Finding the perfect words to express your love and appreciation for your wife can sometimes be challenging. Whether you want to celebrate her strength, kindness, or the special bond you share, a meaningful quote can capture those feelings beautifully. We've gathered a curated collection of the top 64 best wife quotes to inspire you and help you convey just how much she means to you.
1. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” - Jane Austen
2. “The best thing a girl can be is a good wife and mother. It is a girl's highest calling. I hope I am ready.” - Nancy E. Turner
3. “We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.” - H.L. Mencken
4. “They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.” - Virginia Woolf
5. “I told my wife the truth. I told her I was seeing a psychiatrist. Then she told me the truth: that she was seeing a psychiatrist, two plumbers, and a bartender.” - Rodney Dangerfield
6. “Jane, you are my confidante, my helpmate, my friend. My lover. You are everything the word wife means to me. In my heart, we are wed. In my soul, you are mine.” - Charlotte Featherstone
7. “Ah, Evie,” she heard him say softly, “I must have a heart, after all…because right now it aches like the devil.”“Only your heart?” she asked ingenuously, making him laugh.He lowered her to the bed, his eyes sparkling wickedly. “Also a few other things,” he conceded. “And as my wife, it’s your duty to ease all my aches.” - Lisa Kleypas
8. “Then don't. I can't help you. They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I don't dream at all. You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so don't ask for sorrow now. There is none. Maybe you'll be good at this. I doubt it, but who knows. The one thing I can tell you is that you won't survive for yourself. I know because I would have never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and sheild it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.” - Cormac McCarthy
9. “Betty's a good Muslim woman and wife. I don't imagine many other women might put up with the way I am. Awakening this brainwashed black man and telling this arrogant, devilish white man the truth about himself, Betty understands, is a full-time job” - Malcolm X
10. “When a woman thinks her husband is a fool, her marriage is over. They may part in one year or ten; they may live together until death. But if she thinks he is a fool, she will not love him again.” - Philippa Gregory
11. “A woman has to change her nature if she is to be a wife. She has to learn to curb her tongue, to suppress her desires, to moderate her thoughts and to spend her days putting another first. She has to put him first even when she longs to serve herself or her children. She has to put him first even if she longs to judge for herself. She has to put him first even when she knows best. To be a good wife is to be a woman with a will of iron that you yourself have forged into a bridle to curb your own abilities. To be a good wife is to enslave yourself to a lesser person. To be a good wife is to amputate your own power as surely as the parents of beggars hack off their children's feet for the greater benefit of the family.” - Philippa Gregory
12. “It does help to actually realize that however stunning the person who is, you know, fluttering eyelashes at you, she doesn't do anything to match up to your wife.” - Colin Firth
13. “The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church - read on - and give his life for her (Eph. V, 25). This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is - in her own mere nature - least lovable. For the Church has not beauty but what the Bride-groom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely. The chrism of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man's marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not acquiescence. As Christ sees in the flawed, proud, fanatical or lukewarm Church on earth that Bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labours to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is Christ-like (and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs. He is a King Cophetua who after twenty years still hopes that the beggar-girl will one day learn to speak the truth and wash behind her ears.” - C.S. Lewis
14. “I have too many fantasies to be a housewife.... I guess I am a fantasy.” - Marilyn Monroe
15. “I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest -- blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine.” - Charlotte Brontë
16. “all believers should “submit to each other out of reverence for Christ.” In many ways, wives should submit to their husbands in the same way any believer should submit to other believers, specifically by living according to the lifestyle the apostle Paul lays out earlier in the chapter. This mutual submission is an accountability to be held to God’s standards, an accountability in which both husband and wife are called to participate.” - Janet Boynes
17. “I’ve been fighting to be who I am all my life. What’s the point of being who I am, if I can’t have the person who was worth all the fighting for?” - Stephanie Lennox
18. “Viktor was swinging a leather duffle and wearing a black Adidas tracksuit and his favorite brown UGG slippers with a hole in the toe."Worn and old, just like Viv," he'd say when Frankie made fun of them, and then his wife would swat him on the arm. But Frankie knew he was just joking, because Viveka was the type of woman you wished was in a magazine just so you could stare at her violet-colored eyes and shiny black hair without being called a stalker or a freak.” - Lisi Harrison
