Quotes from Marshall B. Rosenberg

You can't make your kids do anything. All you can do is make them wish they had. And then, they will make you wish you hadn't made them wish they had.

All moralistic judgments, whether positive or negative, are tragic expressions of unmet needs.

At the root of every tantrum and power struggle are unmet needs.

When our communication supports compassionate giving and receiving, happiness replaces violence and grieving.

Let's shine the light of consciousness on places where we can hope to find what we are seeking.

When we hear the other person's feelings and needs, we recognize our common humanity.

It's harder to empathize with those who appear to possess more power, status, or resources.

Instead of playing the game "Making Life Wonderful", we often play the game called "Who's Right". Do you know that game? It's a game where everybody loses.

My ultimate goal is to spend as many of my moments in life as I can in that world that the poet Rumi talks about, 'a place beyond rightness and wrongness.

What I want in my life is compassion a flow between myself and others based on mutual giving from the heart.

A need is life seeking expression within us.

Anger tells us we've disconnected from life. The purpose in anger is to use it to come back to life.

All people ever say is: THANK YOU (a celebration of life) and PLEASE (an opportunity to make life more wonderful).

It's really a spiritual practice that I am trying to show as a way of life.

With empathy, I'm fully with them, not full of them — that's sympathy.

In a Giraffe institution, the head nurse job would be to serve the nurses, not to control them. Teachers are there to serve the students, not control them.

Social change involves helping people see new options for making life wonderful that are less costly to get needs met.

A difficult message to hear is an opportunity to enrich someone's life.

Power-Over leads to punishment and violence. Power-With leads to compassion and understanding, and to learning motivated by reverence for life rather than fear, guilt, shame, or anger.

We want to take action out of the desire to contribute to life rather than out of fear, guilt, shame, or obligation.

Needs are the expression of life through us.

Not getting our needs fulfilled is painful - but it's a sweet pain, not suffering, which is what comes from life-alienated thinking and interpretation.

My need is for safety, fun and to have distribution of resources, a sustainable life on the planet. NVC is a strategy that serves me to meet these needs.

To practice NVC, it's critical for me to be able to slow down, take my time, to come from an energy I choose, the one I believe that we were meant to come from, not the one I was programmed into.