Quotes about Relationships

Jesus firmly and consistently reinforced human equality by spending a lot of time in the margins of society, most notably in relationships with women. He didn't simply bring relief and comfort to the down and out. He engaged, recruited, and mobilized for his kingdom people who didn't count for anything in the eyes of society or of religious leaders. His interactions with women violated patriarchal propriety and repeatedly shocked his disciples.

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.

Love is not "fulfilling" oneself through the use of another. Love is giving oneself to another, for the good of the other, and receiving the other as a gift.78 The lethal paradox of the age was that, for all its alleged humanism, it had ended up devaluing the human person into an economic unit, an ideological category, an expression of a class or race or ethnicity.

The love we give away is the only one we keep.

Nine times out of ten, when you extend your arms to someone, they will step in, because basically they need precisely what you need.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers.

A woman means by unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others. Thus each sex regards the other as basically selfish.

We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.

Relations are simply a tedious pack of people who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

To love others, we must first learn to love ourselves.

Leaders must draw the best out of people, and friendship does that far better than prolonged argument or mere logic.

We can only know and understand ourselves fully through others — through the way we experience others and ourselves in relation to others, and the way others experience us.