Marriage Quotes

- From "It Takes Two to Tango" by Gary and Norma Smalley

The most successful relationships are those in which each person feels
safe sharing his or her feelings and needs. This is where our
personalities and parenting histories strongly affect us, because many
of us are fearful or uncomfortable about sharing such intimacies.

- From "It Takes Two to Tango" by Gary and Norma Smalley
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Honoring Your Wife...

When a man learns to speak both the language of the head and the
language of the heart, it can make tremendous positive changes in his
own life and in the lives of his wife and children.

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Honoring Your Husband...

Though your husband may not demonstrate or even realize it, he needs you
to teach him about intimate relationships! Men can learn how to relate
at a deep level, but only when they've chosen to communicate--a decision
you can help your mate to make.

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Learning to Communicate...

Communication takes perseverance--and the very strength and courage of
God's Spirit--to replace impatience, insensitivity, and
self-preoccupation with loving communication patterns
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Resolving Conflict and Dealing with Anger...

When we have offended someone, we must give that person a chance to
respond. True restoration is confession of wrong plus forgiveness
granted.

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Increasing Your Intimacy 100 Percent...

Whenever a husband and wife agree on the main areas of their lives, they
become bonded together and achieve a unique strength. Desert Storm was
a military success because the various leaders battled with a clearly
understood plan and mutual strategy. Two people united are much
stronger than one.

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Keeping Alive Romance and Security...

Take the initiative occasionally to suggest a specific time to talk
together. For example, set up a breakfast or dinner out with just the
two of you. Let your convictions show. Meaningful conversation is
crucial in developing a growing and loving relationship.
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Keeping Alive Romance and Security...

When you speak of a man's personal power, you immediately think of words
reflecting character like warmth, sensitivity, dependability,
determination, genuine compassion, and caring.
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Honoring God...

We honor God by serving Him. Seeing people (like our mate) renewed,
healed, blessed, encouraged, and motivated by our love for them
increases our self-worth as servants of God.

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Honoring Your Wife...

A woman misses very little about her environment, which is probably the
basis for that mysterious gift some have called intuition--and another
reason a man should honor and value his wife.

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Honoring Your Husband...

You can motivate your husband to love you by learning to be a
courageous, persistent, and patient wife. As a completer and helper,
you will need courage to help motive change, gentle persistence to make
sure it continues, and patience to wait on the Lord when change is long
in coming.

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Learning to Communicate...

Words have awesome power to build us up or tear us down emotionally.
Many people can clearly remember words of praise their parents spoke
years ago. Others can remember negative, cutting words--in
extraordinary detail
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Resolving Conflict and Dealing with Anger...

Even when crises come from external sources, we must be careful not to
close the spirits of those around us. When we are under stress, we can
react harshly to our mate and close his or her spirit.

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Increasing Your Intimacy 100 Percent...

Keeping your written relationship menu posted in a prominent household
location provides a continual reminder of which values and rules you're
working toward. It generally takes about 30 days to start a new habit.
So if you're regularly working on attaining your goals, it will only
take a month before you notice significant changes in your relationship.

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Keeping Alive Romance and Security...

How can we turn our negative thoughts to positive ones before they
affect our sense of worth and become a hurtful part or our self-image?
By developing a grateful attitude. One of the most attractive qualities
a person can have is a spirit of gratefulness.

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Finding Treasures in Trials...

Great faith is the confidence, even during a trial, that it will one day
turn out to be to our benefit. "Dinky" faith is complaining or
"murmuring" during a trial that there will be no benefit.

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Finding Treasures in Trials...

Disappointed expectations confront us all. How we handle those
disappointments will have a powerful impact on the peace and stability
of our lives.

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Honoring God...

When we rejoice in the Lord always, He keeps us, in many situations,
from giving in to such temptations as envy, jealousy, fear, and anger.
Rejoicing, even in times of testing, is acknowledging that God is the
source of life. And it brings us to the place where our lives can be
filled by God Himself.
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Honoring Your Wife...

When a man treats his wife carelessly, she's usually offended far deeper
than he realizes. She begins to close him out, and if he continues to
hurt her feelings, she will separate herself from him mentally,
emotionally, and physically

.

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Keeping Alive Romance and Security...

Touch has the power to instantly calm, reassure, transfer courage, and
stabilize a situation beginning to spin out of control. With touch, we
push back the threatening shadows of anger, bitterness, loneliness, and
insecurity.

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Honoring God...

God wants us to be mature, loving people who reflect Jesus Christ's
character in every area of life, including marriage. The only way He
can make that happen is to allow trials. It's important to note that
God doesn't cause the trials. They come from many sources, including
our own sinful nature and Satan, God's enemy. But God uses them for our
ultimate benefit.

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"Wise men and women in every major culture
throughout history have found that the secret to happiness is not in getting more but in wanting less." - E. St. James

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Those who complain that they make no progress in the life
of prayer because they "cannot meditate" should examine, not
their capacity for meditation, but their capacity for
suffering and love. For there is a hard and costly element, a
deep seriousness, a crucial choice, in all genuine religion.
... Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941)

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Leave Him [God] out of our explanations, and the life of
thought is decapitated... Without God, everything dries up.
... Martin C. D'Arcy (1888-1976)

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If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we
belong to each other.

