Tao Te Ching
Marriage
In the Confucian model integrated into old Eastern cultures, marriage is more of a business deal where something of value is given and something of roughly equivalent value received. Marriage choice is based on practical concerns and life after marriage based on good manners. While in Western traditions, marriage always had a practical side (e.g. dowries, forced and arranged marriage), they also tended to have a strong, religious foundation and developed with a kind of devotional, eternalistic spirit. Plato described the ancient myth of humans in the distant past being perfect, round beings that the gods became jealous of and split into two parts of male and female that are forever looking to rejoin. The age of Romanticism brought a deeply emotional and dramatic feeling to relationships and marriage, unrealistic attitudes and expectations still strongly influential today. And through these cultural, philosophical and religions prerogatives; our genetic heritage weaves its own powerful, highly evolved impact.
Quotes (131)
“The duties of woman are created in the rites of wedding... a husband must be constantly worshiped as a god by a faithful wife... If a wife obeys her husband, she will for that reason alone be exalted in heaven.”
“‘Perseverance furthers,’ for it is perseverance that make the difference between seduction and courtship.”
“When two people are at one in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or of bronze.”
“When two people are at one in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or of bronze.”
“And may the gods accomplish your desire: a home, a husband, and harmonious converse with him – the best thing in the world being a strong house held in serenity where man and wife agree. Woe to their enemies, joy to their friends!”
“there is nothing greater and better than this—when a husband and wife keep a household in oneness of mind”
“For a man can win nothing better than a good wife, and nothing more painful than a bad one.”
“Give all four to the virtuous suitor, a virtual man is always the best kind of husband and he will make your daughters happy.”
“What else but tears is now my hapless lot, whose country, children, husband, all are lost”
“He hewed the humans in two just as one cuts fruit for preservation… After that, with their natures hewn in two, each one missed the union with its other half… nor would it appear that we want anything else… cooperation and fusion - becoming one out of two. For this is the basis; this is our primeval nature, described as being whole.”
“The Tao begins in the relation between man and woman, ends in the infinite vastness of the universe.”
“Chuang-tzu’s wife died. When Hui-tzu came to offer his condolences, he found him pounding on a tub and singing… Chuang-tzu said, ‘The same process that brought her to birth, in time brought her to death, as naturally as fall turns into winter and spring into summer... if I went around wailing and pounding my chest, it would only show that I didn’t understand the first thing about reality.’”
“Can one gather water lilies from the the boughs of a tree?
When hearts are not at one, the match-maker wearies;
Favor that was but scant is lightly severed...
In our union was no faithfulness, only grief has lasted;
She did not keep her tryst”
“I abhor the roaming lover, nor do I drink from every well - I loathe all things in common.”
“Why place so much importance on love and loss of love when we know one day we must leave everyone?”
“Woe to the house where the hen crows and the rooster keeps still.”
“in the beginning the Eloheim created mortals male and female; they were one body, perfectly united and absolutely equal…. when you are redeemed from the Fall, male and female will cease to exist, you will become a perfect whole, accomplishing a single work.”
“If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they a found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman 50 shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife.”
“Without a consort, a partner of skillful means, there is no way to experience the mysteries of tantra.”
“Your spouse is going to be dead soon. You are going to be dead soon. Be nice to each other.”
“There are more maidens here than grass on the mountains, but an eligible life-mate is rarer than gold.”
“I need a wife who is a wisdom dakini, who is without the biased conduct of a worldly life”
“She who weds a rich man rather than a poor and desires more things in her husband than he does himself, deserves payment rather than love.”
“Nor should she deem herself other than venal who weds a rich man rather than a poor, and desires more things in her husband than himself. Assuredly, whomsoever this concupiscence leads into marriage deserves payment rather than affection.”
“The desire in the female for the male is so that they may perfect each other's work... they appear to be opposites but the truth they serve is one, each desiring the other for the perfection of their work.”
“If a married man goes to a distance from home to be absent for 20 days, his wife has a right to take another husband. The men, on the same principle, marry wherever they happen to reside.”
“Much better to not marry. Living day in and day out with the same man or woman—of whatever sort—makes the other less attractive and become disliked. By keeping apart and only staying together from time to time, they reach a deep intimacy that even the passing of many years will not destroy.”
“A wife is something a man should not have... It is by keeping apart, and going to stay with her only from time to time that an intimacy is reached that even the passing of months and years will not destroy.”
“She'd been respectable throughout her life,
With five churched husbands bringing joy and strife,
Not counting other company in youth;
But thereof there's no need to speak, in truth.”
“A pretty face may be enough to catch a man, but it takes character and good nature to hold him.”
“[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out”
“And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.”
“What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not we are told expressly: that they neither marry, nor are given in marriage.”
“Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.”
“The liberty of divorce is not only a cure for hatred and domestic quarrels; it is also an admirable preservative against them, and the secret for keeping alive that love which first united the married couple.”
