18 Anniversary Quotes That Perfectly Sum Up Love and Marriage
Whether you're writing your husband's anniversary card or looking for the right words to toast your wife at a family dinner celebrating 25 whole years together, draw inspiration from the wise words of these poets, philosophers, novelists, and others who have perfected their descriptions of marriage, commitment, and long-term love. Try working them into your heartfelt speech, penning them in a card, or typing them into a midday email you send his or her way—because even after all this time, they're still the one you just can't stop thinking about.
Related: A Year-by-Year Guide to Traditional Wedding Anniversary Gifts
Maya Angelou
"In the flush of love's light, we dare be brave, and suddenly we see, that love costs all we are, and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free."
W. H. Auden
"Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate."
Honore de Balzac
"True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart."
George Eliot
"What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?"
Mahatma Gandhi
"Where there is love there is life."
Elizabeth Gilbert
"To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow—this is a human offering that can border on miraculous."
Ann Landers
"Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses."
Martin Luther
"There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage."
W. Somerset Maugham
"We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person."
Andre Maurois
"A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short."
Mignon McLaughlin
"A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction."
Franz Schubert
"Happy is the man who finds a true friend, and far happier is he who finds that true friend in his wife."
Simone Signoret
"Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years."
Sophocles
"One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love."
Lao Tzu
"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."
David Viscott
"To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides."
