I'm convinced there's a small room in the attic of the Foreign Office where future diplomats are taught to stammer.
Peter UstinovRead
Marriage is like a three-speed gearbox - affection, friendship, love. It is not advisable to crash your gears and go right through to love straightaway. You need to ease your way through. The basis of love is respect, and that needs to be learned from affection and friendship.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Marriage develops through stages of affection, friendship, and love, all requiring respect.
Peter Ustinov's quote illustrates that marriage is not merely a rush into love but rather a progression through various stages. By comparing marriage to a three-speed gearbox, he emphasizes that the foundational elements of respect, affection, and friendship must be nurtured and cultivated; they serve as essential components for a successful and lasting relationship.
Themes
MarriageRelationshipsLoveAffectionFriendshipRespect
In practice
Example use cases
In a wedding speech, one might refer to this quote to stress the importance of nurturing love through friendship.
More from Peter Ustinov
All quotes βI imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.
Peter UstinovRead
Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.
Peter UstinovRead
Because they have been in love they have survived everything that life could throw at them, even their own failures.
Peter UstinovRead
Corruption is nature's way of restoring our faith in democracy.
Peter UstinovRead
World Government is not only possible, it is inevitable; and when it comes, it will appeal to patriotism in its truest sense,in its only sense, the patriotism of humans who love their national heritages so deeply that they wish to preserve them in safety for the common good.
Peter UstinovRead
Similar quotes
A woman has to be twice as good as a man to go half as far.
Fannie HurstRead
You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves.
John GreenRead
The only things worth counting on are people you can count on.
Dwight D. EisenhowerRead
If a man does not die of a wound, then it heals in some fashion, and so it is with loss. From the sharp pain of immediate berevement, both the Prince and I passed into the gray days of numb bewilderment and waiting. So grief has always seemed to me, a time of waiting not for the hurt to pass, but to become accustomed to it.
Robin HobbRead
No man doth think others will be better to him than he is to them.
Benjamin WhichcoteRead
What does open us is sharing our vulnerabilities. Sometimes we see a couple who has done this difficult work over a lifetime. In the process, they have grown old together. We can sense the enormous comfort, the shared quality of ease between these people. It is beautiful, and very rare. Without this quality of openness and vulnerability, partners don't really know each other; they are one image living with another image.
Joko BeckRead