Marriage Is Friendship Quotes & Sayings

Marriage is like a three-speed gearbox affection, friendship, love. It is not advisable to crash your gears and go right through to love straightaway. You need to ease your way through. The basis of love is respect, and that needs to be learned from affection and friendship. — Peter Ustinov

The best friend will probably acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is founded on the talent for friendship. — Friedrich Nietzsche

They were married before they were friends, which is another way of saying:
Their marriage was the occasion of their friendship.
They were married before they noticed many small differences in background, aspiration, education, ambition. ( ... )
Noting such differences, Leah was in some sense disappointed in herself that they did not cause real conflict between them. It was hard to get used to the fact that the pleasure her body found in his, and vice versa, should so easily overrule the many objections she had, or should have had, or thought she should have had. — Zadie Smith

Marriage is the highest state of friendship. If happy, it lessens our cares by dividing them, at the same time that it doubles our pleasures by mutual participation. — Samuel Richardson

And when Mary nodded, Pauline said, "You'd better hurry then, you know how how is," and laughed to show she would not be married to bald John Keane for all the tea in China. In her laugh was every confidence Mary had ever shared with Pauline about her husband's failings, every unguarded criticism, every angry, impromptu, frustrated critique of his personality, his manners, his sometimes morbid, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes impatient ways. A repository, Pauline and her laugh, for every moment in thier marriage when Mary Keane had not loved her husband, when love itself had seemed a misapprehension, a delusion (a stranger standing outside of Schrafft's transformed into an answered prayer), and marriage
which Pauline had had sense enough to spurn
simply an awkward pact with a stranger, any stranger, John or George, Tom, Dick, or Harry.
A repository, Pauline and her laugh, her knowing eye, for all that Mary Keane should have kept to herself. — Alice McDermott

Love is a combination of friendship, passion, and respect. — John Glenn

Marriage was contrived for ordinary people, for people who are capable of neither great love nor great friendship, which is to say, for most people
but also for those exceptionally rare ones who are capable of love as well as of friendship. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Marriage is a long-lasting friendship. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature. — Adam Gopnik

Marriage is a commitment to do the right thing beyond the emotion of feeling loved — Blake L. Higginbotham

A man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive - and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down. - Chapter 8 — Malcolm Gladwell

Marriage is not a natural phenomenon. It is artificial, arbitrary. And when it disappears you cannot do anything to bring it back. You can pretend, but that pretension makes you a hypocrite. And your pretension cannot deceive the woman, because she has known your love and the pretension cannot become the substitute. The only way is to separate - in friendship, because you have given each other so much. — Rajneesh

I think marriage is dangerous. The idea of two people trying to possess each other is wrong. I don't think the flare of love lasts. Your mind rather than your emotions must answer for the success of matrimony. It must be friendship - a calm companionship which can last through the years. — Carole Lombard

The purest regret, no matter what, is thinking you didn't love enough. — Criss Jami

Love is always fresh as morning dew. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Love is divinity within us. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I guess like any friendship, marriage, or whatever it is familiarity breeds more contempt, and more love. They're just more settled with each other now. — Martin Freeman

Friendship in marriage is its own thing: friendship in a cup of tea, or a glass of wine, or a cappuccino every Sunday morning. Friendship in buying undershirts and underpants. Friendship in picking up a prescription or rescuing the towed car. Friendship in waiting for the phone call after the mammogram. Friendship in toast buttered just so. Friendship in shoveling the snow. I am the one you want to tell. You are the one I want to tell. — Elizabeth Alexander

There is so little difference between husbands you might as well keep the first. — Adela Rogers St. Johns

Significantly, romantic friendships can coexist with the fact of partners' marrying because their reason for being is not to replace marriage but to open the possibility of sustained, committed true love existing among friends, and not just same-sex friends. No matter that our chosen relationship commitments change. Those of us who have long-term romantic friendships, some that have lasted longer than any of our marriages or partnerships, do not fear that these commitments will falter if we create primary bonds. — Bell Hooks

It's one thing to have a divinely inspired love given to you to experience and share; it's something else altogether to recognize it when it appears. Our job is to go on being humbled and grateful that we should get to experience such a thing in our lifetimes, and preserve its magic by doing the most responsible thing possible to keep it alive ...
Just keep saying yes. — Mark Fiore

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I believe in finding a man who can be your best friend, because once the lust fades, friendship is what will hold the foundation of your marriage together. — Nicole Simone

At first an ordeal and then an accomplishment, the daily run becomes a staple, like bread, or wine, a fine marriage, or air. It is also a free pass to friendship. — Benjamin Cheever

