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.
Only two kinds of daughters, she shouted in Chinese. Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!
The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'
Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.
The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.
You young people never say anything. And us old folks don't know how to stop talking.
You can't get there alone. People have to help you, and I do believe in karma. I believe in paybacks. You get people to help you by telling the truth, by being earnest.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.