Soul Mates Quotes

“We cultivate soulfulness in a relationship by honoring its vernacular life. We deal with the given relationship and forgo the indulgence of imagining something better or different. We respect its style and its unfolding qualities. These vernacular qualities of family, marriage, or friendship may not appear in a flash, but may take years to be revealed. Only through time and experience do we discover the nature and styles of actual people.”
― Thomas Moore, Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relat

“Caring for the soul in our relationships, and through them, we can enjoy them both practically and mystically, and with genuine tolerance for individuality in others, in the relationship itself, and in ourselves. We can let unplanned developments happen, allow people to change, tolerate our own idiosyncratic needs and cravings, and enjoy and appreciate a community of individuals who may think differently than we do, live oddly, and express themselves none too rationally. For this is what relationship is about: the discovery of the multitude of ways soul is incarnated in this world.”
― Thomas Moore, Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relat

“WHEN WE shift our attention from the mechanics and structures of a relationship to its soul, a number of changes occur. We no longer have to carry the weight of guilt about not having done relationship properly, we can give ourselves a pardon for having engaged in folly in our younger days, we can feel the sting of endings without bearing a neurotic degree of responsibility, and we can enjoy the pleasures that a lifetime of relationships has given us. We can end the impossible quest for the perfect structure—the happy family, the completely satisfying marriage, the unbroken friendship. We can find some purpose in the failures, the intimacies that never got off the ground, the possibilities that never took flesh. The soul does not share the spirit’s love of perfection and wholeness, but finds value in fragmentation, incompleteness, and unfulfilled promise.”
― Thomas Moore, Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relat