Only fools think in terms of legality; otherwise, love is enough. And I am not against marriage – I am for love. If love becomes your marriage, good; but don’t hope that marriage can bring love. That is not possible. Love can become a marriage. You have to work very consciously to transform your love into a marriage.
Osho
One advantage of marriage is that, when you fall out of love with him or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you fall in again.
Judith Viorst
One should marry only when one is wise enough. Marriage is not for young people. For young people is to fool around. Marriage is for those who have experienced life in many ways, who have seen all the colors, the whole spectrum of it, and are now ready to settle.
Osho
The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.
Brendan Behan
The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.
Peter De Vries
The first thing is love: love deeply. If you have been with a person for a few years, in deep love, and you have experienced all the joys and all the miseries, and still you decide to be with the person, then marriage is okay. Because marriage is only a legal arrangement, it cannot make anything more beautiful than it is. It can only make it ugly, it cannot beautify it. Once it is settled legally, once you start taking each other for granted, things will start going down rather than rising high.
Osho
The man who says his wife can’t take a joke, forgets that she took him.
Oscar Wilde
The new marriage is failing because the new marriage is simply a reaction to the old marriage. It is not out of understanding, but only out of reaction, revolt — ‘love marriage.’ You don’t know what love is. You simply see some beautiful face, you see some beautiful body and you think, ‘My God, I am in love!’ This love is not going to last, because after two days, seeing the same face for twenty-four hours a day, you will get bored. The same body… you have explored the whole topography; now there is nothing to explore. Exploring the same geography again and again, you feel like an idiot. What is the point? This love affair, this love marriage is failing, it has already failed. The reason is that you don’t know how to wait so that love can happen.
Osho
The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret.
Henny Youngman
There is so little difference between husbands you might as well keep the first.
Adela Rogers St. John
There is a tremendous desire and longing for love, but love needs great awareness. Only then can it reach its highest climax — and that highest climax IS marriage. It has nothing to do with law. It is a merging of two hearts into totality. It is the functioning of two persons in synchronicity — that is marriage.
Osho
To avoid mistakes and regrets, always consult your wife before engaging in a flirtation.
E.W. Howe
To keep your marriage brimming, With love in the loving cup, Whenever you’re wrong admit it; Whenever you’re right shut up.
Ogden Nash
You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly.
Sam Keen
You have not looked at the poor woman for years, for the simple reason that marriage makes things so certain. Marriage makes things so dead and dull. Marriage takes all surprise and wonder away. Marriage makes you take your wife for granted, your husband for granted. What is the need to look at your wife? She will be there tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and forever. You look at people when you know you may not be able to look at them again. Marriage kills; it makes something tremendously beautiful very ugly.
Osho
We have the greatest pre-nuptial agreement in the world. It’s called love.
Gene Perret
What do marriage vows show? They show that you may want to separate sometime in the future. If there is love between two people, the thought of taking vows never arises. This is only an indication of the absence of love. People do not marry out of love; they marry out of fear. If there is love on this earth, marriage will become redundant. When love is not, marriage is a must. We make arrangements for that which we cannot do. We make rules for that which we are not sure of.
Osho
When a man opens the car door for his wife, it’s either a new car or a new wife.
Prince Philip
When marrying, ask yourself this question; Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Why does a woman work ten years to change a man’s habits and then complain that he’s not the man she married?
Barbra Streisand
Marriage is an attempt to solve problems together which you didn’t even have when you were on your own.
Eddie Cantor
Marriage is an institution that teaches a man regularity, frugality, temperance, forbearance and many other splendid virtues he would not need had he stayed single.
Osho
Marriage has made love disappear badly, marriage has made love disappear from the earth. Because for other considerations marriage is arranged – money, finance, family, prestige, astrology – all absurd. They have nothing to do with the heart of the two persons who are going to be married. So marriage is almost always a failure; only in rare accidents it is not so – but they are accidents, exceptions. They cannot be counted. Marriage is always on the rocks, because it is for wrong reasons. Only love can become the foundation of a real marriage, there is no other way. Because there is no other way to find that your wave length is exactly the same as the other’s, that you vibrate in the same way as the other. There is no other way to find it out.
