Mark & Julie with daughters (2011)Some of these wedding day quotes and poems would make wonderful readings for a ceremony. Used as they are, or adapted to suit, they can make your day extra special and memorable. Having a reading during your ceremony is also a great way to involve a family member or friend, asking them to do a reading for you makes them an important part of your day.
Your chosen words are significant, as they express your personal views on love and marriage to all of the closest people in your lives, who are there to witness and celebrate your special day with you. Your choice of words are also a way of making your ceremony unique and memorable for your guests.
There are also shorter quotes about the wedding day on this page, along with more inspirational words and poems from unknown sources on the Wedding Sayings page.
Quotes are listed alphabetically on surname/source
Wedding Day Quotes: A
Aesop 620BC – 564BC
Union gives strength.
Arabic Blessing
You are my friend. And a friend is one to whom one may pour out all the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping and with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away.
Wedding Day Quotes: B
Robert Browning 1812 – 1889
Grow old along with me. The best is yet to be.
Buddhist Marriage Teaching (adapted)
There is nothing without a cause. The coming together of this man and woman is not an accident; it is the foreordained result of numerous previous lives. This bond cannot be made less or broken. In the time ahead, this joyous occasion will arrive as surely as the morning even though difficult times will arrive as inevitably as the darkening night sky. When things go joyously, take the time to meditate. When things cause you sadness, take the time to meditate. To only say the words ‘love and compassion’ comes easily, but to know that love and compassion are dependent on perseverance and patience is not easy. If you remember this, your marriage will have strength and be everlasting.
Wedding Day Quotes: E
George Eliot 1819 – 1880
What greater thing is there for two human Souls than to feel that they are joined for life. To strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting.
Wedding Day Quotes: F
James Dillet Freeman 1912 – 2003
Blessing For A Marriage
May your marriage bring you all the exquisite excitements a marriage should bring, and may life grant you also patience, tolerance, and understanding.
May you always need one another – not so much to fill your emptiness as to help you to know your fullness.
A mountain needs a valley to be complete; the valley does not make the mountain less, but more; and the valley is more a valley because it has a mountain towering over it. So let it be with you and you.
May you need one another, but not out of weakness.
May you want one another, but not out of lack.
May you entice one another, but not compel one another.
May you embrace one another, but not out encircle one another.
May you succeed in all important ways with one another, and not fail in little graces.
May you look for things to praise, often say, “I love you!” and take no notice of small faults. If you have quarrels that push you apart, may both of you hope to have good sense enough to take the first step back.
May you enter into the mystery which is the awareness of one another’s presence – no more physical than spiritual, warm and near when you are side by side, and warm and near when you are in separate rooms or even distant cities.
May you have happiness, and may you find it making one another happy.
May you have love, and may you find it loving one another.
Wedding Day Quotes: G
Kahlil Gibran 1883 – 1931
Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of life can contain your hearts. And stand together yet not too near together. For pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
Oliver Goldsmith 1730 – 1774
I chose my wife, as she did her wedding gown…not for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well.
Wedding Day Quotes: H
Robert Herrick 1592 – 1674
And as this round (ring) is nowhere found to flaw, or else to sever. So let our love as endless prove and pure as gold forever.
Wedding Day Quotes: M
Christopher Marlowe 1564 – 1593
Come live with me and be my love and we will all the pleasures prove.
Thomas Moore
Marriage is the 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.
Wedding Day Quotes: N
Native American Love Blessing
Now you will feel no rain for each of you will be shelter to the other. Now you will feel no cold for each of you will be warmth to the other. Now there is no more loneliness for each of you will be companion to the other. Now you are two persons but there is only one life before you.
May beauty surround you both in your journey ahead and through the years. May happiness be your companion to the place where the river meets the sun. And may your days be good and long upon the Earth.
May the sun bring you new energy by day. May the moon softly restore you by night. May the rain wash away your worries. May the breeze blow new strength into your beings. And all the days of your lives may you walk gently through the world and know its beauty.
Treat yourselves and each other with respect. And remind yourselves often of what brought you together. Give the highest priority to the tenderness, gentleness and kindness that your connection deserves.
When frustration, difficulty and fear assail your relationship, as they threaten all relationships at one time or another, remember to focus on what is right between you, not only on the part that seems wrong. In this way you can ride out the storms when clouds hide the face of the sun in your lives, remembering that even if you lose sight of it for a moment the sun is still there. And if each of you takes responsibility for the quality of your life together, it will be marked with abundance and delight.
When evening falls there you will both be. You’ll take each other’s hands and turn together to look at the road you have travelled to reach this, the hour of your happiness. It stretches behind you even as the future lies ahead. A long and winding road whose every turn means discovery.
Old hopes – new laughter – shared tears.
The adventure has just begun.
Paul & Emma (2002)Wedding Day Quotes: S
William Shakespeare 1564 – 1616
Now join hands, and with your hands, your hearts.
Sydney Smith 1883 – 1969
Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated, often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.
Wedding Day Quotes: T
Tao Te Ching (adapted)
Your love is from life’s great mystery. It lies beneath a great quiet lake. It is like the deep truth of a dark well. Your love is purity and coolness. You have no need to make waves in the water. You have no need to dig another well. You only have need to watch yourself with clarity and drink deeply from your love.
Leo Tolstoy 1828 – 1910
What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.
TV
Good Witch
They’re about to say I Do. Three little letters. Two little words. It’s the simplest part of the day, but there is nothing simple about the things that will remain unsaid.
I Do means – I Do know I could be hurt, but I’m ready to be healed with you. It means I Do want to try, even when the fear of failure holds me back and I Do not know the future, but I’m ready to be surprised along the way. And I Do means I Do want your love and I Do give you mine and nothing we do will ever be the same because you and I will be doing it all together.
NUMB3RS
There are fundamental forces in physics: electromagnetism, strong nuclear interaction, weak nuclear interaction and gravity… We’ve been talking here about the forces that bind the Universe. But what binds humans? Love. Powerful in small places, yet with profound effect in distance. Love defies time, outliving both its source and its object. Love is faster then light, for light requires time in order to travel through space, but love reaches its object instantaneously. Love journeys forever, into infinity, and it’s here, binding together two lives
London Wedding (1944)My mother’s family were evacuated to Oxford during the war. In 1944 her father took her back to London for a family wedding. Apart from having a new outfit for the occasion her main memory of that day was the sights and smells of a bombed London. She is the little girl in front of the bride and her father is on the far left.
