Shutterstock / marcogarrincha

100 Classic Quotes About Why Marriage Sucks

"I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury." —Groucho Marx

By Lorenzo Jensen III

Updated 10 years ago, May 15, 2015

1.

I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.
—Groucho Marx

2.

Marriage can be viewed as the waiting room for death.
—Mike Myers

3.

Marriage is the death of hope.
—Woody Allen

4.

I used to be married…but I’m much better now.
—Unknown

5.

Marriage is an exercise in torture.
—Frances Conroy

6.

Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.
—Leonardo da Vinci

7.

Marriage is the tomb of love.
—Giacomo Casanova

8.

Marriage is give and take. You’d better give it to her or she’ll take it anyway.
—Joey Adams

9.

Married men live longer than single men. But married men are a lot more willing to die.
—Johnny Carson

10.

A wedding is a funeral where you smell your own flowers.
—Eddie Cantor

11.

The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret.
—Henny Youngman

12.

When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her.
—Sacha Guitry

13.

A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he’s finished.
—Zsa Zsa Gabor

14.

The music at a wedding procession always reminds me of the music of soldiers going into battle.
—Heinrich Heine

15.

Always get married in the morning. That way if it doesn’t work out, you haven’t wasted the whole day.
—Mickey Rooney

16.

Personally, I know nothing about sex, because I have always been married.
—Zsa Zsa Gabor

17.

Married life had taught him the futility of arguing with a female in a dark-brown mood.
—Isaac Asimov

18.

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
—Oscar Wilde

19.

Most marriages don’t add two people together. They subtract one from the other.
—Ian Fleming

20.

My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.
—Rodney Dangerfield

21.

Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed.
—Albert Einstein

22.

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

23.

The trouble with some women is that they get all excited about nothing – and then marry him.
—Cher

24.

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.
—Michel de Montaigne

25.

Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
—Oscar Wilde

26.

Some people claim that marriage interferes with romance. There’s no doubt about it. Anytime you have a romance, your wife is bound to interfere.
—Groucho Marx

27.

There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.
—Oscar Wilde

28.

Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who’ll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness—It means you’re in the wrong house, that’s what it means.
—Henny Youngman

29.

Marriage is an attempt to solve problems together which you didn’t even have when you were on your own.
—Eddie Cantor

30.

All men make mistakes, but married men find out about them sooner.
—Red Skelton

31.

My husband and I have never considered divorce…murder sometimes, but never divorce.
—Joyce Brothers

32.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.
—Benjamin Franklin

33.

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
—Oscar Wilde

34.

If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.
—Katharine Hepburn

35.

Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.
—P. G. Wodehouse

36.

There’s only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I’ll get married again.
—Clint Eastwood

37.

They say all marriages are made in heaven, but so are thunder and lightning.
—Clint Eastwood

38.

Before marriage, a girl has to make love to a man to hold him. After marriage, she has to hold him to make love to him.
—Marilyn Monroe

39.

Marrying means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties
—Arthur Schopenhauer

40.

Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.
—Jane Austen

41.

Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
—Voltaire

42.

A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.
—Dorothy L. Sayers

43.

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
—H. L. Mencken

44.

When a girl marries, she exchanges the attention of many men for the inattention of one.
—Helen Rowland

45.

Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.
—Michel de Montaigne

46.

Loving the same man or woman all your life, why, that’s like supposing the same candle could last you all your life
—Leo Tolstoy

47.

Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
—Ambrose Bierce

48.

I learned that day that there is no more lonely state than being in a lonely marriage.
—Julie Metz

49.

…it seemed marriage by its very design was meant to seek out love and destroy it.
—Kelly O’Connor McNees

50.

Never get married in college; it’s hard to get a start if a prospective employer finds you’ve already made one mistake.
—Elbert Hubbard

51.

In every marriage more than a week old there are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find and continue to find grounds for marriage.
—Robert Anderson

52.

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
—Gilbert K. Chesterton

53.

Marriage…the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world.
—Malcolm Bradbury

54.

Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.
—Isadora Duncan

55.

And pray where in earth or heaven are there prudent marriages—Might as well talk about prudent suicides.
—G.K. Chesterton

56.

Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.
—Stephen Leacock

57.

Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce.
—P. J. O’Rourke

58.

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn’t they’d be married too.
—H. L. Mencken

59.

It doesn’t much signify whom one marries, for one is sure to find out the next morning that it was someone else.
—Samuel Rogers

60.

I like getting married, but I don’t like being married.
—Don Adams

61.

Marriage is like the Middle East, isn’t it—there’s no solution.
—Willy Russell

62.

Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
—Ambrose Bierce

63.

To marry is to narrow one’s possibilities horribly.
—Jude Morgan

64.

A husband is what is left of a lover, after the nerve has been extracted.
—Helen Rowland

65.

Better be a desperate single with many options than a desperate married with no option.
—Amen Muffler

66.

Instead of getting married again, I’m going to find a woman I don’t like and give her a house.
—Lewis Grizzard

67.

Men marry women hoping they’ll never change. Women marry men hoping they will.
—David Mitchell

68.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
—Honore de Balzac

69.

All in all, death is something like marriage.
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline

70.

Marriage is nature’s way of keeping us from fighting with strangers.
—Alan King

71.

Death stands behind every bride, every groom.
—Catherynne M. Valente

72.

All marriages are happy. It’s the living together afterward that causes all the trouble.
—Raymond Hull

73.

Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner.
—Charles Caleb Colton

74.

If you want to read about love and marriage, you’ve got to buy two separate books.
—Alan King

75.

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open.
—George Bernard Shaw

76.

I support gay marriage. I believe they have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us.
—Kinky Friedman

77.

The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.
—Oscar Wilde

78.

What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?
—Angela Carter

79.

A marriage is no amusement but a solemn act, and generally a sad one.
—Queen Victoria

80.

Marriage is really tough because you have to deal with feelings… and lawyers.
—Richard Pryor

81.

Marriage destroyed my relationship with two wonderful men.
—Marilyn Monroe

82.

How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.
—Oscar Wilde

83.

Marriage is like life—it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

84.

After marriage, the other man’s wife looks more beautiful.
—Navjot Singh Sidhu

85.

Divorce is probably of nearly the same date as marriage. I believe, however, that marriage is some weeks the more ancient.
—Voltaire

86.

Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

87.

Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.
—Michel de Montaigne

88.

The secret to a long marriage is to stay gone.
—Dolly Parton

89.

The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

90.

It was a perfect marriage. She didn’t want to and he couldn’t.
—Spike Milligan

91.

Usually, the fairy tale ends with the girl marrying the prince. But mine started as soon as the marriage was over.
—Diane von Furstenberg

92.

If variety is the spice of life, marriage is the big can of leftover Spam.
—Johnny Carson

93.

The biggest reason for divorce is marriage.
—Gene Simmons

94.

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.
—Alexander Theroux

95.

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
—Alain de Botton

96.

God invented concubinage, Satan marriage.
—Francis Picabia

97.

Marriage is like a bank account. You put it in, you take it out, you lose interest.
—Irwin Corey

98.

Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.
—J. B. Priestley

99.

Anything outside marriage seems like freedom and excitement.
—Jeanette Winterson

100.

I’ve had two terrific relationships, but both ended in marriage.
—Jane Seymour

Read this: 40 Mae West Quotes That Are Better Than Anything Marilyn Monroe Ever Said

Read this: The 100 All-Time Greatest Quotes About Cats

Read this: The 100 All-Time Greatest Quotes About Dogs

Read this: 100 Warm ‘N’ Sunny Quotes About Springtime