Human Relationships Quotes

“For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people's faces.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Let us express our confidence lavishly. In the construction of human relationships, trust can unlock bolted hearts and evaporate groundless suspicions. It has the power to uplift us and detach us from material calculations. Except, if reliance shows nasty shatters, we may put it on hold for a while or, furthermore, deny it. ("'My radio ")”
― Erik Pevernagie, Words of Wisdom: Selected and illustrated by his readers

“Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

“Rafael?”
”Yeah?”
„Do we all have monsters?”
„Yes.”
„Why does God give us so many monsters?”
„You want to know my theory?”
„Sure.”
„I think it’s other people who give us monsters. Maybe God doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Last Night I Sang to the Monster

“My theory is - we don't really go that far into other people, even when we think we do. We hardly ever go in and bring them out. We just stand at the jaws of the cave, and strike a match, and quickly as if anybody's there.”
― Martin Amis, Money

“Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know however slightly, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to make me dizzy.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.”
― Graham Greene

“Those who are nurtured best, survive best.”
― Louis Cozolino, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment And the Developing Social Brain

“Compassionate leaders honor the complexity of human relationships, nurture authenticity and create common grounds for blooming great ideas of individuals.”
― Amit Ray, Mindfulness Meditation for Corporate Leadership and Management

“Yes, there is something in me hateful, repulsive," thought Ljewin, as he came away from the Schtscherbazkijs', and walked in the direction of his brother's lodgings. "And I don't get on with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put myself in such a position".”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Humility is the embarrassment you feel when you tell people how wonderful you are.”
― Laurence J. Peter

“Cause and effect are never divided between two people.”
― Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller

“this isn't so much romance as it is opportunity [victor mancini]”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Ce qui m’a le plus étonné (absurdement, bien sûr) à Paris, c’est de n’avoir aperçu aucun carrosse avec un malade à l’intérieur. J’ai découvert un jour au coin d’une rue un invalide dans un chariot mécanique et j’ai voulu lui foncer dedans, l’embrasser et le serrer dans mes bras comme si ç’avait été un frère. Mais tu ne sais que trop bien que, dans la vie, précisément les gestes les plus sensés sont interdits.”
― Max Blecher, Scarred Hearts

“Before falling head over heels for somebody ask yourself if that person clearly have what it takes to go the distance.”
― Germany Kent

“(...) the essence of experience, the law of relation, is reciprocal freeing: here is "the rock and the substance of the human spirit.”
― Mary Parker Follett, Creative Experience

“We were two different people, and found that hard to accept in one another. But I was hers and she was mine. That's how it had always been. Who would I be, if not hers? I didn't want to be without her.”
― Ashley C. Ford, Somebody's Daughter

“Chance encounters can bring two people together, but it is ultimately up to those individuals to maintain a relationship and make it work.”
― Sanjeev Himachali

“Without institutional obligations, the upkeep of friendships require must be very deliberate...

However, the weakness of friendship is also the source of its immeasurable strength. Why do true friendships make us happier than spouses or children? Because they're always a deliberate choice, never an obligation...

Someone does not cease to be your parent, boss, or spouse because you stop liking them. Friendship is more real because either person can walk away at any time. Its fragility proves its purity.”
― Eric Barker, Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong

“To Aristotle, friends “are disposed toward each other as they are disposed to themselves: a friend is another self.”

… Your brain is like a clever lawyer, twisting the words in Darwin’s contract. Selfishness can actually be altruism— if I believe that you are me.”
― Eric Barker, Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong

“Edith Wharton in the 1800s? “There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not as a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self.”

… In psychology it’s called “self-expansion theory” —that we expand our notion of our self to include those we’re close to.

… When women heard the names of their close friends, their gray matter responded the same way it did when they heard their own name.”
― Eric Barker, Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong

“Jeff Hall's research found that it took as many as sixty hours to develop a light friendship, sometimes one hundred hours to get to full-fledged "friend" status, and two hundred or more hours to unlock the vaunted "best friend" achievement...

Hall also found that how people talked mattered. We've all hit that wall with a potential friend where the small talk starts to go in circles...