“If they hastily seek consummation and merely attain a moment's pleasure; not only will the woman not be happy, neither will the man and the relationship will surely fail in the long run.”
“It is absurd to expect the inclinations and wishes of two human beings to coincide, through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and live together is to subject them to some inevitable potion of thwarting, bickering, and unhappiness.”
“Make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives; that is, if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers.”
“Marriage should be forbidden to individuals who have known each other less than 6 months.”
“women live, as a rule, more for the species than for the individual, and it is this which produces that discord in married life which is so frequent, and almost the normal state.”
“Happy marriages are well known to be rare, just because it lies in the nature of marriage that its chief end is not the present but the coming generation.”
“Nothing in the world is single; All things by a law divine In one another's being mingle:— Why not I with thine?”
“A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.”
“Our names united before the whole world as representative of the unity that a man and woman can achieve and must achieve – and will achieve all over the world… the deep companionship that has developed between us so that we almost have one breath, one life, one interest.”
“No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.”
“The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.”
“All ought to refrain from marriage who cannot avoid abject poverty for their children.”
“Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.”
“Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest... A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.”
“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 the last parting?”
“A marriage based on full confidence, based on complete and unqualified frankness on both sides; they are not keeping anything back; there's no deception underneath it all. If I might so put it, it's an agreement for the mutual forgiveness of sin.”
“For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organize our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organize our lust and our revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.”
“Marriage as a long conversation. When marrying you should ask yourself if you are going to enjoy talking with this woman into your old age? Everything else in a marriage is transitory.”
“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
“My husband and I were persons of quite different construction, different bent, completely dissimilar views. But we always remained ourselves, in no way echoing nor currying favor with one another.”
“Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. Women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man’s last romance.”
“A man alone is only half a man—it takes both a man and a woman to complete the circuit... sublime thoughts and great deeds are the children of married minds.”
“We choose not randomly each other. We meet only those who already exists in our subconscious.”
“When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that exalted, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until dealt do they part... Make divorce as easy, as cheap, and as private as marriage.”
“It's devilish cold here, so I had to get married. Turn the card over to see her little mug. Quite a piece, eh?”
“Unconsecrated unions produce relationships that are just as numerous and as complicated as those created by a marriage, but more solid.”
“Because they imply the sacrifice of a more or less flattering situation to purely intimate joys, shockingly irregular marriages are usually the most estimable.”
“It seems clear to me that marriage ought to be constituted by children, and relations not involving children ought to be ignored by the law and treated as indifferent by public opinion. It is only through children that relations cease to be a purely private matter.”
“When considering marriage one should ask oneself this question; 'will I be able to talk with this person into old age?' Everything else is transitory, the most time is spent in conversation”
“the psychological relationship between the sexes… the real domain of woman. Woman's psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos.”
“A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude. If they succeed in loving the distance between them, a wonderful living side by side can grow up.”
“No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes she were not.”
“With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes—one of the tragedies of married life.”
“if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.”
“I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?”
“She could feel herself poisoned through and through, and was forced at length to consider the most desperate of remedies, which was to yield completely and submissively to the spirit of the age, and take a husband.”
“But let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of the heavens dance between you.”
“Our prevailing mode of marriage—chaotic and deliquescent as it is—represents a pleasant refinement on marriage by capture or purchase... there is less brutality between men and women... The emancipation of woman and her ascendancy over man indicate an unprecedented gentility in the once murderous male.”
“Man is secretly and ravenously polygamous... and yet the earlier the love, the fresher and deeper it must be; no man can love after 30 with the ardor and self-abandonment of youth... if we could find a way to restore marriage to its natural age, we should at one stroke reduce by half the prostitution, the venereal disease, the fruitless celibacy, the morbid chastity, and the experimental perversions that stigmatize our contemporary life.”
“Love generated by physical attraction of boy and girl is an accident of hormones and propinquity; to found a lasting marriage upon such a haphazard and transitory condition is ridiculous.”
“Marriage began as a form of the law of property, as a part of the institution of slavery.”
“The willow in the empty sky spread her transparent fan
perhaps it were better that I not be your wife.”
“The bitterest creature under heaven is the wife who discovers that her husband’s bravery is only bravado, that his strength is only a uniform, that his power is but a gun in the hands of a fool.”
“There is nothing so intimate in a man's life, or in a woman's, as marriage, nothing that goes so far toward leaving an imprint on the texture of life and on man's soul itself.”
“It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming; she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible. Like two floating logs they met in a head-on rush, caught, and sped along together.”
“Our names united before the whole world as representative of the unity that a man and woman can achieve and must achieve – and will achieve all over the world… the deep companionship that has developed between us so that we almost have one breath, one life, one interest.”
