Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.
Interpretation
Marriage can be challenging and comes with its difficulties, while remaining single may lack the joys that relationships can provide.
This quote by Samuel Johnson highlights the dual nature of romantic commitments. While marriage may bring about various struggles and challenges, opting for celibacy, or a life without romantic involvement, may lead to a lack of joyful experiences that companionship can offer. It subtly suggests that choosing not to engage in relationships comes with its own drawbacks, implying that the pains of marriage are preferable to the emptiness of solitude.
In practice
During a wedding speech, one might reflect on the challenges and joys of marriage with this quote.
To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of the weary pilgrimage.
Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
When any anxiety or gloom of the mind takes hold of you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaining; but exert yourselves to hide it, and by endeavoring to hide it you drive it away.
A fishing rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.
Trust is the glue of life. It's the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It's the foundational principle that holds all relationships.
Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west. The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.
Conventional compliments often take the form of judgments however positive, and are sometimes offered to manipulate the behavior of others. NVC encourages the expression of appreciation solely for celebration.
Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and the sea is not within sight; that in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.
When you say, 'I'm sorry,' you turn people into your allies, even your partners.
What you can do with relations is greater than what you can do with guns.
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