The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.

Romantic ardor is in basic principle Lethean. Its purpose is temporarily to blind us to one another; make us forget the low esteem in which we really hold one another, and in which we quite deserve to be held; the anesthetic administered to reason without which the race would not go on.

... it is a fact universally acknowledged that a husband is the most ridiculous thing on earth, except for a bachelor.

I suppose I shall marry eventually One does that, one drifts into stability