20

MARRIAGE

 

• ‘Before marriage, a man will lay down his life for you; after marriage he won’t even lay down his newspaper.’
Helen Rowland

• ‘The world has suffered more from the ravages of ill-advised marriages than from virginity.’
Ambrose Bierce

• ‘Many a man owes his success to his first wife and his second wife to his success.’
Jim Backus

• ‘If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.’
Katharine Hepburn

• ‘Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.’
Oscar Wilde

• ‘Women might be able to fake orgasms, but men can fake whole relationships.’
Sharon Stone

• ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you. Snore and you sleep alone.’ Anthony Burgess

• ‘I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell this to my children, they just about throw up.’
Barbara Bush, First Lady, 1989

• ‘No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.’
Honore de Balzac

• ‘An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have; the older she gets the more interested he is in her.’
Agatha Christie

• ‘The most happy marriage I can imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.’
S T Coleridge

• ‘The male is a domestic animal, which, if treated with firmness, can be trained to do most things.’
Jilly Cooper

• ‘Ah Mozart! He was happily married – but his wife wasn’t.’
Victor Borge

• ‘If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.’
Chekhov

• ‘The trouble with some women is that they get all excited about nothing – and then marry him.
Cher

• ‘One survey found that ten per cent of Americans thought Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife…’
Robert Boynton

• ‘For a male and female to live continuously together is… biologically speaking, an extremely unnatural condition.’
Robert Briffault

• ‘Husbands are awkward things to deal with; even keeping them in hot water will not make them tender.’
Mary Buckley

• ‘Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.’
George Bernard Shaw

• ‘The majority of husbands remind me of an orang-utan trying to play the violin.’
Jonathan Carroll.

• ‘If variety is the spice of life, marriage is the big can of leftover Spam.’
Johnny Carson

• ‘Better to have loved a short man than never to have loved a tall.’
David Chambless

• ‘Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.’
G K Chesterton

• ‘Marriage is like a bank account. You put it in, you take it out, you lose interest.’
Irwin Corey

• ‘I’ve sometimes thought of marrying, and then I’ve thought again.’
Noel Coward

• ‘I feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s sixth husband. I know what I’m supposed to do, but I don’t know how to make it interesting.’
Milton Berle

• ‘Marriage is a matter of give and take, but so far I haven’t been able to find anybody who’ll take what I have to give.’
Cass Daley

• ‘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 he’d be dead within a year.’
Bette Davis

• ‘Never go to bed angry. Stay up and fight.’
Phyllis Diller

• ‘It destroys one’s nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.’
Benjamin Disraeli

• ‘Long engagements give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which is never advisable.’
Oscar Wilde

• ‘Honolulu, it’s got everything. Sand for the children, sun for the wife, sharks for the wife’s mother.’
Ken Dodd

• ‘Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.’
Isadora Duncan

• ‘A man’s wife has more power over him than the state has.’
Ralph Waldo Emerson

• ‘Choose a wife by your ear rather than your eye.’
Thomas Fuller, 1732

• ‘Politics doesn’t make strange bedfellows, marriage does.’
Groucho Marx

• ‘Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half-shut afterwards.’
Benjamin Franklin

• ‘Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.’
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• ‘Love is blind and marriage is the institution for the blind.’
James Graham

• ‘If I were a girl, I’d despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.’
Robert Graves

• ‘A man must marry only a very pretty woman in case he should ever want some other man to take her off his hands.’
Sacha Guitry

• ‘Women and cats will do as they please. Men and dogs had better get used to it.’
Robert Heinlein

• ‘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

• ‘Bigamy is one way of avoiding the painful publicity of divorce and the expense of alimony.’
Oliver Herford

• ‘Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious; both are disappointed.’
Oscar Wilde

• ‘Wedding is destiny, and hanging likewise.’
John Heywood

• ‘A man who marries a woman to educate her falls a victim to the same fallacy as the woman who marries a man to reform him.’
Elbert Hubbard

• ‘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 in the house.’
Jean Kerr

• ‘A coward is a hero with a wife, kids and a mortgage.’
Marvin Kitman

• ‘I don’t worry about terrorism. I was married for two years.’
Sam Kinison

• ‘Marriage is a lottery, but you can’t tear up your ticket if you lose.’
F M Knowles

• ‘Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.’
Stephen Leacock

• ‘Harpo, she’s a lovely person. She deserves a good husband. Marry her before she finds one.’
Oscar Levant, to Harpo Marx

• ‘It’s true that I did get the girl, but then my grandfather always said, “Even a blind chicken finds a few grains of corn now and then.”’
Lyle Lovett, after marrying actress Julia Roberts

• ‘Marriages are made in heaven and consummated on Earth.’
John Lyly

• ‘Marriage is a great institution, but who wants to live in an institution?’
Groucho Marx

• ‘The best way to get husbands to do something is to suggest that perhaps they are too old to do it.’
Shirley MacLaine