19. “I define myself by helping others. This is what I do.Those people who want me to abandon my husband are asking me to put myself first and to judge him. The poor man has been judged unfairly by others. Why would I abandon him in his greatest need?” - Deirdre-Elizabeth Parker
20. “I have spent my whole life preparing to be William Wallace’s wife. The choices I make are defined by the person I am.“I am Mrs. William Victor Wallace. I am married to a federal felon whom I love unconditionally.I hold my head high, I take pride in my life and I walk this world without regret.I will be the perfect wife and my husband deserves nothing less.” - Deirdre-Elizabeth Parker
21. “It's a terrible thing for a man when his woman gangs up on him wi' a toad” - Terry Pratchett
22. “Sometimes I wait at the bottom of those dark stairs, I sit at the bottom of the stairs, I wait beyond the bottom of the stairs and listen to the sounds my wife and children make as they sleep, the sounds our animals make as they step carefully through our dreams and out the other side to polished floor and cold window. Sometimes I wait so long I become unsure if I am asleep, or awake, or dead.” - Steve Rasnic Tem
23. “These things are lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone taking the time to write it all down. That Litvinoff had a wife who was so devoted is, to be frank, the only reason anyone knows anything about him at all.” - Nicole Krauss
24. “Miss. My. Wife.” - Julia Quinn
25. “A man should be taller, older, heavier, uglier, and hoarser than his wife.” - E.W. Howe
26. “Why?” she whispered. “Why should I dance with you?”“Because I love you. Because I love you so much I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make it go differently this time.”... "Because we should be a married couple, because I never wanted to not be married to you. Because all these men out here dancing with their wives can’t possibly love them as much as I love you. Because for me, there is only one woman, and I’m sorry to break it to you, but you’re it.” - Erin McCarthy
27. “...when I see you here amidst all this, I realise that I proposed to a very small part of you. I thought I was giving you a home and a position, but here I see that I am taking you away from so much.” - Daisy Goodwin
28. “[I]f the name of wife appears more sacred and more valid, sweeter to me is ever the word friend, or, if thou be not ashamed, concubine ... And thou thyself wert not wholly unmindful of that ... [as in the narrative of thy misfortunes] thou hast not disdained to set forth sundry reasons by which I tried to dissuade thee from our marriage, from an ill-starred bed; but wert silent as to many, in which I preferred love to wedlock, freedom to a bond. I call God to witness, if Augustus, ruling over the whole world, were to deem me worthy of the honour of marriage, and to confirm the whole world to me, to be ruled by me forever, dearer to me and of greater dignity would it seem to be called thy concubine than his empress.” - Héloïse
29. “Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands.” - Oscar Wilde
30. “Eccentricity may be diverting, Mama, but it is out of place in a wife: certainly in my wife!” - Georgette Heyer
31. “Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem".” - G.K. Chesterton
32. “You are curious and quick, you have a deft mind, and for some unaccountable reason, people tell you things -- useful things.” - Deanna Raybourn
33. “Serving as the only audience for a man raised by crowds of admirers exhausted her. [...] The buried thought that he might have found comfort elsewhere was almost a comfort to her.” - Carey Wallace
34. “Commitment is Circumstances” - Leju Thomas
35. “Wife, to him, was someone who stood for stability, forcoming home, for dealing with all the shit he wasn’t able to deal with. For providing a real life and not this insanity.” - Aleksandr Voinov
36. “I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian]” - Kurt Vonnegut
37. “It's risky most of the time, but its better to listen to your heart.” - Jonathan Anthony Burkett
38. “The owner of the Agut d'Avignon had the air of a 1920s dandy who had ruined himself with one mad night of gambling at baccarat and had only been saved by this restaurant, which he seemed to cherish as if it were his wife or a good fountain pen.” - Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
39. “…the designation of wife in India, of the Hindu wife, is higher and grander than that of Empress. She is called Devi” - Virchand Raghavji Gandhi
40. “My dad, who my mom always refers to as DH for Darling Husband, was protrayed as a 'let's look on the bright side of things' kind of guy, the pillar my everbumbling mother leans on in times of distress.” - Frances O'Roark Dowell
41. “They had a saying: An Arab loves in the order of: his son, his camel, and his wife - but there were times when one was allowed to take precedence over the other!” - Margaret Rome
42. “She expressed an opinion that the happiness of a woman in Paradise is beneath the soles of her husband's feet,' he enlightened humorously, seemingly not at all averse to her obvious desire to be comforted.” - Margaret Rome
43. “...she lost twenty minutes sitting on the floor with her arms wrapped around her knees, smiling into the pretty glow and imagining herself a contented farmer's wife waiting for her man to come in from the fields.” - Nora Roberts
