Wedding Toasts

Jump-start your toast with an eloquent and moving reflection on marriage, love, or soul-binding. Need inspiration? Here are 30 quotes to ponder — integrate the words into your own original speech (“As Shakespeare said…”; “In the words of the poet Nikki Giovanni…”), relating them to bride and groom. The idea is to get the crowd to feel the universal significance and emotional impact of the words.

May your love be like the misty rain, gentle coming in but flooding the river.
– Traditional African

Insomuch as love grows in you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.
– St. Augustine

We never live so intensely as when we love strongly. We never realize ourselves so vividly as when we are in full glow of love for others.
– Walter Rauschenbusch

To love someone deeply gives you strength. Being loved by someone deeply gives you courage.
– Lao Tzu

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery

One word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.
– Sophocles

Night and day you are the one,
Only you beneath the moon and under the sun.
– Cole Porter

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.
– Plato

Love is a fire that feeds our life.
– Pablo Neruda

Love is friendship set to music.
– Anonymous

Marriage is like a golden ring in a chain, whose beginning is a glance and whose ending is eternity.
– Kahlil Gibran

The strongest and sweetest songs
yet remain to be sung.
– Walt Whitman

We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.
– Gwendolyn Brooks

In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.
– Marc Chagall

We love because it’s the only true adventure.
– Nikki Giovanni

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
– John Keating, in Dead Poets Society (1989)

They do not love that do not show their love.
–William Shakespeare

When people care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.
– Langston Hughes

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
– Emily Bronte

That love is all there is
Is all we know of love.
– Emily Dickinson

A great flame follows a little spark.
– Dante Alighieri

There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.
– George Sand

Without love, the world itself would not survive.
– Lope de Vega

When love reigns, the impossible may be attained.
– Indian proverb

Love is life.
– Leo Tolstoy

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.
– Voltaire

Love is a moment that lasts forever.
– Anonymous

Love is all you need.
– John Lennon/Paul McCartney

A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

May your dreams ride on the wings of angels who know their way home to the skies.
– Anonymous

I have known many, Liked not a few, Loved only one. I toast to you.
— Anonymous

Here’s to the prettiest,
here’s to the wittiest,
Here’s to the truest of all who are true,
Here’s to the neatest one,
here’s to the sweetest one,
Here’s to them, all in one – here’s to you.

– Anonymous

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.
– Anonymous

May you never forget what is worth remembering and never remember what is best forgotten.
– Anonymous

Let us toast the health of the bride;
Let us toast the health of the groom;
Let us toast the person that tied;
Let us toast every guest in the room.
– Anonymous

May your love and joy be as deep as the ocean.
– Anonymous

Here’s to the groom with bride so fair,
And here’s to the bride with groom so rare!
– Anonymous

To the newlyweds: May “for better or worse” be far better than worse.

– Anonymous