• ‘In a novel, the hero can lay ten girls and marry a virgin for the finish. In a movie, that is not allowed. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun as he wants, cheating, stealing, getting rich and whipping servants. But you have to shoot him in the end.’
Herman Mankiewicz

• ‘I belong to Bridegrooms Anonymous. Whenever I feel like getting married, they send over a lady in a housecoat and hair curlers to burn my toast for me.’
Dick Martin

• ‘I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.’
Groucho Marx

• ‘Eighty per cent of married men cheat in America. The rest cheat in Europe.’
Jackie Mason

• ‘Perfection is what American women expect to find in their husbands… but English women only hope to find in their butlers.’
W Somerset Maugham

• ‘There’s a way of transferring funds that is even faster than electronic banking. It’s called marriage.’
James Holt McGavran

• ‘Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to become as mediocre as possible.’
Margaret Mead

• ‘When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her.’
Sacha Guitry

• ‘Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn’t, they’d be married too.’
H L Mencken

• ‘I date this girl for two years – and then the nagging starts: “I wanna know your name.”’
Mike Binder

• ‘I recently read that love is entirely a matter of chemistry. That must be why my wife treats me like toxic waste.’
David Bissonette

• ‘Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out.’
Michel de Montaigne

• ‘Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.’
P J O’Rourke

• ‘No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.’
Cesare Pavese

• ‘It doesn’t much signify whom one marries, for one is sure to find out next morning it was someone else.’
Will Rogers

• ‘Before marriage, a man will lie awake all night thinking about something you said; after marriage, he’ll fall asleep before you finish saying it.’
Helen Rowland

• ‘When you see what some girls marry, you realize how they must hate to work for a living.’
Helen Rowland

• ‘Honeymoon: A short period of doting between dating and debting.’
Ray Bandy

• ‘I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage. They’ve experienced pain and bought jewellery.’
Rita Rudner

• ‘To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.’
Arthur Schopenhauer

• ‘We in the industry know that behind every successful screenwriter stands a woman. And behind her stands his wife.’
Groucho Marx

• ‘It is most unwise for people in love to marry.’
George Bernard Shaw

• ‘By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you will become happy, and if you get a bad one you will become a philosopher.’
Socrates

• ‘Marriage: A ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.’
Herbert Spencer

• ‘A husband is what’s left of the lover after the nerve has been extracted.’
Helen Rowland

• ‘I think every woman is entitled to a middle husband she can forget.’
Adela Rogers St John

• ‘Wives are people who feel they don’t dance enough.’
Groucho Marx

• ‘Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.’
Gloria Steinem

• ‘Someone once asked me why women don’t gamble as much as men do and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don’t have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women’s total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.’
Gloria Steinem

• ‘Try praising your wife, even if it does frighten her at first.’
Billy Sunday

• ‘Love is blind – marriage is the eye-opener.’
Pauline Thomason

• ‘Men have a much better time of it than women: for one thing they marry later, for another thing they die earlier.’
H L Mencken

• ‘Whenever I date a guy, I think, Is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?’
Rita Rudner

• ‘God help the man who won’t marry until he finds a perfect woman, and God help him still more if he finds her.’
Benjamin Tillett

• ‘A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.’
Lana Turner

• ‘Marriage isn’t a word… it’s a sentence.’
King Vidor

• ‘Marriage is the one subject on which all women agree and all men disagree.’
Oscar Wilde

• ‘I guess the only way to stop divorce is to stop marriage.’
Will Rogers

• ‘In olden times, sacrifices were made at the altar, a practice which is still very much practised.’
Helen Rowland

• ‘I take my wife everywhere I go. She always finds her way back.’
Henny Youngman

• ‘Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other who never forgets them.’
Ogden Nash

• ‘An ideal wife is one who remains faithful to you but tries to be just as charming as if she weren’t.’
Sacha Guitry

• ‘I should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.’
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

• ‘It does not matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you do not do it in the street and frighten the horses.’
Mrs Patrick Campbell

• ‘A happy home is one in which each spouse grants the possibility that the other may be right, though neither believes it.’
Don Fraser

• ‘I’ve been asked to say a couple of words about my husband, Fang. How about “short” and “cheap”?’
Phyllis Diller

• ‘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’s a real treat.’
Joanne Woodward

• ‘When a girl marries, she exchanges the attentions of many men for the inattention of one.’
Helen Rowland

• ‘The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is sex for money costs less.’
Brendan Francis

• ‘To our wives and sweethearts… and may they never meet.’
Hugo Vickers

• ‘Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.’
Leonardo Da Vinci

• ‘The appropriate age for marriage is around 18 for girls and 37 for men.’
Aristotle

• ‘Instead of getting married again, I’m going to find a woman that I don’t like and just give her the house.’
Rod Stewart

• ‘Marriage is one of the few institutions that allow a man to do as his wife pleases.’
Milton Berle