Mother Teresa
(1910-1997, Albanian-born Roman Catholic Missionary)

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It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that's
what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be
cherished, that every flower is to bloom.

Alice Walker
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Love is a force more formidable than any other. It is invisible,
it cannot be seen or measured, yet is powerful enough to transform you
in a moment, and offer you more joy than any material possession ever
could.

Barbara De Angelis
(American Expert on Relationship & Love, Author)

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First keep peace with yourself, then you can also bring peace to
others.

Thomas ãempis
(1379-1471, German Monk, Mystic, Religious Writer)

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You are what your deep driving desire is; As your deep driving
desire is, so is your will; As your will is so is your deed; As your
deed is so is your destiny.

The Upanishads
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It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And
it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

Eleanor Roosevelt
(1884-1962, American First Lady, Columnist, Lecturer, Humanitarian)

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Each of us individually has risen into moral life from a
mode of being which was purely natural; in other words, each
of us also has fallen -- fallen, presumably in ways determined
by his natural constitution, yet certainly, as conscience
assures us, in ways for which we are morally answerable, and to
which, in the moral constitution of the world, consequences
attach which we must recognise as our due. They are not only
results of our action, but results which that action has
merited; and there is no moral hope for us unless we accept
them as such.
... James Denney (1856-1917), The Atonement and the Modern
Mind [1903]

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For the first two or three years after my conversion, I
used to ask for specific things. Now I ask for God. Supposing
there is a tree full of fruits -— you will have to go and buy
or beg the fruits from the owner of the tree. Every day you
would have to go for one or two fruits. But if you can make
the tree your own property, then all the fruits will be your
own. In the same way, if God is your own, then all things in
Heaven and on earth will be your own, because He is your Father
and is everything to you; otherwise you will have to go and ask
like a beggar for certain things. When they are used up, you
will have to ask again. So ask not for gifts but for the Giver
of Gifts: not for life but for the Giver of Life -— then life and
the things needed for life will be added unto you.
... Sadhu Sundar Singh (1889-1929)_______________________________________________________________

Never again are we to look at the stars, as we did when we
were children, and wonder how far it is to God. A being
outside our world would be a spectator, looking on but taking
no part in this life, where we try to be brave despite all the
bafflement. A god who created, and withdrew, could be mighty,
but he could not be love. Who could love a God remote, when
suffering is our lot? Our God is closer than our problems, for
they are out there, to be faced; He is here, beside us,
Emmanuel.
... Joseph E. McCabe (1912- ), Handel's Messiah [1978]

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Jesus... did not finish all the urgent tasks in Palestine
or all the things He would have liked to do, but He did finish
the work which God gave Him to do. The only alternative to
frustration is to be sure that we are doing what God wants.
Nothing substitutes for knowing that this day, this hour, in
this place, we are doing the will of the Father. Then and only
then can we think of all the other unfinished tasks with
equanimity, and leave them with God.
... Charles E. Hummel (1923- ), The Tyranny of the Urgent
[1997]

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At the earlier Methodist class meetings, members were
expected every week to answer some extremely personal
questions, such as the following: Have you experienced any
particular temptations during the past week? How did you react
or respond to those temptations? Is there anything you are
trying to keep secret, and, if so, what? At this point, the
modern Christian swallows hard! We are often coated with a
thick layer of reserve and modesty which covers "a multitude
of sins" -- usually our own. Significantly, James 5:16-20, the
original context of that phrase, is the passage which urges,
"Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another,
that you may be healed."
... Michael Griffiths (1928- ), Cinderella with Amnesia
[1975]
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He who has surrendered himself to it knows that the Way
ends on the Cross -- even when it is leading him through the
jubilation of Gennesaret or the triumphal entry into
Jerusalem.
... Dag Hammarskjöld (1905-1961), Markings [1964]

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[He said] that it was a great delusion to think that the
times of prayer ought to differ from other times; that we are
as strictly obliged to adhere to God by action in the time of
action as by prayer in the season of prayer. That his view of
prayer was nothing else but a sense of the Presence of God,
his soul being at that time insensible to everything but
Divine Love; and that when the appointed times of prayer were
past, he found no difference, because he still continued with
God, praising and blessing Him with all his might, so that he
passed his life in continual joy; yet hoped that God would
give him somewhat to suffer when he should have grown
stronger.
... Brother Lawrence (c.1605-1691)

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We must never speak to simple, excitable people about "the
Day" without emphasizing again and again the utter
impossibility of prediction. We must try to show them that
that impossibility is an essential part of the doctrine. If
you do not believe our Lord's words, why do you believe in His
return at all? And if you do believe them, must you not put
away from you, utterly and forever, any hope of dating that
return?
... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), The World's Last Night

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The now wherein God made the first man, and the now
wherein the last man disappears, and the now I am speaking in,
all are the same in God, where this is but the now.
... Meister Eckhart (1260?-1327?)

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One kind word can warm three winter months.

Japanese Proverb
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