33 Quotes About Interpersonal-relationships

You may say you won’t interfere with another person’s soul, but you do—merely by existing. The snag about it is the practical difficulty, so to speak, of not existing.

Harriet had long ago discovered that one could not like people any the better, merely because they were ill, or dead—still less because one had once liked them very much.

To switch effectively from defense to social engagement strategies, the nervous system must do two things: (1) assess risk, and (2) if the environment looks safe, inhibit the primitive defensive reactions to fight, flight or freeze.

Sometimes the things that went on between two people were so private and so painful the the rest of the world needed to reserve judgement.

Authority is not a quality one person 'has,' in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.

It's not ideas, nor vision, nor tools that truly matter in therapy. If you debrief patients at the end of therapy about the process, what do they remember? Never the ideas—it's always the relationship.

If you happen to hold that human consciousness is no more than the epiphenomenon, or secretion, of our individual brains then you are more or less trapped in your own skull. But if consciousness is open, if it can partake in a more global form of being, if it can merge with the natural world and with other beings, then, indeed, it may be possible to drop, for a time, the constraints of one's personal worldview and see reality through the eyes of others.

The closest one person can get to another is through silence.

I wish there wasn't such a division between people who believe certain things and people who don't. It seems vastly hypocritical on both ends, these two groups of people both claiming to believe in good things and yet willing to do bad things to each other for disagreeing.