Below are some quotes collected that can create little rays of illumination by the “shoulders of giants” in your ceremony.
Nisargadatta: In marriage you are neither the husband nor the wife; you are the love between the two.
Rilke: Love consists in this: That two solitudes protect, and touch, and greet each other.
Marcel Proust: Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Voltaire: Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.
Zora Neale Hurston: Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
Robert Sexton: In a time when nothing is more certain than change, the commitment of two people to one another has become difficult and rare. Yet, by its scarcity, the beauty and value of this exchange have only been enhanced.
Joseph Campbell: 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.
Maya Angelou: We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
Abdu’l-baha, Paris Talks: Love gives life to the lifeless. Love lights a flame in the heart that is cold. Love brings hope to the hopeless and gladdens the hearts of the sorrowful.
Gottfried Willhelm Leibnitz: To love is to place our happiness in the happiness of another.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity.
Amy Tan: I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.
Anais Nin: Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
Allan K. Chalmers: The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
Felix Adler: Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each include the other, each is enriched by the other.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.
Nikki Giovanni: We love because it’s the only true adventure.
Leo Tolstoy: All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
The goal of life should not be to find joy in marriage, but to bring more love and truth into the world. We marry each other to assist in this task.
Erica Jong: Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fight for, being brave for, risking everything for. And trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.
C. Simmons: A person’s character is but half formed till after wedlock.
Rafael Ortiz: Love is not finding someone to live with; it’s finding someone you can’t live without.
Malagasy Proverb: Let your love be like the misty rains, coming softly, but flooding the river.
bell hooks: The capacity to love is tied to being able to be awake, to being able to move out of yourself and be with someone else in a manner that is not about your desire to possess them, but to be with them, to be in union and communion.
Ursula LeGuin: Love doesn’t sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all of the time, made new.
Ancient Egyptian: Your embraces alone give life to my heart.
Thomas Merton: Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone….We find it with another.
Sophocles: One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life; that word is love.
Willa Cathar: Where there is great love there are always miracles.
Lau Tzu: To love someone deeply gives you strength. Being loved by someone deeply gives you courage.
William Butler Yeats: True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its votaries live in confidence, equality and unreserve.
James Weldon Johnson: The world, for me, and all the world can hold…Is circled by your arms: for me there lies,….Within the lights and shadows of your eyes,…The only beauty that is never old.
George Santayana: Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
Peter Ustinov: Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.
Baruch Spinoza: All happiness or unhappiness solely depends on the quality of the object to which we are attached by love. Love for an object eternal and infinite feeds the mind with joy aloe, a joy that is free from sorrow.
St. Augustine (354-430): What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has the eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.
Hassidic Saying: When passion burns within you, remember that it was given to you for good purpose.
Flora Davis: Almost all married people fight, although many are ashamed to admit it. Actually a marriage in which no quarreling at all takes place may well be one that is dead or dying from emotional undernourishment. If you care, you probably fight.
Albert Einstein: Strange is our situation here upon the Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. However, there is one thing that we do know: that we are here for the sake of others. Above all, for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends.
Robert Browning: Take away love, and our earth is a tomb.
Robert Heinlein: Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Victor Hugo: Love is knowing that even when you are alone, you will never be lonely again. And great happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved. Loved for ourselves. And even loved in spite of ourselves.
Letter from Victor Hugo: When two souls, which have sought each other for, however long in the throng, have finally found each other …a union, fiery and pure as they themselves are… begins on earth and continues forever in heaven.
This union is love, true love, … a religion, which deifies the loved one, whose life comes from devotion and passion, and for which the greatest sacrifices are the sweetest delights.
Lord Byron: The bravest are the tenderest and the loving are the daring.
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