H. L. Mencken Marriage Quotations

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

If I ever mary, it will be on a suddn impulse - as aman shoots himself

The fundamental trouble with marriage is that it shakes a man's confidence in himself, and so greatly diminishes his general competence and effectiveness. His habit of mind becomes that of a commander who has lost a decisive and calamitous battle. He quite trusts himself thereafter.

He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.

The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all other men are just as easy to fool.

I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.

The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.

Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.

Happiness is peace after strife, the overcoming of difficulties, the feeling of security and well-being. The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous; the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.