Quotations and Poems

» “A relationship, I think, is like a shark, you know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.”
– Woody Allen

»  ”We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.”
– Henri Frederic Amiel

»  ”The easiest kind of relationship is with ten thousand people, the hardest is with one.”
– Joan Baez

»  ”The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
– Walter Benjamin

»  ”Constant togetherness is fine — but only for Siamese twins.”
– Victoria Billings

»  ”People must be taken as they are, and we should never try make them or ourselves better by quarreling with them.”
– Edmund Burke

»  ”My attachment has neither the blindness of the beginning, nor the microscopic accuracy of the close of such liaisons.”
– Lord Byron

»  ”Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future –and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.”
– Albert Camus

»  ”In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.”
– Angela Carter

»  ”The ”Inside-Out” approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self — with your paradigms, your character, and your motives. The inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves recedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.”
– Stephen R. Covey

»  ”The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are. And if our words and our actions come from superficial human relations techniques (the Personality Ethic) rather than from our own inner core (the Character Ethic), others will sense that duplicity. We simply won’t be able to create and sustain the foundation necessary for effective interdependence.”
– Stephen R. Covey

»  ”It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.”
– Quentin Crisp

»  ”The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.”
– Quentin Crisp

»  ”Treasure your relationships, not your possessions.”
– Anthony J. D’Angelo

»  ”Relationships are like a dance, with visible energy racing back and forth between partners. Some relationships are the slow, dark dance of death.”
– Colette Dowling

»  ”The thing that’s between us is fascination, and the fascination resides in our being alike. Whether you’re a man or a woman, the fascination resides in finding out that we’re alike.”
– Marguerite Duras

»  ”Relationships based on obligation lack dignity.”
– Wayne Dyer

»  ”It takes a lot of experience of life to see why some relationships last and others do not. But we do not have to wait for a crisis to get an idea of the future of a particular relationship. Our behavior in little every incidents tells us a great deal.”
– Eknath Easwaran

»  ”Surely there must be some way to find a husband or, for that matter, merely an escort, without sacrificing one’s privacy, self-respect, and interior decorating scheme. For example, men could be imported from the developing countries, many parts of which are suffering from a man excess, at least in relation to local food supply.”
– Barbara Ehrenreich

»  ”In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.”
– Albert Einstein

»  ”The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.”
– George Eliot

»  ”All things need watching, working at, caring for and marriage is no exception. Marriage is not something to be treated indifferently, or abused or something that simply takes care of itself. Nothing neglected will remain as it was or is, or will fail to deteriorate. All things need attention care and concern and especially so in this most sensitive of all relationships of life.”
– Richard L. Evans

»  ”Do good to your friends to keep them, to your enemies to win them.”
– Benjamin Franklin

»  ”It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.”
– Betty Friedan

»  ”The greatest ability in business is to get along with others and influence their actions. A chip on the shoulder is too heavy a piece of baggage to carry through life.”
– John A. Hannah

»  ”Kindness and intelligence don’t always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.”
– Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

»  ”I know for me the subject of how to be in a relationship is precious and complicated and challenging. It wouldn’t be right to make it look too easy. [On her approach to Mad About You]“
– Helen Hunt

»  ”I want to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.

»  ”We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions — love, antipathy, charity, or malice — and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.”
– Milan Kundera

»  ”One can find women who have never had one love affair, but it is rare indeed to find any who have had only one.”
– Francois De La Rochefoucauld

»  ”I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality. Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us.”
– D. H. Lawrence

»  ”There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”
– Iris Murdoch

»  ”Each relationship nurtures a strength or weakness within you.”
– Mike Murdock

»  ”You will always move toward anyone who increases you and away from anyone who makes you less.”
– Mike Murdock

»  ”If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.”
– Octavio Paz

»  ”The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands.”
– Alexandria Penney

»  ”I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you.”
– Luigi Pirandello

»  ”The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.”
– Marcel Proust

»  ”When people are like each other they tend to like each other.”
– Anthony Robbins

»  ”The quality of your life is the quality of your relationships.”
– Anthony Robbins

»  ”Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they’re trying to find someone who’s going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take.”
– Anthony Robbins

»  ”Today we are faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships… the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world, at peace.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt

»  ”Nowadays love is a matter of chance, matrimony a matter of money and divorce a matter of course.”
– Helen Rowland

»  ”It is the things in common that make relationships enjoyable, bit it is the little differences that make them interesting.”
– Todd Ruthman

»  ”Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer

»  ”When you’re in a relationship, you’re always surrounded by a ring of circumstances… joined together by a wedding ring, or in a boxing ring.”
– Bob Seger

»  ”It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them.”
– Anthony Storr

»  ”Relationships are the hallmark of the mature person.”
– Brian Tracy

»  ”If you’re in a relationship and you want to make it work, you have to be a little selfless at times.”
– Montel Williams

»  ”Assumptions are the termites of relationships.”
– Henry Winkler

»  ”It takes two men to make a brother.”
– Israel Zangwill