Osho
Marriage itself never destroys anything. Marriage simply brings out whatsoever is hidden in you – it brings it out. If love is hidden behind you, inside you, marriage brings it out. If love was just a pretension, just a bait, then sooner or later it has to disappear. And then your reality, your ugly personality comes up. Marriage simply is an opportunity, so whatsoever you had to bring out will come out. I am not saying that love is destroyed by marriage. Love is destroyed by people who don’t know how to love. Love is destroyed because in the first place love is not. You have been living in a dream. Reality destroys that dream. Otherwise love is something eternal, part of eternity. If you grow, if you know the art, and you accept the realities of love-life, then it goes on growing every day. Marriage becomes a tremendous opportunity to grow into love.
Osho
Marriage is not a natural phenomenon. It is artificial, arbitrary. And when it disappears you cannot do anything to bring it back. You can pretend, but that pretension makes you a hypocrite. And your pretension cannot deceive the woman, because she has known your love and the pretension cannot become the substitute. The only way is to separate – in friendship, because you have given each other so much.
Osho
Marriage is a totally different phenomenon: it is the climax of love. Then it is good. I am not against marriage – I am for the REAL marriage. I am against the false, the pseudo, that exists. But it is an arrangement. It gives you a certain security, safety, occupation. It keeps you engaged. Otherwise, it gives you no enrichment, it gives you no nourishment.
Osho
My husband and I have never considered divorce… murder sometimes, but never divorce.
Joyce Brothers
My wife and I have the secret to making a marriage last. Two times a week, we go to a nice restaurant, a little wine, good food….. She goes Tuesdays, I go Fridays.
Henry Youngman
No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes she were not.
H. L. Mencken
Love marriage’ came into existence but is not going to survive, for the simple reason that love comes, happens, and one day suddenly goes. It was not in your hands to bring it; neither is it in your hands to keep it. The old marriage failed because the insistence was that you should love your wife, you should love your husband. It was a ‘should’. And you could not even conceive how you could love; at the most you could pretend, you could act. But love is not a pretension, is not an acting. You cannot do anything. You are absolutely powerless as far as love is concerned. The old marriage failed. The new marriage is failing because the new marriage is simply a reaction to the old marriage. It is not out of understanding, but only out of reaction, revolt – ‘love marriage.’
Osho
Marriage almost always never happens, because marriage means the celebration of togetherness. It is not a license. No registry office can give you marriage; no priest can give it to you as a gift. It is a tremendous revolution in the being, it is a great transformation in your very style of life, and it can happen only when you celebrate togetherness, when the other is no longer felt as the other, when you no longer feel yourself as I. When the two are not really two, a bridge has happened, they have become one in a certain sense. Physically they remain two, but as far as the innermost being is concerned, they have become one. They may be two poles of one existence but they are not two. A bridge exists. That bridge gives you glimpses of togetherness. It is one of the rarest things to come across a marriage. People live together because they cannot live alone. Remember this: because they cannot live alone, that is why they live together. To live alone is uncomfortable, to live alone is uneconomical, to live alone is difficult, that is why they live together. The reasons are negative.
Osho
Marriage exists as an institution of exploitation, it is not togetherness. That is why no happiness comes out of it as a flowering. It cannot. Out of the roots of exploitation how can ecstasy be born?
Osho
Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open.
George Bernard Shaw
It is sometimes essential for a husband and a wife to quarrel – they get to know each other better.
Goethe
Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.
Benjamin Franklin
Let the wife make the husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave.
Martin Luther
Love in marriage should be the accomplishment of a beautiful dream, and not, as it too often is, the end.
Alphonse Karr
Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.
Ellen Key
Love affairs have been failing, and parents feel very happy. People come to me and they say, ‘Look, in the West love affairs have been failing. Then why are you against marriage?’ they ask me. Love affairs are failing because first the marriage was arranged by the astrologer, then it was arranged by the parents, and now it is being arranged by biology, by instinct. You suddenly feel that you like a woman, but you don’t know how long this is going to last and you are not even aware why you like her. You are not even alert to what it is in you that likes her. Maybe it is just her hairstyle. Now, are you going to get married to a hairstyle? You can get married, but tomorrow morning when you see her hair disheveled you will be at a loss; ‘Is this the same woman I fell in love with?’ How long can you be interested in the hairstyle? Soon you will get fed up. The same hairstyle again and again — the whole day, twenty-four hours a day…!
Osho
People are falling in love because a certain man has a certain type of nose. People are falling in love with fragments! Nobody is bothered about the totality of the person — and it is a vast thing. The nose does not count for much — after two days you won’t look at it at all. Or the color, or the shape, or the proportion of the body — all these things are very minor. The real thing is the total functioning of the person, and that can be experienced only when you live together.
