These inspirational marriage sayings are thoughtful words of wisdom about marriage that can be used to personalize cards or gifts. They are useful for every wedding anniversary from the very first to the golden anniversary or, if so blessed, even later anniversaries.
Photo: My parents on their Golden Wedding Anniversary in 2008. Behind them is a photo-board of their years together, also with telegrams from their wedding day (which had to be explained to the younger ones!)
Marriage sayings are listed alphabetically surname/source
Unknown sources are at the bottom of the page
Marriage Sayings: A
Joseph Addison 1672 – 1719
A good marriage in it… all the pleasures of a friendship, all the enjoyments of sense and reason, and indeed all the sweets of life.
Marriage Sayings: B
Honore de Balzac 1799 – 1850
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the Soul.
William Blake 1757 – 1827
She who dwells with me whom I have loved with such communion, that no place on Earth can ever be solitude to me.
Amy Bloom 1953
Marriage is not the ritual or an end, it is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and choice of partner.
Robert Brault
A good marriage is.. Each for the other and two against the world.
Sometimes a couple stays together for the sake of the kids.. Two kids who pledged to be forever true.
The older I get, the less time I want to spend with the part of the human race that didn’t marry me.
Marriage Sayings: D
Hari Dass
Husband and wife are like the two equal parts of a soybean. If the two parts are put under the earth separately, they will not grow. The soybean will grow only when the parts are covered by the skin. Marriage is the skin which covers each of them and makes them one.
Benjamin Disraeli 1804 – 1881
I have lived long enough to know that the evening glow of love has its own riches and splendour.
Robert C. Dodds 1989
The goal in marriage is not to think alike, but to think together.
Marriage Sayings: E
George Eliot 1819 – 1880
What greater thing is there for two human Souls than to feel that they are joined… to beat one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories.
Marriage Sayings: F
John Florio 1553 – 1625
A good husband makes a good wife.
Jane Fonda 1937
Well, what is a relationship? It’s about two people having tremendous weaknesses and vulnerabilities, like we all do, and one person being able to strengthen the other in their areas of vulnerability, and vice versa. You need each other. You complete each other, passion and romance aside.
Muriel Fox 1928
Partnership, not dependence, is the real romance in marriage.
Marriage Sayings: G
Kahlil Gibran 1883 – 1931
Let there be spaces in your togetherness.
Marriage Sayings: H
Harville Hendrix
Marriage is not a static state between two unchanging people. Marriage is a psychological and spiritual journey that begins in the ecstasy of attraction, meanders through a rocky stretch of self-discovery, and culminates in the creation of an intimate, joyful, lifelong union.
Audrey Hepburn 1929 – 1993
The best thing to hold onto in life is… each other.
Oliver Wendell Holmes 1809 – 1894
Where we love, is home. Home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
Homor
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.
Marriage Sayings: J
Robert A. Johnson
The real relatedness between two people is experienced in the small tasks they do together: the quiet conversation when the day’s upheavels are at rest, the soft word of understanding, the daily companionship, the encouragement offered in a difficult moment, the small gift when least expected, the spontaneous gesture of love.
Marriage Sayings: K
Nicole Kidman 1967
Every day there is a compromise. Living with somebody requires a lot of understanding. But I love being married. I really love it.
Marriage Sayings: L
William James Lampton 1859 – 1917
Same old slippers – Same old rice – Same old glimpse of paradise
Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1906 – 2001
The web of marriage is made by propinquity in the day to day living, side by side, looking outward and working in the same direction. It is woven in space and in time of the substance of life itself.
When the heart is flooded with love there is no room in it for fear, for doubt, for hesitation. And it is this lack of fear that makes for the dance. When each partner loves so completely that he has forgotten to ask himself whether he is loved in return; when he only knows that he loves and is moving to music – then, and then only, are two people able to dance perfectly in time to the same rhythm.
Martin Luther 1483 – 1546
Let the wife make the husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave.
Marriage Sayings: M
George Macdonald 1824 – 1905
One of the good things that come of a true marriage is, that there is one face which changes come without you seeing them; or rather, there is one face which you can see the same, through all the shadows which years have gathered upon it.