It's an odd term, girlfriend, particuarly for grown persons. And in practice an even odder concept. Generally speaking, in adults it described a woman, not a girl, who was willing to provide sex, not friendship. In fact, from what I had observed it was quite possible for one to actively dislike one's girlfriend, although of course true hatred is reserved for marriage. — Jeff Lindsay

Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won't! You'll have ... A God, essentially, of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction. Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination. So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with God. It is the precondition for it. — Timothy Keller

You will have to forgive me, Major Woodruffe. I am new to marriage, and perhaps more given to jealousy than some of the more experienced husbands that you know. It is possible that you seek only friendship with my wife. If, however, you entertain any other
"
-Sebastian to Woodruffe
"I assure you that such a thing is the furthest thing from my mind."
-Woodruffe to Sebastian
"Come now, Major. We are both men. Such ideas are never far from our minds at all. But if you do anything that causes me to think that your mind dwells long on that particular idea, I will thrash you, I will ruin you, and I will probably kill you.
-Sebastian to Woodruffe — Madeline Hunter

A single person is a manageable entity, whom you can either make friends with or leave alone. But half of a married couple is not exactly a whole human being: if the marriage is successful it is something a little more than that; if unsuccessful, a little less. In either case, a fresh complication is added to the already intricate business of friendship: as Clem had once remarked, you might as well try to dance a tarantella with a Siamese twin. — Jan Struther

Life is a sacred love. — Lailah Gifty Akita

There is a place for what my heart tells me about you, and there is no shame or guilt in it. God Himself is free to look in my heart right this instant and I know He would not shame or admonish me about what He would see there because the pure, ego-less truth of how I hold you in my heart deserves to be kept alive. — Mark Fiore

Marriage is the strictest tie of perpetual friendship, and there can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity; and he must expect to be wretched, who pays to beauty, riches, or politeness that regard which only virtue and piety can claim. — Samuel Johnson

The moon splits open.
We move through, waterbirds rising
to look for another lake.
Or say we are living in a love-ocean,
where trust works to caulk our body-boat,
to make it last a little while,
until the inevitable shipwreck,
the total marriage, the death-union.
Dissolve in friendship,
like two drunkards fighting.
Do not look for justice here
in the jungle where your animal soul
gives you bad advice.
Drink enough wine so that you stop talking.
You are a lover, and love is a tavern
where no one makes much sense.
Even if the things you say are poems
as dense as sacks of Solomon's gold,
they become pointless. — Rumi

[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare. — Wallace Stegner

Yet friendship, I believe, is essential to intellectuals. It is probably the growth hormone the mind requires as it begins its activity of producing and exchanging ideas. You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. In the course of my history, not love or marriage so much as friendship has promoted growth. — Mary McCarthy

Life is enrich with much love — Lailah Gifty Akita

Shouldn't we at least be asking whether the transcending of venereal desire that marriage requires of a mostly or entirely 'heterosexual' man who marries for the sake of love, friendship, and raising a family isn't more or less the same as the transcendence required of a man whose venereal desire is 'oriented' mostly or entirely toward men but who restrains these drives, and who marries for the sake of love, friendship and raising a family? Of course, men with little venereal desire for women can't proceed towards marriage driven by such desire. For them, marriage must develop from friendship. But wouldn't it be better if all marriages developed from friendship? — Jonathan Mills

Behind many broken friendships there is a marriage. — Pratik Akkawar

You soul is only satisfy with your soul-spirit, soul mate. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Between husband and wife friendship seems to exist by nature, for man is naturally disposed to pairing. — Aristotle.

The truth is friendship is every bit as sacred and eternal as marriage. — Katherine Mansfield

'Safe Harbor' is a state of mind ... it's the place - in reality or metaphor - to which one goes in times of trouble or worry. It can be a friendship, marriage, church, garden, beach, poem, prayer, or song. — Luanne Rice

Answer, yeah I know it... We were for little period of time texting nothing else... no friendship is available as a feature but you are talking about relationship and marriage are you right with your mind? — Deyth Banger

apart from marriage, our friendship should count as one of the things that remain stable. But just this is not so in the estimation of others and the consideration that they give it. It is marriage - whether it is the more stable of the two or not - that gets the outward consideration and recognition. Everyone, in this case the whole family, must take it into account and thinks it right that much has to be done, and should be done, on behalf of a married couple. Friendship, even when it's so exclusive and includes all of each other's goods, as it is with us, doesn't have any "necessitas, — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Maybe being married is talking to oneself with one's other self listening. — Ruth Rendell

