Quotes About Relationships

If anything should take place behind closed doors, it was cruelty and betrayal.

An editor sleeping with his writer was not as bad as a psychoanalyst sleeping with his patient, or even a professor sleeping with an undergraduate, let alone a president with an intern.

He couldn't help wondering whether love could really consist of an unpleasant combination of obsession, self-pity, rivalry, lust and day-dreaming. These characteristics didn't seem to distinguish it from the rest of life, except by their intensity.

They had never met, but she had come to understand what had driven Victor's wife to seek refuge in a full set of Snoopy mugs.

Most people either felt regret at staying with someone for too long, or regret at losing them too easily. I manage to feel both ways at the same time about the same object.

He hated happy families with their mutual encouragement, and their demonstrative affection, and the impression they gave of valuing each other more than other people.

As he poured himself a drink, David thought about his dead father-in-law, Dudley Craig, a charming, drunken Scotsman who had been dismissed by Eleanor's mother, Mary, when he became too expensive to keep.

Our goal is to love people more than need them. We are overflowing pitchers, not leaky cups.

Fear of man is always part of a triad that includes unbelief and disobedience.

Love breaks the hold of individualism; it builds new communities out of the ashes of broken and fragmented relationships.

Regarding other people, our problem is that we need them (for ourselves) more than we love them (for the glory of God).

With our touch, Jesus becomes our scapegoat. In his touch, Jesus takes our sin and absorbs our shame (Psalm 69:9; Romans 15:3), and we receive his righteousness. If you prefer symmetry in your relationships, in which you give a gift of similar value to the one you receive, you have not yet touched Jesus.

He says "I love you" first, even when we respond with an indifferent shrug or the equivalent of a passing, "Oh, thanks." And in this we discover why it might be hard for us to move toward others: the one taking the initiative in the relationship—the one who loves most—is the one who risks humiliation.

Knowing and being known—by design we enjoy human connections, and those connections are forged over time through normal interactions and questions that gradually ask for more. Such connections are the foundations for mutual help, and they are helpful in themselves since they are expressions of love.

Since the desires for power and control are in every heart, you don't have to look overseas for lawless brutality. It happens every day between parents and children, boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives. Where there is injustice, shame will be part of its fallout.

Love is able to see past the clutter of a disorganized life.

Love is the opposite of anger. Anger is disdain, hatred, and contempt.

If you are casual about anger and unprepared, you will lose and so will those around you.

Anger shows contempt. You are better than they. You are smarter, more righteous—you are above and they are below. Anger tears down. It kills relationships.

We are connected to things that have been forced on us, such as the sins of others

Regarding other people, our problem is that we need them (for ourselves) more than we love them (for the glory of God). The task God sets for us is to need them less and love them more. Instead of looking for ways to manipulate others, we will ask God what our duty is toward them.

Imagine how aloneness could gradually be banished.

do not end the conversation without an offer to pray. Ask what he needs prayer for and either pray right then or pray later and then follow up the next time you see him.

We don't aim to draw out problems so that we can be helpers. We are simply interested in knowing another person, which is a basic feature of everyday love.