Quotes about Relationships

Being alive means being loved.

When people can cease having to be for us everything, we can accept the fact they may still have a gift for us.

Healing encounters and deep communion with others come about from persons who have experienced at least a taste of love offering love to another, without manipulation or subtle games.

If prayer, understood as an intimate relationship with God, is indeed the basis of all relationships—to ourselves as well as to others.

But real openness to each other also means a real closedness, because only he who can hold a secret can safely share his knowledge. When we do not protect with great care our own inner mystery, we will never be able to form community. It is this inner mystery that attracts us to each other and allows us to establish friendship and develop lasting relationships of love.

The return to the "Father from whom all fatherhood takes its name" allows me to let my dad be no less than the good, loving, but limited human being he is, and to let my heavenly Father be the God whose unlimited, unconditional love melts away all resentments and anger and makes me free to love beyond the need to please or find approval.

And still, I knew that I would never be able to live the great commandment to love without allowing myself to be loved without conditions or prerequisites. The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realized.

Relate to people as a conqueror and they will hide their real nature from you. Violence is the brother and distrust the sister of this way of life.

If you see in me more than my function or job, then I can slowly communicate to you on a deeper level. I can become a person to you.

Pain suffered alone feels very different from pain suffered alongside another. Even when the pain stays, we know how great the difference if another draws close, if another shares with us in it.

Forgiveness is to allow the other person not to be God. Forgiveness says, "I know you love me, but you don't have to love me unconditionally, because no human being can do that." [...] If we want other people to give us something that only God can give, we become a heavy burden. We say, "Love me!" and before we know it we become demanding and manipulative [...] To forgive other people for being able to give us only a little love—that is a hard discipline.

Life is just a little opportunity for you during a few years to say, I love you, too.