Nothing can bring a real sense of security into the home except true love.
– Billy Graham
Love | Marriage | Home
When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now.
– C.S. Lewis
Marriage | Love
Marriage was ordained for a remedy and to increase the world and for the man to help the woman and the woman the man, with all love and kindness.
– William Tyndale
Marriage | Helping
Try praising your wife, even if it does frighten her at first.
– Billy Sunday
Marriage
If your wife doesn’t treat you as she should, be thankful, you might not like what you deserve.
– Jerry Falwell
Marriage | Thankfulness
The reason that marriage is so painful and yet wonderful is because it is a reflection of the Gospel, which is painful and wonderful at once. The Gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.
– Tim Keller
The Gospel | Marriage
Men, you’ll never be a good groom to your wife unless you’re first a good bride to Jesus.
– Tim Keller
Marriage | Relationships
A man doesn’t own his marriage; he is only the steward of his wife’s love.
– Ed Cole
Marriage
Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.
– Assorted Authors
Marriage
A good wife is heaven’s last, best gift to man, – his gem of many virtues, his casket of jewels; her voice is sweet music, her smiles his brightest day, her kiss the guardian of his innocence, her arms the pale of his safety, her industry his surest wealth, her economy his safest steward, her lips his faithful counselors, her bosom the softest pillow of his cares.
– Jeremy Taylor
Marriage | Music
[Spiritual friendship] is eagerly helping one another know, serve, love, and resemble God in deeper and deeper ways.
– Tim Keller
Friendship | Love | Marriage
The man who loves his wife above all else on earth gains the freedom and power to pursue other noble, but lesser, loves.
– David Jeremiah
Marriage | Freedom
When Eve was brought unto Adam, he became filled with the Holy Spirit, and gave her the most sanctified, the most glorious of appellations. He called her Eva, that is to say, the Mother of All. He did not style her wife, but simply mother, mother of all living creatures. In this consists the glory and the most precious ornament of woman.
– Martin Luther
Marriage | Mothers | Sanctification
There is no more lovely, friendly or charming relationship, communion or company, than a good marriage.
– Martin Luther
Marriage | Relationships
For a wife take the daughter of a good mother.
– Thomas Fuller
Marriage | Mothers | Daughters
As God by creation made two of one, so again by marriage He made one of two.
– Thomas Adams
Marriage
Many marriages would be better if the husband and the wife clearly understood that they are on the same side.
– Zig Ziglar
Marriage
Let the wife make the husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave.
– Martin Luther
Marriage | Home
If you treat your wife like a thoroughbred, you’ll never end up with a nag.
– Zig Ziglar
Marriage
According to the Bible, the marriage act is more than a physical act. It is an act of sharing. It is an act of communion. It is an act of total self-giving wherein the husband gives himself completely to the wife, and the wife gives herself to the husband in such a way that the two actually become one flesh.
– Wayne Mack
Marriage | Giving
God has set the type of marriage everywhere throughout the creation. Every creature seeks its perfection in another. The very heavens and earth picture it to us.
– Martin Luther
Marriage | Creation
It is not marriage that fails; it is people that fail. All that marriage does is to show them up.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Marriage
The Lord commands the wife to be submissive. Refusal to submit to the husband is therefore rebellion against God Himself. Submission to the husband is a test of her love for God as well as a test of love for her husband. The wife then must look upon her submission to her husband as an act of obedience to Christ and not merely to her husband.
– Wayne Mack
Marriage | Submission
Sociologists argue that in contemporary Western society the marketplace has become so dominant that the consumer model increasingly characterizes most relationships that historically were covenantal, including marriage. Today we stay connected to people only as long as they are meeting our particular needs at an acceptable cost to us. When we cease to make a profit – that is, when the relationship appears to require more love and affirmation from us than we are getting back – then we ‘cut our loses’ and drop the relationship. This has also been called ‘commodification,’ a process by which social relationships are reduced to economic exchange relationships, and so the very idea of ‘covenant’ is disappearing in our culture. Covenant is therefore a concept increasingly foreign to us, and yet the Bible says it is the essence of marriage.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage
Only with time do we really learn who the other person is and come to love the person for him- or herself and not just for the feelings and experiences they give us.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage | Time
We must say to ourselves something like this: ‘Well, when Jesus looked down from the cross, he didn’t think ‘I am giving myself to you because you are so attractive to me.’ No, he was in agony, and he looked down at us – denying him, abandoning him, and betraying him – and in the greatest act of love in history, he stayed. He said, ‘Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.’ He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely. That is why I am going to love my spouse.’ Speak to your heart like that, and then fulfill the promises you made on your wedding day.