“Without money, you can't be straightforward in your dealings with women. For without money, you can't pick and choose, you've got to take what women you can get; and then, necessarily, you've got to break free of them. Constancy, like all other virtues, has got to be paid for in money... Marriage is only a trap set for you by the money-god. You grab the bait; snap goes the trap; and there you are, chained by the leg to some 'good' job... And what a life! Licit sexual intercourse in the shade of the aspidistra. Pram-pushing and sneaky adulteries. And the wife finding you out and breaking the cut-glass whisky decanter over your head.”
“Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one… Marriage is the reunion of the separated duad, the recognition of a spiritual identity”
“The second stage of marriage, the alchemical stage, is a sacrificing of the visible entity for a transcendent good, two experiencing that they are one. If still living in the primary stage of marriage, they will go apart when the children leave. Daddy will fall in love with a young, nubile girl and run off; Mother will be left with an empty house and heart.”
“Marriage is not a love affair. Marriage is a comitment to that which you are, that person is literally your other half. A love affair is a relationship for pleasure and when it gets to be unpleasureable, it's off. Marriage is a life commitment , the prime concern of your life. If it's not the prime concern, you're not married.”
“Take off your dress and stockings;
Sit in the deep chair before the fire.
I will warm your feet in my hands;
I will warm your breasts and thighs with kisses.
I wish I could build a fire
In you that would never go out.
I wish I could be sure that deep in you
Was a magnet to draw you always home.”
“Passion and marriage are essentially irreconcilable. Their origins and their ends make them mutually exclusive. Their co-existence in our midst constantly raises insoluble problems, and the strife thereby engendered constitutes a persistent danger for every one of our social safeguards.”
“Buddhism does not enjoin enforced chastity, with is the road to madness... Perfect chastity is dangerous... it is far, far better for you to get married.”
“the funny part is, I felt like marrying here the minute I saw her. I'm crazy. I didn't even like her much, and yet all of a sudden I feel like I was in love with her and wanted to marry her.”
“I wish you'd get married. [Mrs. Glass]... I like to ride on trains too much You never get to sit next to the window any more when you're married. [Zooey]”
“The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”
“Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life. But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won't mean a thing.”
“When people are young and 'in love,' they have strong biological bonds, genes and hormones creating attraction and a kind of genetic glue. When older though and into or past their main reproductive years, that gene-hormone-glue dissolves and continuing the relationship requires a re-negotiation, a more rational foundation, a more conscious choice.”
“that most ignoble form of real estate, the possessive occupation and tyranny over two square inches of human flesh”
“marriage is the hottest furnace of the spirit today, much more difficult than solitude, much more challenging for people who want to work on themselves. It’s a situation in which there are no alibis, excruciating most of the time… but it’s only in this situation that any kind of work can be done.”
“Marriage is the hottest furnace of the spirit today, much more difficult than solitude, much more challenging for people who want to work on themselves. It’s a situation in which there are no alibis, excruciating most of the time… but it’s only in this situation that any kind of work can be done.”
“There are three rings involved with marriage. The engagement ring, the wedding ring, and the suffering.”
“Whenever we talk about relationship, we manage to reduce ourselves into just simply one louse trying to fight another louse in the crack of a seam in our shirt — psychiatrists, marriage counselors, physicians, and local gurus all do that.”
“A pretty face may last a year or two; but pretty soon they’ll see what you can do.”
“If your Bible tells you that gay people ought not to be married in your church, don’t tell them they can’t be married at city hall. Marriage is a civil rite as well as a civil right, and we can’t let religious bigotry close the door to justice to anyone.”
“Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet... putting her in a wheel barrow and wheeling her down the street.”
“Unlike other world religions that possess elaborate theologies of marriage, Buddhism has very little to say about the subject, considering marriage (and divorce) a matter of secular concern... [in] Tibet, the mere presence of a Buddhist priest at a wedding ceremony is thought to bring bad luck.”
“I'm looking for hard headed woman, one who'll make me do my best
And if I find my hard headed woman, I know the rest of my life will be blessed”
“Maybe that’s what a marriage is… Some kind of performance… not just a conversation, but a performance.”
“You don't have to be stupid to marry the wrong man... Isn't that what love is—losing your mind? You don't see your beloved's faults... [but] when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences.”
“A huge majority—980 of the 1154 past or present societies for which anthropologists have data—have permitted a man to have more than one wife… [but] most marriages have been monogamous”
“lasting love is something a person has to decide to experience. Lifelong monogamous devotion is just not natural — not for women even, and emphatically not for men. It requires, for lack of a better term, what we can call an act of will.”
“Proud families spend fortunes on a one-day wedding ceremony for a marriage that may or may not last, while on the same day, in the same village, people are dying of starvation.”
“Such a cozy room, the windows are illuminated… Our house is a very, very, very fine house with two cats in the yard; Life used to be so hard; Now everything is easy 'cause of you.”
“Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.”
“* Marriage is an anchor, lads. Stops you drifting onto rocks, but stops you voyaging as well.”
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