44. “-Sir, se lei fosse mio marito, io le avvelenerei il tè.-Madam, se lei fosse mia moglie, io lo berrei."Dialogo tra Lady Astor e Winston Churchill” - Winston Churchill
45. “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.” - Sorcha MacMurrough
46. “One wife, you're happy, two and you're tired, three and they'll hate each other, four and they'll hate you.” - Patrick Rothfuss
47. “I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.Visiting Kathy's grave was the less dramatic of the two.” - John Scalzi
48. “I have also fantasised myself to be his female slave, but this does not suffice, for after all every woman can be the slave of her husband.” - Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing
49. “We treat our stone wives with much more care than they treat their warm ones, anyway. I personally dust mine once a week, and I know Khaamil gives them presents when I am not looking. These are yours - they are in your care, and you must be faithful.” - Catherynne M. Valente
50. “She wisely reasoned that my chosen husband was no ordinary man, that his whole life was absolutely dedicated to God and His service, ad that I must never, never hinder him by trying to put myself first in his heart.” - Susannah Spurgeon
51. “And when wind and winter hardenAll the loveless land,It will whisper of the garden,You will understand.” - Oscar Wilde
52. “there are no houses to wife. only window seats to occupy when the weather needs changing & waters to flow past our ankles on Sundays as we fish.” - Darnell Lamont Walker
53. “If you have the woman you love, what more do you need? Well, besides an alibi for the time of her husband’s murder. ” - Dark Jar Tin Zoo
54. “A man and wife should see the best in each other, should work together, should enjoy each other.” - Gena Showalter
55. “The doctor's wife ate two apples a day, just to be safe. But her husband kept coming home.” - Joseph Gordon-Levitt
56. “Karena gue pengen punya istri yang mau tidur sama gue di karpet, sampe bisa beli spring bed, dan tetep setia meski suatu saat terpaksa balik lagi ke karpet.” - Alitt Susanto
57. “I shall expect my husband to have no pleasures but what he shares with me; and if his greatest pleasure of all is not the enjoyment of my company - why - it will be the worse for him - that's all.''If such are your expectations of matrimony, Esther, you must, indeed, be careful whom you marry - or rather, you must avoid it altogether.” - Anne Brontë
58. “What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. Days and years and feelings much the same, except that the children would grow up, and there might be one or two more of them and they too would grow up, and she and Brendan would grow older and then old.It was not until now, not until this moment, that she had seen so clearly that she was counting on something happening, something which would change her life. She had accepted her marriage as one big change, but not as the last one. So, nothing now but what she or anybody else could sensibly foresee. That was to be her happiness, that was what she had bargained for, nothing secret, or strange.Pay attention to this, she thought. She had a dramatic notion of getting down on her knees. This is serious...It was a long time ago that this happened. In North Vancouver, when they lived in the Post and Beam house. When she was twenty-four years old and new to bargaining.” - Alice Munro
59. “A righteous wife is a respectful wife.” - Habeeb Akande
60. “I have leveled with the girls - from Anchorage to Amarillo.I tell them that all marriages are happyIt's the living together afterward that's tough.I tell them that a good marriage is not a gift,It's an achievement.that marriage is not for kids It takes guts and maturity.It separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls.I tell them that marriage is tested dily by the ability to compromise.Its survival can depend on being smart enough to know what's worth fighting about.Or making an issue of or even mentioning.Marriage is giving - and more important, it's forgiving.And it is almost always the wife who must do these things.Then, as if that were not enough, she must be willing to forget what she forgave.Often that is the hardest part.Oh, I have leveled all right.If they don't get my message, Buster,It's because they don't want to get it.Rose-colored glasses are never made in bifocalsBecause nobody wants to red the small print in dreams.” - Ann Landers
61. “Every relationship that has hit a crossroads has asked, “What is it that you want from me?” - Shannon L. Alder
62. “Honor, obey?" Gisbourne shouted, grappling with John. "This is what you call being a good wife?"I stopped. "I never said I'd be a good wife, Guy. Just that I'd marry you.” - A.C. Gaughen
63. “They saw her husband, this giant of a man in God’s Kingdom, this man, that for over fifteen years was their example of what a great man and husband looked like, walking up to his weeping wife, gently embracing her, soothing her, lifting and holding her soul up high while she released her own pains and worries from the last two days, feeling him, leaning into him, and submitting her pain and fears to her husband out of her love and trust. His strength was shown in his softness. He was made strong in his wife’s pain. He was her man of God” - Lee Goff
64. “There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.” - Shannon L. Alder
