C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Celibacy
No man can either live piously or die righteous without a wife.
Marriage has in it less of beauty, but more of safety, than the single life.
“As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will,” says Socrates, “he will be sure to repent.”
God has set the type of marriage through creation. Each creature seeks its perfection in another.
Alas! many an enamored pair have courted in poetry, and after marriage lived in prose.
Thales was reputed to be one of the wise men who made answer to the question when a man should marry: “A young man not yet, an old man not at all.”
It happens, as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.
Even supposing there were some spiritual advantage in celibacy, it ought to be completely voluntary.
Might I have had my own will, I would not have married Wisdom herself, if she would have had me.
Though bachelors be the strongest stakes, married men are the best binders in the hedge of the commonwealth.
They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful, and captious, tenacious of their own practices and maxims.
Unmarried men are best friends, best masters, best servants, but not always best subjects; for they are light to run away, and almost all fugitives are of that condition.