Dowry Quotes

• Any young man, who makes dowry a condition to marriage, discredits his education and his country and dishonours womanhood.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Country, Women, Young

  Mahatma Gandhi (1959). “India of My Dreams”, p.213, Rajpal & Sons

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• As long as she is wise and good, a girl has sufficient dowry.

  Plautus

  Girl, Wise, Women

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• The dowry, not the wife, is the object of attraction.

  Juvenal

  Wife, Objects, Attraction

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• Too many people embrace religion from the same motives that they take a companion in wedlock, not from true love of the person, but because of a large dowry.

  Hosea Ballou

  People, Embrace, Wedlock

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• You have your whole life ahead of you. Be smart. Study hard and be independent. I'm afraid the chances of your getting a dowry are slim. You must rely on yourself. No matter what else people may steal from you, they will never be able to take away your knowledge. The world is changing. You must make your own life outside this home.

  Adeline Yen Mah

  Smart, Independent, Home

  Adeline Yen Mah (1997). “Falling leaves return to their roots”, Penguin Books Ltd

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• If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny.

  William Shakespeare

  Calumny Is, Ice, Snow

  William Shakespeare (1823). “The Dramatic Works of William Shakspeare: From the Text of Johnson, Stevens, and Reed; with Glossarial Notes, His Life, and a Critique on His Genius & Writings”, p.920

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• The great virtue of parents is a great dowry.

  Horace

  Family, Parent, Virtue

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• As Indian citizens, we subsist on a regular diet of caste massacres and nuclear tests, mosque breakings and fashion shows, church burnings and expanding cell phone networks, bonded labor and the digital revolution, female infanticide and the NASDAQ crash, husbands who continue to burn their wives for dowry and our delectable stockpile of Miss Worlds. What's hard to reconcile oneself to, both personally and politically, is the schizophrenic nature of it.

  Arundhati Roy

  Fashion, Husband, Cells

  Arundhati Roy (2001). “Power Politics”, South End Pr

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• She was a lovely blonde, with fine teeth. She had gold and pearls for her dowry; but her gold was on her head, and her pearls were in her mouth.

  Victor Hugo

  Lovely, Gold, Blonde

  Victor Hugo (2015). “Les Misérables: World Classic”, p.158, World Classic

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• Quarrels are the dowry which married folk bring one another.

  Ovid

  Marriage, Society, Married

  Ovid (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ovid (Illustrated)”, p.316, Delphi Classics

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• It often happens, that misery will follow a marriage when the dowry is too large.

  Decimius Magnus Ausonius

  Misery, Happens

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• A great dowry is a bed full of brables.
  [A great dowry is a bed full of brambles.]

  George Herbert

  Bed

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• If a marriage is going to work well, it must be on a solid footing, namely money, and of that commodity it is the girl with the smallest dowry who, to my knowledge, consumes the most, to infuriate her husband. All the same, it is only fair that the marriage should pay for past pleasures, since it will scarcely procure any in the future.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Marriage, Girl, Money

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• I have taken a wife, I have sold my sovereignty for a dowry.
  [Lat., Uxorem accepi, dote imperium vendidi.]

  Plautus

  Taken, Wife, Sovereignty

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• The arrows are from her dowry.

  Juvenal

  Arrows

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• If I do marry, I'll expect a pretty serious dowry. I'm talking goats, pigs, chickens, the works.

  Dov Davidoff

  Pigs, Talking, Goats

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• Wine is a bride who brings a great dowry to the man who woos her persistently and gracefully.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Wine, Men, He Man

  Evelyn Waugh (1947*). “Wine in peace and war”

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• I like Daniel. He takes care of you." I blinked. "Oh my God. Did you really just say that? He takes care of me?" Dad flushed. "I didn't mean it like-" "Takes care of me? Did I go to sleep and wake up in the nineteenth century?" I looked down at my jeans and T-shirt. "Ack! I can't go to school like this. Where's my corset? My bonnet?" Dad sighed as Mom walked in with her empty teacup. "What did I miss?" She said. "Dad's trying to marry me off to Daniel." I looked at him. "You know, if you offer him a new truck for a dowry, he might go for it.

  Kelley Armstrong

  Mom, Dad, Mean

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• I cannot always sympathize with that demand which we hear so frequently for cheap things. Things may be too cheap. They are too cheap when the man or woman who produces them upon the farm or the man or woman who produces them in the factory does not get out of them living wages with a margin for old age and for a dowry for the incidents that are to follow. I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth or shapes it into a garment will starve in the process.

  Benjamin Harrison

  Men, Age, Doe

  "Rain Still Follows Him: The President's Vermont Trip Marked by Storms". Speech in Rutland, Vermont, reported in The New York Times, August 29, 1891 issue p. 5,

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• Look on beauty, and you shall see 'tis purchased by the weight; which therein works a miracle in Nature, making them lightest that wear most of it: so are those crisped snaky golden locks which make such wanton gambols with the wind upon supposed fairness, often known to be the dowry of a second head, the skull that bred them in the sepulchre.

  William Shakespeare

  Skulls, Hair, Wind

  William Shakespeare (1816). “The Works of William Shakspeare...: Collated Verbatim with the Most Authentic Copies, and Revised, with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators”, p.56

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• My dowry is thirty-five. A year.” His brows climbed. “You’re joking.” “I would never joke about money with a notorious thief. Just imagine, in a mere two years you’re at a profit.” “How I adore a woman who does mathematics in her head.” “I can forge signatures as well.” “Splendid. Exactly the bride I’ve been hoping for.

  Shana Abe

  Years, Two, Signatures

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• What philosopher of the schoolroom, with the mental dowry of four summers, ever questions the power of the wand that opened the dark eyes of the beautiful princess, or subtracts a single inch from the stride of seven leagues?

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Beautiful, Summer, Princess

  Robert Aris Willmott (1907). “Pleasures of Literature”

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• Money, when considered as the fruit of many years' industry, as the reward of labor, sweat and toil, as the widow's dowry and children's portion, and as the means of procuring the necessaries and alleviating the afflictions of life, and making old age a scene of rest, has something in it sacred that is not to be sported with, or trusted to the airy bubble of paper currency.

  Thomas Paine

  Children, Mean, Years

  Thomas Paine (1830). “Brief sketch of the life of Thomas Paine. Common sense. Epistle to Quakers. The crisis. Public good. Letter to the Abbe Raynal. Dissertations on government, the affairs of the bank, and paper money. Miscellaneous”, p.404

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• Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creepinto a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Nature, Men, Humanity

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.39, Harvard University Press

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