The strongest marriage is between two who seek the same God, the strongest friendship between two who flee the same devil. — Robert Breault

No buddy is perfect — Saji Ijiyemi

Friendship is much more important to a man than marriage. — Gordon Merrick

A love which depends solely on romance, on the combustion of two attracting chemistries, tends to fizzle out. The famous lovers usually end up dead. A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love. — Madeleine L'Engle

What is there in the vale of lifeHalf so delightful as a wife;When friendship, love and peace combineTo stamp the marriage-bond divine? — William Cowper

Only marriage combines all three forms of companionship - spouse is family, best friend, and permanent companion. This is why it is widely held that while the death of a child is the most painful loss, the death of a spouse is the most disorienting one. — Dennis Prager

Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce. — Voltaire

Experts on romance say for a happy marriage there has to be more than a passionate love. For a lasting union, they insist, there must be a genuine liking for each other. Which, in my book, is a good definition for friendship. — Marilyn Monroe

It is not lies or a lack of loyalty that ends a relationship. It is the agonizing truth that one person feels in their heart on a daily basis. It is realizing that you are coping and not living. It is the false belief that there is a verse, quote, phrase or talk that will magically make you feel content, complete or not care. However, it doesn't last longer than a few days, before your mind and heart goes back to what it wants. It is the moment you realize that you left without ever leaving. It is the moment you realize that fear, shame or guilt is the only thing standing in the way of the life God meant for you to live. — Shannon L. Alder

What, then, is marriage for? It is for helping each other to become our future glory-selves, the new creations that God will eventually make us. The common horizon husband and wife look toward is the Throne, and the holy, spotless, and blameless nature we will have. I can think of no more powerful common horizon than that, and that is why putting a Christian friendship at the heart of a marriage relationship can lift it to a level that no other vision for marriage approaches. — Timothy Keller

[Spiritual friendship] is eagerly helping one another know, serve, love, and resemble God in deeper and deeper ways. — Timothy Keller

Marriage is the connecting of the two: Without passion it's just friendship; without friendship it's just lust. — Donna Lynn Hope

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level. — Oscar Wilde

Married people should be best friends; no relationship on earth needs friendship as much as marriage ... Friendship in a marriage is so important. It blows away the chaff and takes the kernel, rejoices in the uniqueness of the other, listens patiently, gives generously, forgives freely. Friendship will motivate one to cross the room one day and say 'I'm sorry. I didn't mean that.' it will not pretend perfection nor demand it. It will not insist that both respond exactly the same in every thought and feeling, but it will bring to the union honesty, integrity. There will be repentance and forgiveness in every marriage
every good marriage
and respect and trust. — Marion D. Hanks

I should like to have friends, I confess. I do not suppose I ever shall. But there have been moments when I have realized what friendship might be. Rare moments - but never forgotten. Friendship is a binding, as solemn as marriage. We take each other for life, through everything - forever. But it's not enough to say we will do it. I think, myself, it is pride which makes friendship most difficult. To submit, to bow down to the other is not easy, but it must be done if one is to really understand the being of the other. Friendship isn't merging. One doesn't thereupon become a shadow and one remain a substance. Yet, it is terribly solemn - frightening, even. — Katherine Mansfield

Friendships are different from all other relationships. Unlike acquaintanceship, friendship is based on love. Unlike lovers and married couples, it is free of jealousy. Unlike children and parents, it knows neither criticism nor resentment. Friendship has no status in law. Business partnerships are based on a contract. So is marriage. Parents are bound by law. But friendships are freely entered into, freely given, and freely exercised ... — Stephen Ambrose

During this time I came to understand a lot about myself, human beings, faith and the meaning of marriage and friendship. The world is not black and white, nothing is what it seems, and we are not cartoon characters that can be divided into goodies and baddies, but complex and multi-faceted beings with many weaknesses. Human beings will always disappoint. But God is there. He sometimes speaks through others and we would be wise to listen to those we trust and to our own inner voice, God's voice. No matter how difficult or painful life sometimes becomes, we must never lose faith.

