28 Quotes by Harry Stack Sullivan

Everybody has a great deal of experience in living. But no one lives in anything like the highest style of the art; and it is very disconcerting to notice how badly one lives in the sense of the extent to which fatigue and other discomforts are connected with one's important dealings with other people.

There is a persistent funny form of suspicion in most of us that we can solve our own problems and be the masters of our own ships of life, but the fact of the matter is that by ourselves we can only be consumed by our problems and suffer the shipwreck.

What I am, at any given moment in the process of my becoming a person, will be determined by my relationships with those who love me or refuse to love me, with those whom I love or refuse to love.

We are all much more simply human than otherwise, be we happy and successful, contented and detached, miserable and mentally disordered, or whatever.

It may be possible through detachment, to gain knowledge that is ‘useful;’ but only through participation is it possible to gain the knowledge that is helpful.

All of us are much more human than otherwise.

When the satisfaction or the security of another person becomes as significant to one as one’s own satisfaction or security, then the state of love exists. Under no other circumstances is a state of love present, regardless of the popular usage of the term.

When people approach you angrily, you take them very seriously, and, if you’re like me, with the faint suggestion that you can be angry too, and that you would like to know what the shooting is about.

If you do not feel equal to the headaches that psychiatry induces, you are in the wrong business. It is work – work the like of which I do not know.