“Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.”
This quote has no known author and is recorded as an anonymous proverb.
About this quote
The line borrows the vocabulary of the duel to describe a contest neither party can escape, and it is usually quoted for the joke rather than the threat. Chesterton's version of it goes on to call marriage a perpetual crisis, which makes clear that the exaggeration is deliberate.