Osho
Love, and love as deeply as possible. And if love itself becomes the marriage, that is another thing, altogether different. If love itself becomes such an intimacy that it is unbreakable, that is another thing, that is not a legal sanction. Legal sanctions are needed only because you are afraid. You know that your love is not enough; you need the legal support for it. You know perfectly well that you can escape or the woman can escape, hence you need the policeman to keep you together. But this is ugly, to need a policeman to keep you together. That’s what marriage is!
Osho
In marriage there are no manners to keep up, and beneath the wildest accusations no real criticism. Each is familiar with that ancient child in the other who may erupt again. We are not ridiculous to ourselves. We are ageless. That is the luxury of the wedding ring.
Enid Bagnold
In olden times sacrifices were made at the altar – a practice which is still continued.
Helen Rowland
Instead of getting married again, I’m going to find a woman I don’t like and give her a house.
Lewis Grizzard
It destroys one’s nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.
Benjamin Disraeli
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It isn’t tying himself to one woman that a man dreads when he thinks of marrying; it’s separating himself from all the others.
Helen Rowland
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
George Santayana
It’s not beauty but fine qualities, my girl, that keep a husband.
Euripides
It’s tough to stay married. My wife kisses the dog on the lips, yet she won’t drink from my glass.
Rodney Dangerfield
India missed with arranged marriage; the West is missing with free love. India missed love because parents were too calculating and cunning. They would not allow falling in love: that is dangerous, nobody knows where it will lead. They were too clever, and through cleverness India missed all possibility of love. In the West they are too rebellious, too young; not clever — too young, too childish. They have made sex a free thing, available everywhere: no need to go so deep to discover love, enjoy sex and be finished.
Through sex, the West is missing: through marriage, the East has missed. But if you are alert you need not be Eastern, you need not be Western. Love is neither Eastern nor Western. Go on discovering love within you. And if you love, sooner or later the person will happen to you, because a loving heart, sooner or later, comes to a loving heart — it always happens. You will find the right person. But if you are jealous you will not find, if you are simply for sex you will not find, if you live only for security you will not find.
Osho
Osho
I am all for love, because love fails. You will be surprised – I have my own logic. I am all for love, because love fails. I am not for marriage, because marriage succeeds; it gives you a permanent settlement. And that is the danger: you become satisfied with a toy, you become satisfied with something plastic, artificial, man-made.
Osho
I am not against marriage — I am for love. If love becomes your marriage, good; but don’t hope that marriage can bring love. That is not possible. Love can become a marriage. You have to work very consciously to transform your love into a marriage. Ordinarily, people destroy their love. They do EVERYTHING to destroy it and then they suffer. And they go on saying, ‘What went wrong?’ They destroy — they do everything to destroy it.
Osho
I don’t think my wife likes me very much, when I had a heart attack she wrote for an ambulance.
Frank Carson
I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy. First, let her think she’s having her own way. And second, let her have it.
Lyndon B. Johnson
I have never heard about any perfect marriage. They say perfect marriages are made in heaven. Nobody comes back from there so maybe it is true, but what kind of marriage will those perfect marriages be? There will be no tension, there will be no individuality in the man or in the woman. They will never collide, they will never fight. They will be too sweet to each other. And too much sweetness brings diabetes! Marriage is an institution that teaches a man regularity, frugality, temperance, forbearance and many other splendid virtues he would not need had he stayed single.
Osho
I have never said that love is destroyed by marriage. How can marriage destroy love? Yes, it is destroyed in marriage, but it is destroyed by you, not by marriage. It is destroyed by the partners. How can marriage destroy love? It is you who destroy it, because you don’t know what love is. You simply pretend to know, you simply hope that you know, you dream that you know, but you don’t know what love is. Love has to be learned; it is the greatest art there is.
Osho
I love being married. It’s so great to find one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.
Rita Rudner
If it were not for the presents, an elopement would be preferable.
George Ade
If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.
Michel de Montaigne
If you made a list of reasons why any couple got married, and another list of the reasons for their divorce, you’d have a hell of a lot of overlapping.
Mignon McLaughlin
If you want to read about love and marriage, you’ve got to buy two separate books.
Alan King
If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.
Katharine Hepburn
In a time when nothing is more certain than change, the commitment of two people to one another has become difficult and rare. Yet, by its scarcity, the beauty and value of this exchange have only been enhanced.
Robert Sexton
In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find, and continue to find, grounds for marriage.
