quotations about relationships
Relationships are the most important aspect of our lives because it is through another that we come to know ourselves.
CYNTHIA MORGAN
You're Already Hypnotized: A Guide to Waking Up
By building relations we create a source of love and personal pride and belonging that makes living in a chaotic world easier.
SUSAN LIEBERMAN
attributed, The Lost and Found Box
If you can't be happy and content by yourself then you shouldn't be in a relationship.
EVAN SUTTER
Solitude: How Doing Nothing Can Change the World
Both in counseling couples and in workshops I've led around the country, I have taught people from all walks of life how to turn bad relationships into good ones, and good relationships into great ones. Because great is what you're really after. Great is what you deserve. Not merely a relationship you can live with, but one that is truly alive--passionately, tenderly, maddeningly filled to the brim with unexpected twists and turns, with comfort and solidity, with the sense of knowing and being known, and loving each other anyway. How do you get such a relationship? You don't get it, you build it, thoughtfully and skillfully, brick by brick.
TERRENCE REAL
The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work
The best relationships are those that are established in prayer.
ZACHARIAS TANEE FOMUM
Life-changing Thoughts on Prayer
Can relationship be based on an idea? And, any action based on an idea surely must be merely the continuation of that idea, which is activity. Action is not based on an idea; action is immediate, spontaneous, direct, without the process of thought involved. But when we base an action on an idea, then it becomes an activity. And if we base our relationship on an idea, then surely such a relationship is merely an activity without comprehension, merely carrying out a formula, an activity, a pattern based on an idea. Therefore, relationship is always restricting, limiting, confining, because we want something out of that relationship.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
J. Krishnamurti Second Talk in Ojai, July 17, 1949
I remember thinking how often we look, but never see ... we listen, but never hear ... we exist, but never feel. We take our relationships for granted. A house is only a place. It has no life of its own. It needs human voices, activity and laughter to come alive.
ERMA BOMBECK
A Marriage Made In Heaven; or, Too Tired For an Affair
The human heart finds nowhere shelter but in human kind.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Spanish Gypsy
But the people who mattered were the people you chose instead of the people who were yours by an accident of birth. Real family was heart as much as, if not more than, blood.
MARTINA BOONE
Compulsion
A happy marriage perhaps represents the ideal of human relationship--a setting in which each partner, while acknowledging the need of the other, feels free to be what he or she by nature is; a relationship in which instinct as well as intellect can find expression; in which giving and taking are equal; in which each accepts the other, and I confronts Thou.
ANTHONY STORK
The Integrity of Personality
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
W. H. AUDEN
"Hic et Ille", The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays
Relationships are social structures in which people interact across organisational boundaries. People provide the channel through and by which the atmosphere of the relationship is shaped.
BILL DONALDSON & TOM O'TOOLE
Strategic Market Relationships: From Strategy to Implementation
Weddings are the biggest relationship killers out there. If you can survive the wedding, they say, the rest is a piece of cake.
NOAH HAWLEY
Other People's Weddings
Relationships don't always make sense. Especially from the outside.
SARAH DESSEN
Along for the Ride
Good relationships make people happy, and happy people enjoy more and better relationships than unhappy people.... Conflicts in relationships--having an annoying office mate or roommate, or having chronic conflict with your spouse--is one of the surest ways to reduce your happiness. You never adapt to interpersonal conflict; it damages every day, even days when you don't see the other person but ruminate about the conflict nonetheless.
JONATHAN HAIDT
The Happiness Hypothesis
To get from people you had to give a piece of yourself, a real piece that mattered. Just being nice was not enough.
PETER ABRAHAMS
End of Story
In most breakups, neither person is awesome, and both are looking out the relationship window, sick with vertigo, ready to jump. Whoever jumps and pulls the ripcord first, wins. The prize is an intact ego.
HEIDI K. ISERN
"The responsibility to fall out of love is on you", Quartz, August 5, 2016
The person that loves the least, controls the relationship.
ZANE
Total Eclipse of the Heart
I think that many people falsely frame each relationship as one that needs to last forever. How limiting. Consider dating as life's dressing room, each relationship a new outfit to try on. An engineer will hold your angles, an artist will trace your curves, and a poet will entice your tongue. Each person will give you new perspectives and experiences to taste. If it were not for the men in my life I would never have learned how to climb rocks, shoot whisky, or speak sultry French. I decided to not fall out of love, but shift my love to a new person. Every, um, couple of months.
HEIDI K. ISERN
"The responsibility to fall out of love is on you", Quartz, August 5, 2016
The best relationships are between decent, caring, and committed men and women who share power comfortably and do not expect stereotypical behavior from themselves or from their partners.
KAREN JOHNSON
Trusting Ourselves: The Complete Guide to Emotional Well-being for Women