– Tim Keller
Jesus | Love | Marriage
God created marriage. No government subcommittee envisioned it. No social organization developed it. Marriage was conceived and born in the mind of God.
– Max Lucado
Marriage
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.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage | Sacrifice
Marriage is an exclusive union between one man and one woman, publicly acknowledged, permanently sealed, and physically consummated.
– Assorted Authors
Marriage
Sex appeal alone is the poorest basis in the world for a happy marriage.
– John R. Rice
Marriage
Deceive not thyself by overexpecting happiness in the married estate. Remember the nightingales which sing only some months in the spring, but commonly are silent when they have hatched their eggs.
– Thomas Fuller
Marriage
In Ephesians 5, Paul shows us that even on earth Jesus did not use his power to oppress us but sacrificed everything to bring us into union with him. And this takes us beyond the philosophical to the personal and the practical. If God had the Gospel of Jesus’ salvation in mind when he established marriage, then marriage only ‘works’ to the degree that approximates the pattern of God’s self-giving love in Christ.
– Tim Keller
Jesus | Love | Marriage | Sacrifice
What keeps the marriage going is your commitment to your spouse’s holiness.
– Tim Keller
The Gospel | Marriage
Though bachelors be the strongest stakes, married men are the best binders, in the hedge of the commonwealth.
– Thomas Fuller
Marriage
It seems almost oxymoronic to believe that this new idealism has led to a new pessimism about marriage, but that is exactly what has happened. In generations past there was far less talk about compatibility and finding the ideal soul mate. Today we are looking for someone who accepts us as we are and fulfills our desires, and this creates an unrealistic set of expectations that frustrates both the searchers and the searched for.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage | Compatibility
This principle – that your spouse should be capable of becoming your best friend – is a game changer when you address the question of compatibility in a prospective spouse. If you think of marriage largely in terms of erotic love, then compatibility means sexual chemistry and appeal. If you think of marriage largely as a way to move into the kind of social status in life you desire, then compatibility means being part of the desired social class, and perhaps common tastes and aspirations for lifestyle. The problem with these factors is that they are not durable. Physical attractiveness will wane, no matter how hard you work to delay its departure. And socio-economic status unfortunately can change almost overnight. When people think they have found compatibility based on these things, they often make the painful discovery that they have built their relationship on unstable ground. A woman ‘lets herself go’ or a man loses his job, and the compatibility foundation falls apart.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage | Romance
Every man rejoices twice when he has a partner of his joy; a friend shares my sorrow and makes it but a moiety, but he swells my joy and makes it double.
– Jeremy Taylor
Marriage | Joy
A man finds himself seven years older the day after his marriage.
– Francis Bacon
Marriage
She commandeth her husband, in any equal matter, by constant obeying him.
– Thomas Fuller
Marriage
Fifty-fifty marriages are an impossibility. They do not work. They cannot work. In marriage someone has to be the final decision maker. Someone has to delegate responsibility, and God has ordained that this should be the husband.
– Wayne Mack
Marriage
While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.
– Tim Keller
Character | Marriage
Marriage has in it less of beauty, but more of safety, than the single life; it hath not more ease, but less danger; it is more merry and more sad; it is fuller of sorrows and fuller of joys; it lies under more burdens, but is supported by all the strengths of love and charity; and those burdens are delightful.
– Jeremy Taylor
Marriage
If you would have a good wife, marry one who has been a good daughter.
– Thomas Fuller
Marriage
The good wife is none of our dainty dames, who love to appear in a variety of suits every day new; as if a gown, like a stratagem in war, were to be used but once. But our good wife sets up a sail according to the keel of her husband’s estate; and, if of high parentage, she doth not so remember what she was by birth, that she forgets what she is by match.
– Thomas Fuller
Marriage
Jesus’ teaching in general [implies] that happy and fulfilling sexual relations in marriage depend on each partner aiming to give satisfaction to the other. If it is the joy of each to make the other happy, a hundred problems will be solved before they happen.
– John Piper
Marriage
The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union.
– C.S. Lewis
Adultery | Marriage
Marriage is the mother of the world. It preserves kingdoms, and fills cities and churches, and heaven itself.
– Jeremy Taylor
Marriage
Marriage has the power to set the course of your life as a whole. If your marriage is strong, even if all the circumstances in your life around you are filled with trouble and weakness, it won’t matter. You will be able to move out into the world in strength.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage | Strength
She that hath a wise husband must entice him to an eternal dearness by the veil of modesty and the grave robes of chastity, the ornament of meekness, and the jewels of faith and charity. She must have no painting but blushings; her brightness must be purity, and she must shine roundabout with sweetness and friendship; and she shall be pleasant while she lives, and desired when she dies.
