and remarked, “I’ve heard your arguments, Sir Geoffrey, and I’m none the wiser!” Sir Geoffrey responded, “That may be, m’Lord, but at least you’re better informed!”  Unknown

We cannot judge what we love or have not loved; but we can of what we no longer love. Benson Meas 

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity. G. K. Chesterton

Everyone complains of his memory, no one of his judgement. La Rochefoucauld

For one crime which is expiated in prison ten thousand are committed thoughtlessly by those who condemn. Henry Miller

Men, generally going with the stream, seldom judge for themselves; and purity of taste is almost as rare as talent. Voltaire 

He who is intoxicated with wine will be sober again in the course of the night, but he who is intoxicated by the cup-bearer will not recover his senses until the day of judgement.  Saadi

There is a justice, but we do not always see it. Discreet, smiling, it is there, at one side, a little behind injustice, which makes a big noise. Jules Renard 

It is one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination. George Santayana 

Justice is the very last thing of all wherewith the universe concerns itself. It is equilibrium that absorbs its attention. Maurice Maeterlinck 

It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is a proper judge of it.  Oscar Wilde

Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than the torture of laws. Francis Bacon 

When you cannot be just through virtue, be so through pride. Eugenio Maria De Hostos

Every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment. Emerson

It is impossible to be just if one is not generous. Joseph Roux 

It is not permitted to the most equitable of men to be a judge in his own cause.  Pascal

What makes it so difficult to do justice to others is, that we are hardly sensible of merit, unless it falls within our own views and line of pursuit; and where this is the case, it interferes with our own pretensions. William Hazlitt

Statistics are no substitute for judgement.  Henry Clay

Judges commonly are elderly men, and are more likely to hate at sight any analysis to which they are not accustomed, and which disturbs repose of mind, than to fall in love with novelties. Oliver Wendell Holmes

Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong.  Adolph Hitler

Such as every man is inwardly so he judges outwardly. Thomas A Kempis

A great deal may be done by severity, more by love, but most by clear discernment and impartial justice. Goethe

To an incompetent judge I must not lie, but I may be silent; to a competent I must answer. John Donne

The judge: Now, as we begin, I must ask you to banish all present information and prejudice from your minds, if you have any…  Source: Courtroom transcript

He, who the sword of heaven will bear, should be as holy as severe. Shakespeare 

Keep alive the light of justice, and much that men say in blame will pass you by. Euripides 

The judgment is a utensil proper for all subjects, and will have an oar in everything. Montaigne 

Our natural egoism leads us to judge people by their relations to ourselves. We want them to be certain things to us, and for us that is what they are; because the rest of them are no good to us, we ignore it. Somerset Maugham 

Many have justice in their hearts, but slowly it is let fly, for it comes not without council to the bow. Dante

There are two kinds of lawyers, those that know the law and those that know the judge. Unknown

He, who treats his friends and enemies alike, has neither love nor justice. Robert G. Ingersoll 

The victim to too severe a law is considered as a martyr rather than a criminal. Charles Caleb Colton 

There is an ancient saying; famous among men that they should not judge fully of a man’s life before his death, whether it should be called blessed or wretched. Sophocles

I have the greatest respect for the judiciary, as fine a lot I’ve come across and indignant men as you’ll find anywhere. Finney Peter Dunne 

We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgement of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad. Thomas Carlyle

You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.  Joseph Conrad

It’s perfectly obvious that somebody’s responsible and somebody’s innocent. Otherwise Justice makes no sense at all. Ugo Betti 

The worthy administrators of justice are like a cat set to take care of a cheese, lest it should be gnawed by the mice. One bite of the cat does more damage to the cheese than twenty mice can do. Voltaire

We easily enough confess in others an advantage of courage, strength, experience, activity, and beauty; but an advantage in judgment we yield to none. Montaigne  

Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused. Max Beerbohm 

Fast and firm justice usually contains an element of prejudice. Unknown 

The trial is not fair where affection is judge. Thomas Fuller

In matters of government, justice means force as well as virtue. Napoleon