Weddingbee

I’m sorry I’ve been a bit MIA lately! Work has been extremely busy lately, so unfortunately wedding activities have taken a back seat. But, as promised, here is the follow-up to my Quotables post. I hope these quotes, poems, and passages inspire you as much as they did me!

And yet even while I was exulting in my solitude I became aware of a strange lack. I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect. And to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free.
– Robert Louis Stevenson, from A Night Among the Pines

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To se reality– not as we expect it to be but as it is– is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where really is, in just this sense, love.
– Frederick Buechner, from The Magnificent Defeat

In a time when nothing is more certain than change, the commitment of two people to one another has become difficult and rare. Yet, by its scarcity, the beauty and value of this exchange has only been enhanced.
– Robert Sexton, from The View

Married love is love woven into a pattern of living. It has in it the elements of understanding and of the passionate kindness of husband and wife toward each other. It is rich in the many-sided joys of life because each is more concerned with giving joy than grasping it for himself. And joys are most truly experienced when they are most fully shared.
– Leland Foster Wood, from How Love Grows in Marriage

All paths lead to you
Where e’er I stray,
You are the evening star
At the end of day.

All paths lead to you
Hill-top or low,
You are the white birch
In the sun’s glow.

All paths lead to you
Where e’er I roam.
You are the lark-song

Calling me home!
– Blanch Shoemaker Wagstaff

In the consciousness of belonging together,
in the sense of constancy,
resides the sanctity,
the beauty of matrimony,
which helps us
to endure pain more easily,
to enjoy happiness doubly,
and to give rise to the fullest and finest development
of our nature
– Fanny Lewald

We have lived and loved together
Through many changing years;
We have shared each other’s gladness
And wept each other’s tears;
I have known ne’er a sorrow
That was long unsoothed by thee;
For thy smiles can make a summer
Where darkness else would be.

Like the leaves that fall around us
In autumn’s fading hours,
Are the traitor’s smiles, that darken
When the cloud of sorrow lowers;
And though many such we’ve known, love,
Too prone, alas, to range,
We both can speak of one love
Which time can never change.

We have lived and loved together
Through many changing years,
We have shared each other’s gladness
And wept each other’s tears.
And let us hope the future,
As the past has been will be:
I will share with thee my sorrows,
And thou thy joys with me.
–Charles Jeffreys

For one lone soul, another lonely soul.
Each choosing each through all the weary hours,
And meeting strangely at one sudden goal,
into one beautiful perfect whole;
And life’s long night is ended, and the way
Lies open onward to eternal day.
– Edwin Arnold

And in Life’s noisiest hour,
There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee,
The heart’s Self-solace, and soliloquy.

You mould my Hopes, you fashion me within;
And to the leading Love-throb in the Heart
Thro’ all my being all my pulses beat.
You lie in all my many Thoughts, like Light
Like the fair Light of Dawn, or summer-Eve
On rippling Stream, or cloud-reflecting Lake.

And looking to the Heaven, that bends above you
How oft I bless the Lot, that made me love you.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lines from a Notebook

THE fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever,
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one another’s being mingle: –
Why not I with thine?
See! the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea: –
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?
– Percy Bysshe Shelley, Love’s Philosophy

But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery, from The Little Prince

The moment I heard my first love story I began seeking you,
Not realizing the search was useless.
Lovers don’t meet somewhere along the way.
They’re in one another’s souls from the beginning.
– Rumi

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction of being loved for yourself, or, more correctly being loved in spite of yourself.
– Victor Hugo

When the one man loves the one woman and the one woman loves the one man, the very angels desert heaven and come and sit in that house and sing for joy.
– Brahma Sutra

Sweet be the glances we exchange, our faces showing true concord. Enshrine me in thy heart, and let a single spirit dwell between us.
– From the Atharvaveda

Are any of using quotes, poems, or passages in your wedding ceremony and/or reception? In what way?