Interpersonal Growth Quotes

Friendships naturally shift over life. We have different friends for different times in our lives, and sometimes it's not the best idea to hang on to a friendship to try to make it work if it's an unhealthy connection.

I enjoy the company of overseas people. It's always good learning.

A human being becomes whole not in virtue of a relation to himself [only] but rather in virtue of an authentic relation to another human being(s).

Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict; joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are only one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves.

Normally, when someone we love is turning away from a struggle, we self-protect by also turning away. That's definitely my first response. I think change is more likely to happen if both partners have common language and a shared lens to see problems.

People ask me what my greatest strengths are and I say perspective. The best way to get that is to meet people that are polar opposites; you learn the most from them. There are pieces of you that are inherently yours, but everything else is a collection of the things you’ve seen and the people you’ve met.

She couldn't be on his wavelength all the time. That's all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship.

I write about reconciliation, but not as a miracle, as a slow, gradual process of mutual discovery - discovering one another.

... professing myself moreover convinced that the general's unjust interference, so far from being really injurious to their felicity, was perhaps rather conducive to it, by improving their knowledge of each other, and adding strength to their attachment, I leave it to be settled, by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.

Years later, my wife, Ilusion, woke me up to the realization that you can't just "dump" your whole species simply because you've had a few bad encounters with some of its members. ... Intimacy's a greater goal to seek. ...That true knowledge of intimacy within our own species will allow us to pass it along to interspecies relations.

Conflict in close relationships is not only inevitable, it's essential. Intimacy connects people who are inevitably different.

The act of loving is an act of self-evolution even when the purpose of the act is someone else's growth.

Honestly, I believe that the mother-daughter relationship is magical, complex, potentially dangerous, profoundly powerful, and deeply transformative. To put it simply, all of us have this relationship, and in a very real way, "none of us comes out alive." We are all formed first as daughters and then tested as mothers. There's nothing like motherhood to make us reassess how we were as daughters.

I make it my business to be around people that don't look like me or think like me or act like me. I want to learn from them.

Opening to the world begins to benefit ourselves and others simultaneously. The more we relate with others, the more quickly we discover where we're blocked.

We do not need to understand other people and their customs fully to interact with them and learn in the process; it is making the effort to interact without knowing all the rules, improvising certain situations, which allows us to grow.

Maturity is produced through relationships and community.

To sustain love, a man and a woman must continually be marrying and divorcing, moving with, against, away from, and beyond each other, saying 'yes' and 'no'.

A good marriage is like an incredible retirement fund. You put everything you have into it during your productive life, and over the years it turns from silver to gold to platinum.

She thought of how much people changed you. It was the opposite of what you always heard, that no one could change a person. It wasn't true. It was only through other people that one ever did change.

Marriage is a wrestling match where you hold on tight while your mate changes into a hundred different things. The trick is that you're changing into a hundred other things, but you can't let go. You can only try to match up and never turn into a wolf while he's a rabbit, or a mouse while he's still busy being an owl, a brawny black bull while he's a little blue crab scuttling for shelter. It's harder than it sounds.

A lot of my friends - I am the only white person in their circle. Being able to hear other perspectives besides the white conservative approach has really given me a perspective that I want to share and challenge people to think about.

. . . a relationship has a momentum, it must change and develop, and will tend to move toward the point of greatest commitment.

The thing about dating someone who listens to a totally different genre than you is they can help you find things to appreciate in that genre.

Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.