What is love and what keeps it alive? What is marriage and what makes it work?
Maybe it takes a poet to express the first, and a philosopher to explain the second. If you want to unlock the secrets of a good marriage, start with these quotes from some of the world’s most famous people. You can find a longer list at about.com… these are some of my favorites to give you something to think about:
Mohandas K Gandhi
I first learned the concept of non-violence in my marriage.
Socrates
My advice to you is to get married. If you find a good wife, you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher.
Mark Twain
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 of a century.
Mignon McLaughlin
A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Leo Tolstoy
What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.
Ruth Bell Graham
A good marriage is the union of two good forgivers.
Bill Doherty
I now think of marriage like I think about living in my home state of Minnesota. You move into marriage in the springtime of hope, but eventually arrive at the Minnesota winter, with its cold and darkness. Many of us are tempted to give up and move south at this point, not realizing that maybe we’ve hit a rough spot in a marriage that’s actually above average. The problem with giving up, of course, is that our next marriage will enter its own winter at some point. So do we just keep moving on, or do we make our stand now – with this person, in this season? That’s the moral, existential question we face when our marriage is in trouble.