– Jeremy Taylor
Marriage | Modesty | Purity
There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
– C.S. Lewis
Marriage
Becoming one flesh is a broad concept involving the totality of life. The context of Genesis 2 and the teaching of the rest of the Bible about marriage demand this. At the same time, it is generally recognized that there is no place where this total sharing is more beautifully pictured or fully experienced than in the sexual relationship of the man and his wife.
– Wayne Mack
Marriage
When we claim to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and then willfully choose to unite ourselves with an unbeliever in the most intimate personal union on earth we profane the holiness of God. We act as though our emotional drive for human intimacy is more important than affirming the preciousness of God’s holiness and nearness.
– John Piper
Marriage
She can find peace in the midst of a hard marriage when she turns to God for strength, wisdom, and the ability to overcome.
– Crystal McDowell
Marriage | Strength
A married man falling into misfortune is more apt to retrieve his situation in the world than a single one, chiefly because his spirits are soothed and retrieved by domestic endearments, and his self-respect kept alive by finding that although all abroad be darkness and humiliation, yet there is a little world of love at home over which he is a monarch.
– Jeremy Taylor
Marriage
The married man is like the bee that fixes his hive, augments the world, benefits the republic, and by a daily diligence, without wronging any, profits all; but he who contemns wedlock, like a wasp, wanders an offence to the world, lives upon spoil and rapine, disturbs peace, steals sweets that are none of his own, and, by robbing the lives of others, meets misery as his due reward.
– Owen Feltham
Marriage | Diligence
To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.
– Tim Keller
Commitment | Love | Marriage
Keep thy eyes wide open before marriage; and half shut afterward.
– Thomas Fuller
Marriage
In short, the enlightenment privatized marriage, taking it out of the public sphere, and redefined its purpose as individual gratification, not any ‘broader good’ such as reflecting God’s nature, producing character, or raising children. Slowly but surely, this newer understanding of the meaning of marriage has displaced the older ones in Western culture.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage
Marriage is so much like salvation and our relationship with Christ that Paul says you can’t understand marriage without looking at the Gospel.
– Tim Keller
Marriage | The Bible
Those dreaming of the perfect match are outnumbered by those who don’t really want it at all, though perhaps they can’t admit it. After all, our culture makes individual freedom, autonomy and fulfillment the very highest values, and thoughtful people know deep down that any love relationship at all means the loss of all three. You can say, ‘I want someone who will accept me just as I am,’ but in your heart of hearts you know that you are not perfect, that there are plenty of things about you that need to be changed, and that anyone who gets to know you up close and personal will want to change them.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage
The man who sanctifies his wife understands that this is his divinely ordained responsibility… Is my wife more like Christ because she is married to me? Or is she like Christ in spite of me? Has she shrunk from His likeness because of me? Do I sanctify her or hold her back? Is she a better woman because she is married to me?
– R. Kent Hughes
Sanctification | Marriage
Real love, the Bible says, instinctively desires permanence.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage
In any relationship, there will be frightening spells in which your feelings of love dry up. And when that happens you must remember that the essence of marriage is that it is a covenant, a commitment, a promise of future love. So what do you do? You do the acts of love, despite your lack of feeling. You may not feel tender, sympathetic, and eager to please, but in your actions you must be tender, understanding, forgiving and helpful. And, if you do that, as time goes on you will not only get through the dry spells, but they will become less frequent and deep, and you will become more constant in your feelings. This is what can happen if you decide to love.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage | Passion
Keep up your conjugal love in constant heat and vigor.
– Richard Baxter
Marriage
Within this Christian vision for marriage, here’s what it means to fall in love. It is to look at another person and get a glimpse of the person 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!’ Each spouse should see the great thing that Jesus is doing in the life of their mate through the Word, the Gospel. Each spouse then should give him- or herself to be a vehicle for that work and envision the day that you will stand together before God, seeing each other presented in spotless beauty and glory.
– Tim Keller
Marriage
The happiness of married life depends upon making small sacrifices with readiness and cheerfulness.
– John Selden
Marriage | Cheerfulness | Sacrifice
Our culture says that feelings of love are the basis for actions of love. And of course that can be true. But it is truer to say that actions of love can lead consistently to feelings of love.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage
Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
– G.K. Chesterton
Marriage | War
The thing needed to women (and to men too) is these friendships without love between men and women. And if between married men and married women, all the better.
– Florence Nightingale
Friendship | Marriage | Women
Of all actions of a man’s life, his marriage does least concern other people, yet of all actions of our life tis most meddled with by other people.
