Marriage and deathless friendship, both should be inviolable and sacred: two great creative passions, separate, apart, but complementary: the one pivotal, the other adventurous: the one, marriage, the centre of human life; and the other, the leap ahead.
In countries where there is no marriage, there is no duty between husband and wife; when marriage comes, husband and wife live together on account of attachment; and that kind of living together becomes settled after generations; and when it becomes so settled, it becomes a duty.
The old ideals are dead as nails--nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman--sort of ultimate marriage--and there isn't anything else.
A wife is property that one acquires by contract, she is transferable, because possession of her requires title; in fact, woman is, so to speak, only man's appendage; consequently, slice, cut, clip her, you have all rights to her.
When passion is not fed, it changes to need. At this juncture, marriage becomes a fixed idea in the mind of the bourgeois, being the only means whereby he can win a woman and appropriate her to his uses.
I would rather have young people settle on a small income at once, and have to struggle with a few difficulties together, than be involved in a long engagement.
Your most vital necessity in this life is that you shall love your wife completely and implicitly and in an entire nakedness of body and spirit.... this that I tell you is my message as far as I've got any.
Marriage -- yes, it is the supreme felicity of life. I concede it. And it is also the supreme tragedy of life. The deeper the love the surer the tragedy. And the more disconsolating when it comes.
Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the strayingof the planets and the magnificence of the fixed stars.