57 quotes about Relationships

A relationship, I think, is like a shark, you know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.

Allen, Woody

We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.

Auden, W. H.

The easiest kind of relationship is with ten thousand people, the hardest is with one.

Baez, Joan

For me, the highest level of sexual excitement is in a monogamous relationship.

Beatty, Warren

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

Benjamin, Walter

Constant togetherness is fine -- but only for Siamese twins.

Billings, Victoria

The key to any good relationship, on-screen and off, is communication, respect, and I guess you have to like the way the other person smells -- and he smelled real nice.

Bullock, Sandra

Now the whole dizzying and delirious range of sexual possibilities has been boiled down to that one big, boring, bulimic word. RELATIONSHIP.

Burchill, Julie

People must be taken as they are, and we should never try make them or ourselves better by quarreling with them.

Burke, Edmund

My attachment has neither the blindness of the beginning, nor the microscopic accuracy of the close of such liaisons.

Byron, Lord

Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future --and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.

Camus, Albert

People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie.

Capote, Truman

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

Carter, Angela

The Inside-Out approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self -- with your paradigms, your character, and your motives. The inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves recedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.

Covey, Stephen R.

The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are. And if our words and our actions come from superficial human relations techniques (the Personality Ethic) rather than from our own inner core (the Character Ethic), others will sense that duplicity. We simply won't be able to create and sustain the foundation necessary for effective interdependence.

Covey, Stephen R.

The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

Crisp, Quentin

It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn't give enough.

Crisp, Quentin

Treasure your relationships, not your possessions.

D'Angelo, Anthony J.

Relationships are like a dance, with visible energy racing back and forth between partners. Some relationships are the slow, dark dance of death.

Dowling, Colette

The thing that's between us is fascination, and the fascination resides in our being alike. Whether you're a man or a woman, the fascination resides in finding out that we're alike.

Duras, Marguerite

Relationships based on obligation lack dignity.

Dyer, Wayne

It takes a lot of experience of life to see why some relationships last and others do not. But we do not have to wait for a crisis to get an idea of the future of a particular relationship. Our behavior in little every incidents tells us a great deal.

Easwaran, Eknath

Surely there must be some way to find a husband or, for that matter, merely an escort, without sacrificing one's privacy, self-respect, and interior decorating scheme. For example, men could be imported from the developing countries, many parts of which are suffering from a man excess, at least in relation to local food supply.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.

Einstein, Albert

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

Eliot, George

All things need watching, working at, caring for and marriage is no exception. Marriage is not something to be treated indifferently, or abused or something that simply takes care of itself. Nothing neglected will remain as it was or is, or will fail to deteriorate. All things need attention care and concern and especially so in this most sensitive of all relationships of life.

Evans, Richard L.

Do good to your friends to keep them, to your enemies to win them.

Franklin, Benjamin

It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.

Friedan, Betty

The greatest ability in business is to get along with others and influence their actions. A chip on the shoulder is too heavy a piece of baggage to carry through life.

Hannah, John A.

Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.

Harrison, Barbara Grizzuti

I know for me the subject of how to be in a relationship is precious and complicated and challenging. It wouldn't be right to make it look too easy. [On her approach to Mad About You]

Hunt, Helen

I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law.

King Jr. Martin Luther

We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions -- love, antipathy, charity, or malice -- and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

Kundera, Milan

One can find women who have never had one love affair, but it is rare indeed to find any who have had only one.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality. Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us.

Lawrence, D. H.

Long-term commitment to an intimate relationship with one person of whatever sex is an essential need that people have in order to breed the qualities out of which nurturing thought can rise.

Lerner, Gerda

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

Murdoch, Iris

You will always move toward anyone who increases you and away from anyone who makes you less.

Murdock, Mike

Each relationship nurtures a strength or weakness within you.

Murdock, Mike

If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.

Paz, Octavio

The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands.

Penney, Alexandria

I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you.

Pirandello, Luigi

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

Proust, Marcel

Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they're trying to find someone who's going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take.

Robbins, Anthony

The quality of your life is the quality of your relationships.

Robbins, Anthony

When people are like each other they tend to like each other.

Robbins, Anthony

Today we are faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships... the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world, at peace.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

Nowadays love is a matter of chance, matrimony a matter of money and divorce a matter of course.

Rowland, Helen

It is the things in common that make relationships enjoyable, bit it is the little differences that make them interesting.

Ruthman, Todd

Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

When you're in a relationship, you're always surrounded by a ring of circumstances... joined together by a wedding ring, or in a boxing ring.

Seger, Bob

It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them.

Storr, Anthony

Relationships are the hallmark of the mature person.

Tracy, Brian

If you're in a relationship and you want to make it work, you have to be a little selfless at times.

Williams, Montel

Assumptions are the termites of relationships.

Winkler, Henry

It takes two men to make a brother.

Zangwill, Israel