– John Selden
Marriage
Singles, too, must see the penultimate status of marriage. If single Christians don’t develop a deeply fulfilling love relationship with Jesus, they will put too much pressure on their dream of marriage, and that will create pathology in their lives as well.
– Tim Keller
God | Marriage
All the molestations of marriage are abundantly recompensed with the other comforts which God bestoweth on them who make a wise choice of a wife.
– Thomas Fuller
Marriage | Choices
When God brought the first man his spouse, he brought him not just a lover but the friend his heart had been seeking. Proverbs 2:17 speaks of one’s spouse as your ‘allup’ a unique word that the lexicons define as your ‘special confidant’ or ‘best friend.’ In an age where women were often seen as the husband’s property and marriages were mainly business deals and transactions seeking to increase the family’s social status and security, it was startling for the Bible to describe a spouse in this way. But in today’s society, with its emphasis on romance and sex, it is just as radical to insist that your spouse should be your best friend, though for a different reason. In tribal societies, romance doesn’t matter as much as social status, and in individualistic Western societies, romance and great sex matter far more than anything else. The Bible, however, without ignoring the importance of romance, puts great emphasis on marriage as companionship.
– Tim Keller
Marriage
Both men and women today see marriage not as a way of creating character and community but as a way to reach personal life goals. They are looking for a marriage partner who will ‘fulfill their emotional, sexual, and spiritual desires.’ And that creates an extreme idealism that in turn leads to a deep pessimism that you will ever find the right person to marry.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage | Relationships
Celibacy, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity; but marriage, like the useful bee, builds a house, and gathers sweetness from every flower, and labors and unites into societies and republics, and sends out colonies, and feeds the world with delicacies, and keeps order, and exercises many virtues, and promotes the interest of mankind, and is that state of good to which God hath designed the present constitution of the world.
– Jeremy Taylor
Marriage
The love of a wife to her husband may begin from the supply of her necessities, but afterwards she may love him also for the sweetness of his person; so the soul first loves Christ for salvation but when she is brought to Him and finds what sweetness there is in Him then she loves Him for Himself.
– Richard Sibbes
Marriage | Salvation
Marriage [is] two flawed people coming together to create a space of stability, love and consolation, a haven in a heartless world.
– Tim Keller
Marriage
Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage
Well married a person has wings, poorly married shackles.
– Henry Ward Beecher
Marriage
When a man and a woman give themselves to each other in an act of marital love, they can know the love of Christ as no one else can know it.
– J. Vernon McGee
Marriage
Marriage is a total commitment and a total sharing of the total person with another person until death.
– Wayne Mack
Marriage | Commitment
Wherever you find marital failure, you will find a breakdown in real communication. Wherever you find marital success, you will find a good communication system.
– Wayne Mack
Marriage
Since the marriage relationship is to reflect the relationship between Jesus Christ and His Church, it is imperative that biblical submission and love be practiced in all of its aspects between husband and wife.
– John C. Broger
Marriage | Submission
The Puritan ethic of marriage was first to look not for a partner whom you do love passionately at this moment but rather for one whom you can love steadily as your best friend for life, then to proceed with God’s help to do just that.
– J.I. Packer
Marriage
The Bible opens and closes with a wedding.
– Assorted Authors
Marriage | The Bible
Without the will, marriage is a mockery; without emotion, it is a drudgery. You need both.
– Ravi Zacharias
Marriage
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.
– Frederick W. Robertson
Marriage
You can only afford to be generous if you actually have some money in the bank to give. In the same way, if your only source of love and meaning is your spouse, then anytime he or she fails you, it will not just cause grief but a psychological cataclysm. If, however, you know something of the work of the Spirit in your life, you have enough love ‘in the bank’ to be generous to your spouse even when you are not getting much affection or kindness at the moment.
– Tim Keller
The Holy Spirit | Love | Marriage
I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable.
– G.K. Chesterton
Marriage
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!
– Tim Keller
Marriage | Love
Wholly abstain or wed.
– George Herbert
Marriage
They that marry ancient people, merely in expectation to bury them, hang themselves in hope that one will come and cut the halter.
– Thomas Fuller
Marriage
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.
– C.S. Lewis
Love | Marriage
Better die an old maid, sister, than marry the wrong man.
– Billy Sunday
Marriage
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.
– George Macdonald
Marriage
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.
– William Penn
Marriage | Money
Deceive not thyself by over-expecting happiness in the married state. Look not therein for contentment greater than God will give, or a creature in this world can receive, namely, to be free from all inconveniences. Marriage is not like the hill of Olympus, wholly clear, without clouds.
– Thomas Fuller
Marriage | Deception