Sermon quotes on marriage
G.K. Chesterton
Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
Jeff Foxworthy
I married my wife for her looks, but not the kind she’s giving me lately.
Samuel Johnson
Once described a second marriage as the “triumph of hope over experience
Timothy Keller
In sharp contrast with our culture, the Bible teaches that the essence of marriage is a sacrificial commitment to the good of the other. That means that love is more fundamentally action than emotion. But in talking this way, there is a danger of falling into the opposite error that characterized many ancient and traditional societies. It is possible to see marriage as merely a social transaction, a way of doing your duty to family, tribe and society. Traditional societies made the family the ultimate value in life, and so marriage was a mere transaction that helped your family’s interest. By contrast, contemporary Western societies make the individual’s happiness the ultimate value, and so marriage becomes primarily an experience of romantic fulfillment. But the Bible sees GOD as the supreme good – not the individual or the family – and that gives us a view of marriage that intimately unites feelings AND duty, passion AND promise. That is because at the heart of the Biblical idea of marriage is the covenant.”
Timothy Keller
Within this Christian vision of marriage, here’s what it means to fall in love. It is to look at another person and get a glimpse of what God is creating, and to say, I see who God is making you, and it excites me! I want to be part of that. I want to partner with you and God in the journey you are taking to his throne. And when we get there, I will look at your magnificence and say, ‘I always knew you could be like this. I got glimpses of it on earth, but now look at you!”
C.S. Lewis
Love as distinct from “being in love” is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by the grace which both partners ask, and receive from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself.
George Macdonald
One of the good things that come of a true marriage is, that there is one face on which changes come without your seeing them; or rather there is one face which you can still see the same, through all the shadows which years have gathered upon it.
William Penn
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.
Richard Pryor
Marriage is tough because you have to deal with feelings and lawyers.
Frederick W. Robertson
Marriage is not a union, merely between two creatures – it is a union between two spirits; and the intention of that bond is to perfect the nature of both, by supplementing their deficiencies with the force of contrast, giving to each sex those excellencies in which it is naturally deficient.
Alexander Schmemann
A marriage which does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-suffiency, which does not ‘die to itself’ that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage.
Socrates
Get married. If you have a good wife, you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher.
Source Unknown
The Bible opens and closes with a wedding.
G.K. Chesterton
They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words—“free-love”—as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.
Nora Ephron
A child is a grenade. When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was. Not better, necessarily; not worse, necessarily; but different.
The Impressive Clergyman (Peter Cook)
“Mawidge…mawidge is what bwings us togewer today…”
The Princess Bride
J.R.R. Tolkein
The real soul mate is the one you are actually married to.
Audrey Hepburn
If I get married, I want to be very married.
Bob Goff
None of us complete each other, but we can add a few words to the lives of the people around us to help them understand God’s bigger plan for all of us.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
What a happy and holy fashion it is that those who love one another should rest on the same pillow.
Simone Signoret
Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.
Source Unknown
I wish for you good health in each other’s arms.
Phyllis Diller
Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.
Mignon McLaughlin
A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt.
Eugene Peterson
Weddings are easy; marriages are difficult. The couple wants to plan a wedding; I want to plan a marriage.
Taken from Run with the Horses by Eugene H. Peterson. ©2009, 2019 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove IL 60515-1426. www.ivpress.com
Brian Jennings
Neither truth nor peace can create wholeness without the other. A husband’s complaints against his wife may be true. A wife’s complaints against her husband may be true. If they only care about these truths without seeking peace, their relationship is doomed. Truth won’t even matter anymore. It becomes distorted, manipulated, and angry from a bunker.
Dancing in No Man’s Land: Moving with Peace and Truth in a Hostile World, NavPress.
Helen Roland
Marriage is like twirling a baton, turning hand springs or eating with chopsticks. It looks easy until you try it.
Rita Rudner
When I eventually met Mr. Right I had no idea that his first name was Always.
Rita Rudner
Men who have pierced ears are better prepared for marriage. They’ve experienced pain and bought jewelry.
Red Skelton
All men make mistakes, but married men find out about them sooner.
Will Ferrell
Before you marry a person, you should first make them use a computer with slow Internet to see who they really are.
George Washington
I have always considered marriage as the most interesting event of one’s life, the foundation of happiness or misery.
George Eliot
“What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of last parting?”
Adam Bede
D.H. Lawrence
You can’t worship love and individuality in the same breath.
David Brooks
Marriage starts as a joy and ends up an education.
The Second Mountain, Random House Publishing Group, 2019, p.174.
Joshua Lievman
And they lived happily ever after” is one of the most tragic sentences in literature. It’s tragic because it’s a falsehood. It is a myth that has led generations to expect something from marriage that is not possible.
Benjamin Tillett
God help the man who won’t marry until he finds a perfect woman, and God help him still more if he finds her.
Les & Leslie Parrott
Marriages can never be perfect because people are not perfect. Being human, every bride and groom has faults as well as virtues. We are at times gloomy, cranky, selfish, or unreasonable. We are a mixture of generous, altruistic feelings combined with self-seeking aims, petty vanities, and ambitions. We unite love and courage with selfishness and fear. Marriage is an alloy of gold and tin. If we expect more than this, we are doomed to disappointment.
Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts: Seven Questions to Ask Before—and After—You Marry, expanded and updated ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006).
Jonathan Grant
The two most influential characteristics of the modern self—radical individualism and expressive authenticity—create a perfect storm for relationships.
Mrs. White (Madeline Kahn)
“Husbands should be like Kleenex: soft, strong, and disposable.”
Clue
Kevin DeYoung
Pray less that God would show you who is the right husband or wife and pray more to be the right kind of husband or wife.
Just Do Something: A Liberating Approach to Finding God’s Will (Moody Publishers, 2014)
Kevin DeYoung
The problem with the myth of “the one” is that it assumes that affection is the glue that holds the marriage together, when really it is your commitment to marriage that safeguards the affection. So ditch the myth and get hitched.
Just Do Something: A Liberating Approach to Finding God’s Will (Moody Publishers, 2014)
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