Andre Maurois 1885 – 1967
A happy marriage is a long conversation… that seems all too short.
Mignon McLaughlin 1913 – 1983
A successful marriage requires falling in love many times… always with the same person.
Dave Meurer
A great marriage is not when the ‘perfect couple’ come together. It is when an imperfect couple learns to enjoy their differences.
John Milton 1608 – 1674
Hail wedded love, mysterious law, true source of human happiness.
Moliere 1622 – 1673
Love is often a fruit of marriage.
Thomas Moore
Marriage is an ethnic weaving together of families, of two Souls with their individual fates and destinies, of time and eternity. Everyday life married to the timeless mysteries of the Soul.
Robert Muller 1923 – 2010
Love is the most ecstatic intensive consciousness of the cosmic forces of the Universe. This is why in all religions, marriage is a sacrament, a Divine Phenomenon.
What cosmic currents can pass through the holding of hands and communion of bodies of two beings in love!
Marriage Sayings: P
Gene Perret
Our wedding was many years ago… The celebration continues to this day.
John Pierrakos
Marriage is sought and kept alive by a deep yearning to know another, and be known by another.
Proverb
Married couples, who love each other, tell each other a thousand things without talking.
My maternal grandparents, Alfred & JennieMarriage Sayings: Q
Robert Quiller
A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.
Marriage Sayings: R
David Reuben
A marriage is like a long trip in a tiny row boat: if one passenger starts to rock the boat, the other has to steady it, otherwise, they will go to the bottom together.
Rainer Rilke 1875 – 1926
A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other, guardian of his Soul.
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings, infinite distances continue, a wonderful living, side by side, can grow.
Denis de Rougemont 1906 – 1985
A life allied with mine, for the rest of our lives… that is the miracle of marriage.
Marriage Quotes: S
Simone Signoret 1921 – 1985
Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.
Anthony Storr 1920 – 2001
If we do not look to marriage as the principal source of happiness, fewer marriages would end in tears.
Marriage Sayings: T
Mark Twain 1835 – 1910
A marriage makes of two fractional lives a whole; it gives to two purposeless lives a work and doubles the strength of each to perform it. It gives to two questioning natures a reason for living and something to live for.
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 or a century.
Marriage Quotes: V
Stephen Verney 1919 – 2009
When two people fall in love they seek to possess the object of their desire and to be united with it and to hold on to it forever. In the confident illusion that this will happen a bride and groom may promise on their wedding day ‘to love and to cherish till death us do part,’ but from the first day of the honeymoon, they will discover that husbands and wives can not possess each other.
Then over the years they may learn, as they clash and quarrel and forgive, to respect each other as unique persons and to set each other free.
Peter De Vries 1910
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.
Marriage Sayings: W
Hugh Walpole
The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one’s relationship has a growing depth, beauty and joy as the years increase.
This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing, it cannot be found by looking for it, or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of Divine accident and the most wonderful of all things in life.
Katherine Whitehorn 1928
A good marriage is like Dr Who’s Tardis: small and banal from the outside, but spacious and interesting from within.
Marianne Williamson 1952
A relationship is not meant to be the joining at the hip of two emotional invalids. The purpose of a relationship is not for two incomplete people to become one, but rather, for two complete people to join together for the greater glory of God.
Relationships are part of a vast plan for our enlightenment, the Holy Spirit’s blueprint by which each individual Soul is led to greater awareness and expanded love. Relationships are the Holy Spirit’s laboratories in which He brings together people who have the maximal opportunity for mutual growth.
Ashley Willis
A strong marriage rarely has two strong people at the same time. It is a husband and wife who take turns being strong for each other in the moments when the other feels weak.
Marriage Sayings:
Unknown Source
A healthy relationship will never require you to sacrifice your happiness, your family and friends, your dreams or your dignity.
Marriages are made in Heaven.
No matter how old you both get, never stop holding hands, never stop dancing and never stop saying “I love you.”
No relationship is all sunshine, but two people can share one umbrella and survive the storm together.
Two things doth prolong thy life… a quiet heart and a loving wife.
