Marriage Medley

(with a due nod to Mr. Gary Thomas)

"By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher."
-Socrates

"Like everything else which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, an marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate."
-W.H. Auden

"[Marriage] is the merciless revealer, the great white searchlight turned on the darkest places of human nature."
-Katherine Anne Porter

"If you treat a man as he is, he will stay as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become the bigger and better man."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
-Oscar Wilde

"A magnificent marriage begins not with knowing one another but with knowing God."
-Gary and Betsy Ricucci

"Marriage is the greatest test in the world...but now I welcome the test instead of dreading it. It is much more than a test of sweetness off temper, as people sometimes think; it is a test of the whole character and affects every action."
-T.S. Eliot

"Marriage is the operation by which a woman's vanity and a man's egotism are extracted without anesthetic."
-Helen Rowland

"Like all truly mystical things, love is rooted deeply and rightly in this world and this flesh."
-Katherine Anne Porter

"We find God in the contact of our bodies, not just the longing of our souls."
-Evelyn and James Whitehead