Quotes about Boundaries

The bounds of a personality are not reproducible by a sharp black line, but...each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent people and things.

Do you know, I began to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them—children, duties, visits, bores, relations—the things that protect married people from each other. We've been too close together—that has been our sin. We've seen the nakedness of each other's souls.

For now, what things have you done that you prefer to keep private? What things in your life do you insist on keeping secret? That's where we will find the shame that is attached to what we do.

Territorial disputes have at all times been found one of the most fertile sources of hostility among nations. Perhaps the greatest proportion of wars that have desolated the earth have sprung from this origin.

My mom was very strict. She didn't let me watch anything rated R or anything with cussing.

Life is relationship, living is relationship. We cannot live if you and I have built a wall around ourselves and just peep over that wall occasionally. Unconsciously, deeply, under the wall, we are related.

Between 2008 and 2010 I exhausted myself because I wanted to please everyone.

Without law in some form, and, also, without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily or naturally. We have to have something hard and half-good to rebel against.

Human strength is defined in asserting boundaries. God, it seems, is in the business of dissolving boundaries. So we enter into paradox—what's Three is one and what's One is three. We just can't resolve that, and so we confuse unity with uniformity.

Traveling the road of healthy religion and true contemplation will lead to calmly held boundaries, which need neither to be defended constantly nor abdicated in the name of "friendship." This road is a "narrow road that few travel upon" these days (Matt. 7:14). It is what many of us like to call "the Third Way": the tertium quid that emerges only when you hold the tension of opposites.

People who know who they are find it the easiest to know who they aren't.

Cesar Milan, the "dog whisperer," says that dogs cannot be peaceful or teachable if they have no limits set to their freedom and their emotions. They are actually happier and at rest when they live within very clear limits and boundaries, with a "calm and assertive" master. My dog, Venus, is never happier and more teachable than when I am walking her, but on her leash. Could it be the same for humans at certain stages?