Andre Maurois Quotes

All my adult life I've felt drawn to ask long-married couples how they were able to stay together. All of them said the same thing: "We worked hard at it.

I was really interested in how marriages work, how you can, you know, be in love with somebody and spend many years with your lives intertwined, but in the end another soul can be fundamentally unknowable. And I think that the stress of war, when one party goes away and the other has to deal at home, is a really testing time in a lot of marriages.

I do think it's smart to see a marriage as "a garden and a gardener who constantly swap roles." You really have to switch from one to another. Being the gardener would be the more active role in the situation. Being a garden would be more passive. You've got to be both the one who gets help and the one that's helping. That's the circulation in a couple. You should switch from one position to another. I think it's good to be always aware that love can fade. There's something I really like about that sentence. It's as if love should be seen as work...because it is.

Above all never forget that a marriage is in one way very much like a newspaper. It has to be made fresh every damn day of every damn year.

It's just as hard... staying happily married as it is doing movies.

Marriage takes work - it doesn't just happen.

In 'Friday Night Lights,' the relationship between the coach and his wife, that marriage was something that you couldn't really understand until you actually saw it exist on film.

It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.

Marriage requires a special talent, like acting. Monogamy requires genius.

I honestly believe you can never tell if a relationship is going to last. In my own marriage, which is going on 14 years, I don't think of it as 'I'm going to be with this person forever.' Instead, I think of more like, 'I'll probably be with this person for the next six weeks. Then I'll re-evaluate.'

People often say that if you have to work hard at a marriage, then it's not naturally good, but I think that's totally wrong.

Marriage? I don't know what I really think about marriage. I'm a bit confused on that issue.

It's still too early to say how my wife will influence my life. But I do already know that it's sometimes hard work living with her.

Friendship is all about trust and sharing. Passionate and romantic love is all about sex and emotions. You have to try to combine those, I think. The great marriages, the great couples I know, have both.

Married men make the best husbands.

I think a good husband has to depend on having a good wife.

All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.

I'm a person who's been in a long-term relationship. It's not surprising that a lot of my friends - whether they're in same-sex relationships or not, whether they're married officially or just in a long-term relationship - have really interesting and various stages in their relationship. My life is looking at these friendships and saying, "Wait a minute, isn't this something really interesting? How can I explore this?"

It takes something to get married: nerve, hope, a strong desire to make a certain statement - and it takes something to stay married: more hope, determination, a sense of humor, and needs that are best met by being in a pair.

Not everyone wants to know everything their partner did. Maybe it's enough to say, "Things aren't going well in our marriage. I've made mistakes. I don't think you've been a good partner to me. How do we go forward together?" I think there's a different answer for every couple. But I think intimacy is asking that question.

The magic isn't in getting married, it's in staying married.

No, there are three people in a marriage, there's the woman, there's the man, and there's what I call the third person, the most important, the person who is composed of the man and woman together.

Couples who rarely or never have sex can know lifelong love.

I think we explored the further reaches of for better or for worse than some other married couples.

We were married for better or worse. I couldn't have done better, and she couldn't have done worse.