After over a decade of marriage, I’ve learned that the best marriage quotes aren’t the ones that sound pretty on a card. They’re the ones that make you nod and think, yes, that’s exactly it.

I still remember a fight my husband and I had in our first year, one of those small disagreements about nothing that somehow turns into a referendum on the entire relationship. Afterward, feeling raw and a little scared, I opened a book I’d gotten as a wedding gift and landed on a line about marriage being a verb, something you do rather than something you get. It sounds simple written out like that, but it completely changed how I thought about the fight, and honestly, about marriage in general. I have been collecting lines like that ever since, tucked into notebooks and phone notes and the backs of receipts.

That’s what this list is. Fifty five marriage quotes worth writing down, whether you need something for a card, a caption, a toast, or just a reminder on a hard day of why you said yes in the first place.

Marriage Quotes That Capture What I Do Really Means

 

Sweet and Timeless Marriage Quotes

  • “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.” Henry Ford
  • “A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.” Pearl S. Buck
  • “Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.” Oscar Wilde
  • “There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.” Martin Luther
  • “A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.” André Maurois
  • “It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  • “Happy is the man who finds a true friend, and far happier is he who finds that true friend in his wife.” Franz Schubert
  • “In marriage do thou be wise: prefer the person before money, virtue before beauty, the mind before the body, then thou hast a wife, a friend, a companion, a second self.” William Penn
  • “The highest happiness on earth is marriage. Every man who is happily married is a successful man even if he has failed in everything else.” William Lyon Phelps
  • “Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.” Simone Signoret

Wise and Meaningful Marriage Quotes

  • “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” Friedrich Nietzsche
  • “What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.” Leo Tolstoy
  • “A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.” Michel de Montaigne
  • “If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.” Michel de Montaigne
  • “When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you’re sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.” Joseph Campbell
  • “The secret to having a good marriage is to understand that marriage must be total, it must be permanent, and it must be equal.” Betty Ford
  • “We come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.” Sam Keen
  • “Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up.” Joseph Barth
  • “A good marriage does not require a perfect man or a perfect woman. It only requires a man and a woman committed to strive together toward perfection.” Dallin H. Oaks
  • “You don’t marry one person; you marry three: the person you think they are, the person they are, and the person they are going to become as a result of being married to you.” Richard Needham
  • “Marriage is our society’s most pro-child institution. If you want kids to do well, then you want marriage to do well.” David Blankenhorn

Marriage is a Verb: Quotes About the Daily Work of Love

  • “Marriage is not a noun; it’s a verb. It isn’t something you get. It’s something you do. It’s the way you love your partner every day.” Barbara De Angelis
  • “A strong marriage requires two people who choose to love each other even on those days when they struggle to like each other.” Dave Willis
  • “The difference between an ordinary marriage and an extraordinary marriage is in giving just a little extra every day, as often as possible, for as long as we both shall live.” Fawn Weaver
  • “A great marriage isn’t something that just happens; it’s something that must be created.” Fawn Weaver
  • “Happily ever after is not a fairy tale. It’s a choice.” Fawn Weaver
  • “Creating a happy marriage begins with choosing the right spouse.” Fawn Weaver
  • “The greatest marriages are built on teamwork. Mutual respect, a healthy dose of admiration, and a never-ending portion of love and grace.” Fawn Weaver
  • “Happy marriages begin when we marry the ones we love, and they blossom when we love the ones we marry.” Tom Mullen
  • “A great marriage is not when the ‘perfect couple’ comes together. It is when an imperfect couple learns to enjoy their differences.” Dave Meurer

A Little Funny: Lighthearted Marriage Quotes

  • “I love being married. It’s so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.” Rita Rudner
  • “Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not.” Albert Einstein
  • “A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.” H. L. Mencken
  • “The secret of a happy marriage is finding the right person. You know they’re right if you love to be with them all the time.” H. L. Mencken
  • “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half shut afterwards.” Benjamin Franklin
  • “They say all marriages are made in heaven, but so are thunder and lightning.” Clint Eastwood
  • “My husband is a promise that I will have a friend forever.” Fawn Weaver

Marriage Quotes From Books and Movies

  • “So it’s not gonna be easy. It’s going to be really hard; we’re gonna have to work at this every day, but I want to do that because I want you. I want all of you, forever, every day. You and me, every day.” Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
  • “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
  • “A wedding is an event, but marriage is a life.” Myles Munroe, Waiting and Dating: A Sensible Guide to a Fulfilling Love Relationship
  • “Only in marriage do love and time, eternal enemies, join forces.” Adam Zagajewski, Eternal Enemies: Poems
  • “How to find a good spouse? The best single way is to deserve a good spouse.” Charles T. Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack

Poetic and Romantic Marriage Quotes

  • “But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.” Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
  • “I love you, not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you.” Roy Croft
  • “The happy State of Matrimony is, undoubtedly, the surest and most lasting Foundation of Comfort and Love.” Benjamin Franklin
  • “Love, having no geography, knows no boundaries.” Truman Capote
  • “The essence of marriage is companionship, and the woman you face across the coffee urn every morning for ninety-nine years must be both able to appreciate your jokes and to sympathize with your aspirations.” Elbert Hubbard
  • “A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.” Mignon McLaughlin
  • “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
  • “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.” Mark Twain
  • “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.” Robert Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra

Short and Sweet Marriage Quotes for Captions

  • “There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.” Ronald Reagan
  • “The real act of marriage takes place in the heart, not in the ballroom or church or synagogue.” Barbara De Angelis
  • “Love is a two-way street, constantly under construction.” Carroll Bryant
  • “To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.” Fred Rogers
  • “The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.” Simone Signoret

I hope this list gave you a few lines that felt like they were written just for you and your person. Marriage isn’t always easy, but reading through quotes like these always reminds me why it’s worth every bit of the work.

MARRIED LIFE