Emotional Responsibility Quotes

Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bittersweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt and take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.

When we begin to set boundaries with people we love, a really hard thing happens: they hurt. They may feel a hole where you used to plug up their aloneness, their disorganization, or their financial irresponsibility. Whatever it is, they will feel a loss. If you love them, this will be difficult for you to watch. But, when you are dealing with someone who is hurting, remember that your boundaries are both necessary for you and helpful for them. If you have been enabling them to be irresponsible, your limit setting may nudge them toward responsibility.

I love my kids. But I don't give them the burden of being the source of my love.

Dogs are voiceless ... a critical part of having dogs is emotional responsibility: learning how to understand them and, when necessary, to speak and act on their behalf.

Age carries with it a double load of guilt.

Nobody but you is responsible for your life. You are responsible for your life. What is your life? What is all life? What is every flower, every rock, every tree? Energy. And you're responsible for the energy you create for yourself, and you're responsible for the energy that you bring to others.

I wonder what it's like to have that much power over a boy. I don't think I'd want it - it's a lot of responsibility to hold a person's heart in your hands.

I remember my daughter coming back from school one day and saying that the teacher had asked anybody whose parents were divorced to put their hands up. I felt angry but also guilty. And you feel sort of terribly responsible in that sort of situation.

You're not RESPONSIBLE for somebody else's happiness. You're responsible for your own HAPPINESS.

Friendship is not so simple. It is hard to get and takes a long time, but when one ha it one cannot get rid of it, one has to face it.

…God, it’s over. Takumi, you gotta stop stealing other people’s problems and get some of your own.

I have to grow up and be my own man and look after my own family and make sure that my wife and baby are comfortable with what I'm saying, so if that affects them, then it affects me.

Saying "I feel guilty" is a mere form of words. Saying "I feel ashamed" is not.

Owning your own feelings, rather than blaming them on someone else, is the mark of a person who has moved from contracted to expanded awareness.

You know what getting married is? It's agreeing to taking this person who right now is at the top of his form, full of hopes and ideas, feeling good, looking good, wildly interested in you because you're the same way, and sticking by him while he slowly disintegrates. And he does the same for you. You're his responsibility now and he's yours. If no one else will take care of him, you will. If everyone else rejects you, he won't. What do you think love is? Going to bed all the time?

[a] heavy sense of guilt [is] the most potent factor in the whole psychologic picture of motherliness.

I hated hurting him. Most of the time, I could forget about it, but the inexorable truth is this: They might be glad to have me around, but I was the alpha and the omega of my parents' suffering.

A wise man once said that we can't make anyone feel or do anything. We can throw things into the wind, but it's up to each person to decide how they want to react, where they want to stand when things fall.

You cannot make somebody else responsible for your own happiness.

Someday, when I manage to finally figure out how to take care of myself, then I'll consider taking care of someone else.

I feel like it's my responsibility not to leave the listener in a pool of dread.

Whatever you feel, you become. It is your responsibility.

Events in the present can trigger quite a young part of ourselves. If we don't take responsibility and start looking after that young part of ourselves, we can start asking partners to look after that part of ourselves or we wound ourselves.

The same goes for envy, anger and insults - said the master. - When they are not accepted, they continue to belong to the one who carried them.

Your life doesn't belong to you, it belongs to the people that love you