We may not always find justice in this world, but compassion and forgiveness are such important qualities. They help us to dissolve so much of the negativity that we hold. Practising them mostly benefits ourselves. — Kristiane Backer

Love is the flame that set the heart on fire. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Any friendship that is worth its weight is like a dark and secret place where you hide bits of yourself. The door can be opened only by the two people who have the key, and you carry it with you wherever you go. Magnify that by a billion, and you begin to get an idea of what marriage is like. — Damien Echols

Marriage should be about fun," she says gently. "It's about friendship, and laughter, and trust, and fun. If it's not fun, if you take it all too seriously, what's the point? You know I've been with Andy for fifteen years, and the reason it still works is because he's my best friend and he still makes me laugh. Admittedly, not all the time, and often we get completely bogged down in work, and the kids, and life, but he's still the person I most want to phone when anything happens in life, and he's still the person who makes me laugh the most. — Jane Green

In the early days of marriage, joy precedes the act. Tragically, as the years go by joy can be severed from the act until finally, the act itself is no more. This ought not to be. Over time it is the companionship that brings joy, and service is the natural outworking of the joy of commitment. Failure to act kills it. — Ravi Zacharias

Marriage is a cheerful commitment. — Lailah Gifty Akita

You meet a new guy, analyze him, not good for marriage, not good for a relationship, not good for fucking, maybe excepting the very drunk mood, so, conclusion: this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. — Irina Bors

Love is a feeling that must be felt from the heart and seen through inner beauty. Only if this was known to the youth, many a marriages would have blossomed with age and cherished through decades. Just like a plant that needs the sun, water and more time to grow into a beautiful tree with lovely leaves and flowers, love needs time to be nurtured over time, built on a strong foundation of friendship, trust and honesty. When this foundation is built and combined with the feeling that tickles you from within, that is when love actually happens, the rest is all infatuation, attraction or even lust. — Jagdish Joghee

From open sea she's chosen me
and dashed the hopes of many.
A life with her is worth the hopes
my love for her may bury. — Uzoma C. Azuonye

The bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation — Oscar Wilde

To say that one waits a lifetime for his soulmate to come around is a paradox. People eventually get sick of waiting, take a chance on someone, and by the art of commitment become soulmates, which takes a lifetime to perfect. — Criss Jami

Marriage is the lightning rod that absorbs anxiety and stress from all other sources, past and present. When marriage has a firm foundation of solid friendship and mutual respect, it can tolerate a fair amount of raw emotion. A good fight can clear the air, and it's nice to know we can survive conflict and even learn from it. Many couples, however, get trapped in endless rounds of fighting and blaming that they don't know how to get out of. When fights go unchecked and unrepaired, they can eventually erode love and respect, which are the bedrock of any successful relationship. — Harriet Lerner

A real friendship is like a marriage: for richer and poorer, for better and for worse. If the moment of truth comes, and you can't bear to make a sacrifice, what kind of friend are you? — Sean Stewart

Love can never really be a great base for marriage because love is fun and play. If you marry someone for love you will be frustrated, because soon the fun is gone, the newness is gone, and boredom sets in. Marriage is for deep friendship, deep intimacy. Love is implied in it, but it is not alone. So marriage is spiritual. It is spiritual. There are many things which you can never develop alone. Even your own growth needs someone to respond, someone so intimate that you can open yourself totally to him or her. — Rajneesh

Marriage is mutual faithful friendship. — Lailah Gifty Akita

There is no more precious experience in life than friendship. And I am not forgetting love and marriage as I write this; the lovers, or the man and wife, who are not friends are but weakly joined together. One enlarges his circle of friends through contact with many people. One who limits those contacts narrows the circle and frequently his own point of view as well. — Eleanor Roosevelt

You can't have success without trust. The word trust embodies almost everything you can strive for that will help you to succeed. You tell me any human relationship that works without trust, whether it is a marriage or a friendship or a social interaction; in the long run, the same thing is true about business, especially businesses that deal with people. — Jim Burke

Between married persons, the cement of friendship is by the laws supposed so strong as to abolish all division of possessions: andhas often, in reality, the force ascribed to it. — David Hume

Marriage is a mutual faithful friendship — Lailah Gifty Akita

Friendship is one of the greatest gifts a human being can receive. It is a bond beyond common goals, common interests, or common histories. It is a bond stronger than sexual union can create, deeper than a shared fate can solidify, and even more intimate than the bonds of marriage or community. Friendship is being with the other in joy and sorrow, even when we cannot increase the joy or decrease the sorrow. It is a unity of souls that gives nobility and sincerity to love. Friendship makes all of life shine brightly. — Henri Nouwen

Love is pure and divine. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Just having someone there. The right person that you can honestly say you love, and love's you in return is a blessing. — Auliq Ice

Love is not self-seeking.
Love is not easily angered. — Lailah Gifty Akita

An ideological movement is a collection of people many of whom could hardly bake a cake, fix a car, sustain a friendship or a marriage, or even do a quadratic equation, yet they believe they know how to rule the world. The university, in which it is possible to combine theoretical pretension with comprehensive ineptitude, has become the natural habitat of the ideological enthusiast. A kind of adventure playground, carefully insulated from reality in order to prevent absent-minded professors from bumping into things as they explore transcendental realms, has become the institutional base for civilizational self-hatred. — Kenneth Minogue

