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.
Of the many horrors of divorce, the most egregious is that it robs a kid of the best of both worlds. Dads can do many things that even the best moms can't, and vice versa.
Too often, when transgender people die, family members or funeral homes will end up dressing a body of a transgender person in the garments of the gender that they were assigned at birth instead of their gender identity. They're often dead-named and misgendered.
I believe that what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly.
When you have a lot of solitude, any living thing becomes a companion.
We're reminded yet again: we are stronger, we are smarter, we have more fun when we include each other - when we include as many perspectives as possible.
There is no cruelty greater than a woman's to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an insane irritation.
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