Love & marriage quotes, explained

Tennyson, grieving the sudden death of his closest friend, decides that the pain of losing someone is better than never having loved them. It was written about friendship and death, not a breakup.

Whether something is beautiful depends on the person looking at it. There is no single standard everyone shares.

Family ties are stronger than any other bond, so relatives should stand by each other first.

The greatest love a person can show is to give up their life for others. Jesus says it at the Last Supper, the night before his death.

Old age is not a decline to dread but the goal that youth was preparing for. Browning's speaker invites a listener to grow old with him because the later years complete the life.

Part of a poem praising a wise, hard-working, generous woman. Her children and husband honor her because her life has blessed them.

The poet lists the ways she loves her husband: as deeply as her soul can reach, in everyday needs, freely, purely, with all her life, and, if God allows, even more after death.

Austen's narrator states a “universal truth” that is really a joke: it is the families of single women who want a rich bachelor, not the bachelor who wants a wife.

Shakespeare defines true love as constant: it does not change when circumstances change, and it does not fade with time or age.

Paul describes the kind of love that should hold a community together: patient, kind, humble and enduring. It was written to a quarreling church, not a couple.

Talking with her mother after Beth's death, Jo says no one loves you like a mother, while admitting she is starting to long for other kinds of love too.

Juliet asks why Romeo has to be a Montague, the son of her family's enemy. “Wherefore” means “why,” not “where.”

The poet decides the beloved is better than a summer's day, which is too short and changeable, and promises that the poem itself will keep their beauty alive forever.

Her beauty is like a clear, starry night, a perfect balance of dark and light, and it comes as much from a calm, good mind as from her face.

The best part of a good person's life is not their big achievements but the small, everyday kindnesses that nobody records and they themselves forget.

Lysander comforts Hermia, whose father forbids their marriage, by saying true love has always faced obstacles. It is a promise that trouble does not mean love is false.

Mothers shape the next generation, so their influence on the world is greater than any king's or general's. The poem praises motherhood as the strongest force for good.

Watching a play, Queen Gertrude says the actress playing a queen promises too much love and loyalty to be believed. “Protest” meant “vow,” not “object.”

Lord Darlington, a society man in love, says that everyone is flawed, but some people still look up toward something higher. His friends tease him for being romantic.

A promise of total loyalty: wherever you go, I go; your people will be my people, and your God my God.

Parents bring children into the world and love them, but do not own them. Children have their own thoughts and their own future, and a parent's job is to send them forward, like a bow sending an arrow.