Your palms are sweaty, you're breathing hard, and your heart is pounding. It's almost your turn to give the toast at your best friend's wedding -- good thing you've got the perfect quote locked and loaded for your introduction!
Below, you'll find a list of some of history's greatest quotes concerning love and marriage. From pleasantly humorous to utterly romantic to quietly profound, these sayings are sure to help with writing a memorable wedding speech or toast.
"Behind every great man there is a surprised woman."
-- Maryon Pearson
"Before marriage a man will lay awake all night thinking about something you said; after marriage he'll fall asleep before you have finished saying it."
-- Helen Rowland
"An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her."
-- Agatha Christie
"Any woman can fool a man if she wants to and if he's in love with her."
-- Agatha Christie
"Marriage is the perfection of what love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters written in prose."
-- Beverly Nichols
To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the wedding cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.
--Ogden Nash
"Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same."
-- Emily Bronte
"The critical period in matrimony is breakfast-time."
-- Sir Alan Patrick Herbet
"Marriage is a lottery, but you can't tear up your ticket if you lose."
-- F.M. Knowles
"Shotgun wedding: a case of wife or death."
-- Anonymous
"If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love."
-- Michele de Montaigne
"There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved."
-- George Sand
"Love me tender, love me sweet, never let me go."
-- Elvis Presley
"For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof; the work for which all other work is but preparation."
--Rainer Maria Rilke
"To love another person is to see the face of God." –
Les Miserables
"Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition."
-- Alexander Smith
"There is no remedy for love but to love more."
-- Henry David Thoreau
I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
"You call it madness, but I call it love."
-- Don Byas
"A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.
-- Ingrid Bergman
"He who is devoid of the power to forgive, is devoid of the power to love."
-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Music is love in search of a word."
-- Anonymous
"Life has taught us that love does not consist of gazing at each other, but looking outward in the same direction."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up."
-- Joseph Barth
"A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person."
--Germaine Greer
"This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love;
the more they give, the more they possess."
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
"Love is the master key which opens the gates of happiness."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Love is space and time measured by the heart."
-- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
"You will find, as you look back upon your life, that the moments when you really lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love."
-- Henry Drummond
”Where there is great love, there are always miracles.”
--Willa Cather