Robert Anderson
Bring more understanding to it. You will not be able to separate easily because love is involved. Without love marriage is easy, divorce is easy. It does not matter either way; it is a simple, utilitarian arrangement. If things-are going well, good; otherwise, say ‘goodbye’. But when you are involved in each other it is not easy, it is difficult. A part of your being has become incorporated in his being, a part of his being has become incorporated in your being. You really don’t exist as two individuals any more – you exist as a couple. A couple does not mean two persons living together. A couple means: two persons plugged into each other – no more really two… trying to be separate and yet trying to be together. That is the difficulty: one wants to remain dependent and one wants to remain independent. One is asking for two polar opposites.
Osho
But I am all for love, and I am against marriage, particularly the arranged kind, because the arranged marriage gives you satisfaction. And love? – love can never satisfy you. It gives you more and more thirst for a better and better love, it makes you more and more long for it, it gives you tremendous discontentment. And that discontent is the beginning of the search for God. When love fails many times, you start looking for a new kind of lover, a new kind of love, a new quality of love. That love affair is prayer, meditation, sannyas.
Osho
But people try love and because they are unconscious… their longing is good, but their love is full of jealousy, full of possessiveness, full of anger, full of nastiness. Soon they destroy it. Hence for centuries they have depended on marriage. Better to start by marriage so that the law can protect you from destroying it. The society, the government, the court, the policeman, the priest, they will all force you to live in the institution of marriage, and you will be just a slave. If marriage is an institution, you are going to be a slave in it. Only slaves want to live in institutions.
Osho
Don’t marry the person you think you can live with; marry only the individual you think you can’t live without.
James C. Dobson
Faithful women are all alike, they think only of their fidelity, never of their husbands.
Jean Giraudoux
For years my wedding ring has done its job. It has led me not into temptation. It has reminded my husband numerous times at parties that it’s time to go home. It has been a source of relief to a dinner companion. It has been a status symbol in the maternity ward.
Erma Bombeck
Getting divorced just because you don’t love a man is almost as silly as getting married just because you do.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
For two people in a marriage to live together day after day is unquestionably the one miracle the Vatican has overlooked.
Bill Cosby
He that loves not his wife and children feeds a lioness at home, and broods a nest of sorrows.
Jeremy Taylor
He’s the kind of man a woman would have to marry to get rid of.
Mae West
How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.
Oscar Wilde
A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn’t want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.
W. Somerset Maugham
A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.
Joey Adams
A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.
Andre Maurois
A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
Mignon McLaughlin
A wedding is a funeral where you smell your own flowers.
Eddie Cantor
After marriage, husband and wife become two sides of a coin; they just can’t face each other, but still they stay together.
Hemant Joshi
All marriages are happy. It’s the living together afterward that causes all the trouble.
Raymond Hull
All men make mistakes, but married men find out about them sooner.
Red Skelton
Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage.
Sydney J. Harris
An ideal wife is one who remains faithful to you but tries to be just as charming as if she weren’t.
Sacha Guitry
Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.
Isadora Duncan
Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives.
Samuel Johnson
Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn’t they’d be married too.
H. L. Mencken
Before marriage, a girl has to make love to a man to hold him. After marriage, she has to hold him to make love to him.
Marilyn Monroe
Being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck. If you live through it, you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left.
Jean Kerr
Be a little aware before you are trapped! Marriage is a trap: you will be trapped by the woman and the woman will be trapped by you. It is a mutual trap. And then legally you are allowed to torture each other forever.
Osho
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.
Unknown
Behind every great man there is a surprised woman.
Maryon Pearson
As I see it, out of a hundred marriages ninety-nine marriages are just licensed prostitution. They are not marriages. A marriage is only a real marriage when it grows out of love. Legal, illegal, does not matter. The real thing that matters is love. If love exists between two persons, it is blessed. If love does not exist between two persons, then all your laws put together cannot bridge them. Then they exist separate, then they exist apart, then they exist in conflict, then they exist always in war. And they create all kinds of trouble for each other. They are nasty to each other, nagging to each other, possessive of each other, violent, oppressive, dominating, dictatorial. In a better world, with a better humanity, things will be different. In a better world, the child born out of love will not be called bastard; the child only born out of license, law, will be called bastard.
Osho
A dress that zips up the back will bring a husband and wife together.
James H. Boren
A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.
Michel de Montaigne
A good wife always forgives her husband when she’s wrong.
Rodney Dangerfield
A husband is what is left of a lover, after the nerve has been extracted.
Helen Rowland
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
John Steinbeck
A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he’s finished.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