Friendship is two-sided. It isn't a friend just because someone's doing something nice for you. That's a nice person. There's friendship when you do for each other. It's like marriage - it's two-sided. — John Wooden

If marriage is centrally an emotional union, rather than one inherently ordered to family life, it becomes much harder to show why the state should concern itself with marriage any more than with friendship. Why involve the state in what amounts to the legal regulation of tenderness? — Sherif Girgis

Many people, if they were to treat other people as they treat their spouses, would soon have not a friend in the world. Why it is assumed that marriage is more impervious to the effects of discourtesy than friendship, I do not know ... — Jo Coudert

Everything is made of words, and the words had done their job. I could even say they had done it well. They had risen in a confusing swarm and spun around in spirals, ever higher, colliding and separating, golden insects, messengers of friendship and knowledge, higher, higher, into that region of the sky where the day turns into night and reality into dreams, regal words on their nuptial flight, always higher, until their marriage is finally consummated at the summit of the world. — Cesar Aira

Friendship is also a vital and wonderful part of courtship and marriage. A relationship between a man and a woman that begins with friendship and then ripens into romance and eventually marriage will usually become an enduring, eternal friendship. — Marlin K. Jensen

And so, by circuitous and unpredictable routes, we converge toward midcontinent and meet in Madison, and are at once drawn together, braided and plaited into a friendship. It is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it, but mutual liking. It is therefore rare. To Sally and me, focused on each other and on the problems of getting on in a rough world, it happened unexpectedly; and in all our lives it has happened so thoroughly only once. — Wallace Stegner

Allow me to presume upon this new friendship of ours by telling you that denying your fiance your company in order to gain whatever it is you want, is not only foolish but risky. It was obvious to me that his grace has a great affection for you, and I truly think he would give you anything you want if you simply gave him that lovely smile of yours and asked him for it. Deceit and deviousness do you no credit, my child, and what's more, they will get you absolutely nowhere with the duke. He has known females far more skilled in deception and trickery than you, and all those ladies ever got from him was the opportunity to amuse him for a very brief time. While you, by being direct and forthright as I sense that you are, have gained the very thing those other females most desired. You have gained the offer of his grace's hand in marriage.
-Dr. Whitticomb — Judith McNaught

Some people become family through blood. Some people through marriage. Others find their way into your life and your heart through friendship. Raise a glass to all of our family tonight ... those who share our name and those who we have come to care deeply for. There is no greater fortune than to be surrounded by so much love. — Ruth Cardello

Marriage is the tomb of friendship. — Hannah Webster Foster

Friendship is the union of spirits, a marriage of hearts, and the bond thereof virtue — William Penn

Scott's friends on the forum didn't know his big picture. They read a phrase like "It's going to kill me to live without him" for its precise meaning, and nothing else. They didn't read more than those nine words into the message. They didn't take offense, didn't try to talk him out of it. Didn't resent it for its presumed relativity.

"Of course it is," they said. And it was the same way they'd responded to every other thing he'd told them about himself: his thoughts on parenting, on marriage and sex, on education and race. They read what he wrote, and only what he wrote, and they responded. Not always in agreement - he'd had plenty of heated discussions over the past year on this issue or that. But he didn't need yes-men any more than he needed someone to read twenty-one extra words into the nine he'd written. — Julie Lawson Timmer

If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love. — Michel De Montaigne

Marriage is a mutual friendship. — Lailah Gifty Akita

[A]s people are beginning to see that the sexes form in a certain sense a continuous group, so they are beginning to see that Love and Friendship which have been so often set apart from each other as things distinct are in reality closely related and shade imperceptibly into each other. Women are beginning to demand that Marriage shall mean Friendship as well as Passion; that a comrade-like Equality shall be included in the word Love; and it is recognised that from the one extreme of a 'Platonic' friendship (generally between persons of the same sex) up to the other extreme of passionate love (generally between persons of opposite sex) no hard and fast line can at any point be drawn effectively separating the different kinds of attachment. We know, in fact, of Friendships so romantic in sentiment that they verge into love; we know of Loves so intellectual and spiritual that they hardly dwell in the sphere of Passion. — Edward Carpenter

All I want is to love you and fill you with happiness. — Auliq Ice

Love is friendship. Love is happiness. — Lailah Gifty Akita