Thursday Thirteen

Since I am about to embark on my 41st Year of Marriage on August 12, I thought I would find 13 statements about Marriage from other points of view and other times and places.

1. Man's best possession is a sympathetic wife.
Euripides (484 BC - 406 BC), Antigone
2.By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.
Socrates (469 BC - 399 BC)
3. Never marry but for love; but see that thou lovest what is lovely.
William Penn (1644 - 1718)
4. Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
Voltaire (1694 - 1778)
5. I pay very little regard...to what any young person says on the subject of marriage. If they profess a disinclination for it, I only set it down that they have not yet seen the right person.
Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Mansfield Park
6. I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.
Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937)
7. A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.
Andre Maurois (1885 - 1967)
8. A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one's husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
9. Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might be found more suitable mates. But the real soul-mate is the one you are actually
married to.
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973), Letter to Michael Tolkien, March 1941
10. All married couples should learn the art of battle as they should learn the art of making love. Good battle is objective and honest - never vicious or cruel. Good battle is healthy and constructive, and brings to a marriage the principle of equal partnership.
Ann Landers (1918 - 2002)
11. I used to believe that marriage would diminish me, reduce my options. That you had to be someone less to live with someone else when, of course, you have to be someone more.
Candice Bergen (1946 - )
12. A great marriage is not when the 'perfect couple' comes together. It is when an imperfect couple learns to enjoy their differences.
Dave Meurer, "Daze of Our Wives"
13. A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
Mignon McLaughlin