Quotes about Relationships

Cities remind us that the desire to escape from the problems of other people by fleeing to a suburb, small town, or a monastery, for that matter, is an unholy thing, and ultimately self-defeating. We can no more escape from other people than we can escape from ourselves.

conversion is no more spectacular than learning to love the people we live with and work among.

Conversion is seeing ourselves, and the ordinary people in our families, our classrooms, and on the job, in a new light. Can it be that these very people—even the difficult, unbearable ones—are the ones God has given us, so that together we might find salvation?

Living with people at close range over many years, as both monastics and small-town people do, is much more difficult than wearing a hair shirt. More difficult, too, I would add, than holding to the pleasant but unrealistic ideal of human perfectibility that seems to permeate much New Age thinking.

I had begun to comprehend that the Bible's story is about the relationship of God to human beings, and of human beings to one another, and that this meant that it is our friendships, marriages, families, and even church congregations that best reveal what kind of theology we have, who our God is. Or, as Thomas Merton once put it, "because we love, God is present." That is the story.

It seems that many men, and some women, cannot give up the illusion of possessing another person. The idea of that person—and "idea" is related etymologically to the word "idol"—becomes more important, more potent than the actual living creature. It is much safer to love an idol than a real person who is capable of surprising you, loving you and demanding love in return, and maybe one day leaving you.

We must live in charity with all men, but familiarity with them is not desirable. It sometimes happens that someone personally unknown to us enjoys a high reputation, but that when we meet him, we are not impressed. Similarly, we sometimes imagine that our company is pleasing, when in reality we offend others by our ill behaviour.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.

Eros will have naked bodies Friendship naked personalities.

There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.