top of page
"The romantic person instinctively sees marriage in terms of emotions, but what a couple actually gets up to together over a lifetime has much more in common with the workings of a small business. They must draw up work rosters, clean, chauffeur, cook, fix, throw away, mind, hire, fire, reconcile, and budget."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Marriage quotes

"Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards."

"Marriage is the only Institution With One Access: Entrance Only, No Exit, No Outing Option So Look Well Before You Dive Into It."

"For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there mustbe between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and shehim."

"When she had first crossed the dry and dusty world which his mind inhabited she had been like a spring shower; in opening himself to it he had not been mistaken. He had gone wrong only in assuming that marriage, by itself, gave him either power or title to appropriate that freshness. As he now saw, one might as well have thought one could buy a sunset by buying the field from which one had seen it."

"I'm certain that most couples expect to find intimacy in marriage, but it somehow eludes them."

"Not cohabitation but consensus constitutes marriage."
Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton

"Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfAated but life-enhancing thoughts."

"Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it."

"It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships."

"Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate."

"Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom."

"Being political doesn't only or principally mean caring what party wins the next election, to be political is to care about the happiness of strangers."

"We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves -- that is, the most mature and reasonable parts of us (seldom present in the midst of our crises and obsessions) -- who want to lead the sort of life which we once imagined supernatural beings demanded of us. An adequate evolution of morality from superstition to reason should mean recognizing ourselves as the authors of our own moral commandments."

"I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths."
bottom of page