Want to make good friends without the dozens of hours?... Arthur Aron got strangers to feel like lifelong pals in just forty-five minutes. How? Well that leads us to our second costly signal: vulnerability.”
― Eric Barker, Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong

“We've all read a thousand articles that say marriage makes you healthier and happier. Umm, no. Many of these studies merely survey married people and single people, compare the happiness levels, find that the married people are doing better, and crow "See? Marriage makes you healthy and happy." But that's committing an error called "survivorship bias." If you want to determine if getting married makes you happier, you need to include separated, divorced, and widowed people in with the currently married, not with the unmarried...

A 2010 study from Australia even said previous research probably underestimated just how happy people in happy marriages are. But the flip side is even more damning than you may have guessed. A study of medical records of five thousand patients analyzed the most stressful life events people deal with. Divorce came in #2 (Death of a spouse was number one.) Divorce even beat going to prison.”
― Eric Barker, Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong

“..."For the first time in history, the typical American now spends more years single than married." Marriage has gone from being a cornerstone to a capstone. It used to be something you did while young and on a path to adulthood. Now its demands seem so onerous that people want to make sure they have all their ducks in a row before attempting it -- if they choose to walk down the aisle at all...

Yes, the average marriage has been getting worse year after year without much hope, but there's something you should know about the best marriages right now...

They are better than any in the history of humanity. Period.

... it's winner takes all. And that's why Finkel calls wedlock in our era "the all or nothing marriage.”
― Eric Barker, Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong

“...the most wonderful form of crazy that love brings: idealization... A 1999 study showed that people in happy relationships spend five times as long talking about their sweetheart's good qualities as bad. As Robert Seidenberg said, "Love is a human religion in which another person is believed in."

...Realism may be accurate, but it's our illusions that foretell our happiness in love. And the more crazy, the better. People who idealized their partner the most felt no decline in relationship satisfaction over a study of the first three years in marriage.

...When researchers ask people in the throes of infatuation about their partner's downsides, they can recognize and identify the bad stuff... But they emotionally discount the negative: it's not a big deal. Or those flaws are even "charming." This attitude helps grease the wheels of a relationship”
― Eric Barker, Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong

“Most couples wait too long to go (to marriage counseling). There's an average six-year delay between the first cracks in a marriage and actually getting help...

When entropy decays the happiness of a marriage over time, it's not just a linear downward progression for everyone. Often, there's a phase change (like water to ice)... In marriage this goes by the appropriately intimidating term negative sentiment override.

Idealization hasn't faded-- it has flipped. If love is positive delusion, NSO is utter disillusionment. You are biased against, not toward, your partner. The facts haven't necessarily changed, just your interpretation of them. Rather than attributing problems to context, attributions now lie in someone's poor character traits.”
― Eric Barker, Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong

“Sixty-nine percent of ongoing problems never get resolved. No, I'm not saying that to depress you. The point is that it's not what you talk about, it's how you talk about it. Everyone thinks the issue is clarity, but studies show that most couples (if they do talk) are actually pretty clear...

It's about regulation, not resolution of the conflict. War is inevitable, but you have to obey the Geneva Convention rules. No chemical warfare. No torturing prisoners. Maya Angelou once said, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Eric Barker, Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong

“I closed my eyes and listened carefully for the descendants of Sputnik, even now circling the Earth, gravity their only tie to the planet.
Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other, and part, never to meet again. No words passing between them. No promises to keep”
― Haruki Marukami

“When I was younger all kinds of people talked to me,” she said. “Told me all sorts of things. Fascinating stories, beautiful, strange stories. But past a certain point nobody talked to me any more. No one. Not my husband, my child, my friends …no one. Like there was nothing left in the world to talk about. Sometimes I feel like my body’s turning invisible, like you can see right through me”
― Haruki Marukami

“Respect, when rooted in genuine admiration and understanding, becomes a bridge that connects individuals, fostering empathy, acceptance, and a deep appreciation for the inherent worth of every person.”
― Sanjeev Himachali, Beginners Guide To Job Search