Quotes about Relationships

private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves precedes 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.

whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently. As Emerson once put it, "What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.

Principle-centered leadership is practiced from the inside out on four levels: 1) personal (my relationship with myself); 2) interpersonal (my relationships and interactions with others); 3) managerial (my responsibility to get a job done with others); and 4) organizational (my need to organize people—to recruit them, train them, compensate them, build teams, solve problems, and create aligned structure, strategy, and systems).

They move us progressively on a Maturity Continuum from dependence to independence to interdependence.

You have to build the skills of empathic listening on a base of character that inspires openness and trust. And you have to build the Emotional Bank Accounts that create a commerce between hearts.

Look to yourself. Be honest with yourself first—the roots of your problems are spiritual, and so are the root solutions. Build your character and your relationships on the bedrock of principles.

To relate effectively with a wife, a husband, children, friends, or working associates, we must learn to listen. And this requires emotional strength. Listening involves patience, openness, and the desire to understand—highly developed qualities of character. It's so much easier to operate from a low emotional level and to give high-level advice. Our level of development is fairly obvious with tennis or piano playing, where it is impossible to pretend.

Love is something you do: the sacrifices you make, the giving of self, like a mother bringing a newborn into the world. If you want to study love, study those who sacrifice for others, even for people who offend or do not love in return. If you are a parent, look at the love you have for the children you sacrificed for. Love is a value that is actualized through loving actions. Proactive people subordinate feelings to values. Love, the feeling, can be recaptured.

But in the long run, people will trust and respect you if you are honest and open and kind with them. You care enough to confront. And to be trusted, it is said, is greater than to be loved. In the long run, I am convinced, to be trusted will be also to be loved.

Love is not without its flaws. The stronger the love, the more it tests you. Compassion and empathy will make true love persist.

He measures our lives by how we love.

We lead our lives well when we love God with our whole being and when we love neighbors as we (properly) love ourselves.