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A king's son is no nobler than his company.
-Scottish Proverb
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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.
-Woody Allen
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We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.
-Henri Frederic Amiel
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Her name was called Lady Helena Herring and her age was 25 and she mated well with the earl.
-Daisy Ashford
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You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.
-W. H. Auden
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Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
-W. H. Auden
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It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;-- it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.
-Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
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The easiest kind of relationship is with ten thousand people, the hardest is with one.
-Joan Baez
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In Genesis, it says that it is not good for a man to be alone; but sometimes it is a great relief.
-John Barrymore
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For me, the highest level of sexual excitement is in a monogamous relationship.
-Warren Beatty
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It seems to me that the best relationships, the ones that last, are frequently the ones rooted in friendship. You know, one day you look at the person and you see something more than the night before, like a switch has been flicked somewhere, and the person who was just a friend is suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with.
-Jeffrey Bell, The X-Files (Episode The Rain King spoken by Dana Scully)
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
-Walter Benjamin
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Constant togetherness is fine -- but only for Siamese twins.
-Victoria Billings
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The most effective way to achieve right relations with any living thing is to look for the best in it, and then help that best into the fullest expression.
-Allen J. Boone
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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.
-Sandra Bullock
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Now the whole dizzying and delirious range of sexual possibilities has been boiled down to that one big, boring, bulimic word. RELATIONSHIP.
-Julie Burchill
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People must be taken as they are, and we should never try make them or ourselves better by quarreling with them.
-Edmund Burke
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My attachment has neither the blindness of the beginning, nor the microscopic accuracy of the close of such liaisons.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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Her great merit is finding out mine -- there is nothing so amiable as discernment.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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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.
-Albert Camus
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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.
-Truman Capote
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Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.
-Thomas Carlyle
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In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.
-Angela Carter
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Two may talk together under the same roof for many years, yet never really meet; and two others at first speech are old friends.
-Mary Catherwood
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I hate and I love: why I do so you may well ask. I do not know, but I feel it happen and am in agony.
Odi et amo: quare id facium, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
-Catullus, Carmina
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Sometimes apparent resemblance of character will bring two men together and for a certain time unite them. But their mistake gradually becomes evident, and they are astonished to find themselves not only far apart, but even repelled, in some sort, at all their points of contact.
-Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort
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Like associates with like.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
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In all societies, it is advisable to associate if possible with the highest; not that the highest are always the best, but because, if disgusted there, we can descend at any time; but if we begin with the lowest, to ascend is impossible.
-Charles Caleb Colton
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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.
-Stephen Covey
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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.
-Stephen Covey
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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.
-Quentin Crisp
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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.
-Quentin Crisp
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Treasure your relationships, not your possessions.
-Anthony D'Angelo
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Relationships are like a dance, with visible energy racing back and forth between partners. Some relationships are the slow, dark dance of death.
-Colette Dowling
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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.
-Marguerite Duras
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Relationships based on obligation lack dignity.
-Wayne Dyer
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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.
-Eknath Easwaran
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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.
-Barbara Ehrenreich
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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.
-Albert Einstein
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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.
-George Eliot
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All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily punished. They are punished by fear. Whilst I stand in simple relations to my fellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him. We meet as water meets water, or as two currents of air mix, with perfect diffusion and interpenetration of nature. But as soon as there is any departure from simplicity, and attempt at halfness, or good for me that is not good for him, my neighbour feels the wrong; he shrinks from me as far as I have shrunk from him; his eyes no longer seek mine; there is war between us; there is hate in him and fear in me.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays:
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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.
-Richard L. Evans
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Maybe the most that you can expect from a relationship that goes bad is to come out of it with a few good songs.
-Marianne Faithfull, Faithful 1994, Colston Hall
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My husband said he wanted to have a relationship with a redhead, so I dyed my hair.
-Jane Fonda
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Do good to your friends to keep them, to your enemies to win them.
-Benjamin Franklin
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It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
-Betty Friedan
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If you want to be a winner, hang around with winners
-Christopher D. Furman
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Madam your wife and I didn't hit it off the only time I ever saw her. I won't say she was silly, but I think one of us was silly, and it wasn't me.
-Elizabeth Gaskell
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When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce.
Yet if we have problems with our friends or our family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.
-Thich Nhat Hanh
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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.
-John A. Hannah
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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.
-Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
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He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another.
-Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
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No one should form an acquaintance with one who has an evil character. A piece of coal, if it is hot burns, and if it's cold, blackens the hands.
-Hitopadesa
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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
-Helen Hunt
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Relationships-of all kinds-are like sand held in your hand. Held loosely, with an open hand, the sand remains where it is. The minute you close your hand and squeeze tightly to hold on, the sand trickles through your fingers. You may hold onto some of it, but most will be spilled. A relationship is like that. Held loosely, with respect and freedom for the other person, it is likely to remain intact. But hold too tightly, too possessively, and the relationship slips away and is lost.
-Kaleel Jamison
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If we want to be loved, we must disclose ourselves. If we want to love someone, he must permit us to know him. This would seem to be obvious. Yet most of us spend a great part of our lives thinking up ways to avoid becoming known.
Indeed, much of human life is best described as impersonation. We are role players, every one of us. We say that we feel things we do not feel. We say things we did not do. We say that we believe things we do not believe. We pretend that we are loving when we are full of hostility. We pretend that we are calm and indifferent when we are actually trembling with anxiety and fear.
Of course we cannot tell even the people we know and love everything we think or feel. But our mistakes are nearly always in the other direction. Even in families -- good families -- people wear masks a great deal of the time.
-Sidney Jourard, The Transparent Self, 1971
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Worldly wisdom thinks that love is a relationship between man and man. Christianity teachers that love is a relationship between: man-God-man, that is, that God is the middle term. However beautiful the love-relationship has been between two or more people, however complete all their enjoyment and all their bliss in mutual devotion and affection have been for them, even if all men have praised their relationship
-S
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I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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There is no end to relationship. There may be the end of a particular relationship, but relationship can never end; to be is to be related.
-J. Krishnamurti
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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.
-Milan Kundera
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We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves. We encourage one another in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.
-Charles Lamb
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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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.
-Gerda Lerner
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The only real security in a relationship lies neither in looking back in nostalgia, nor forward in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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How can our relationship grow when you don't respect my need to discuss everything that is wrong with you?
-Michael Lipsey
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I won't belong to any organization that would have me as a member.
-Groucho Marx
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Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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First, all relationships are with yourself-and sometimes they involve other people. Second, the most important relationship in your life - the one you have, like it or not, until the day you die - is with yourself.
-Peter McWilliams
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How sweet is life, can we but choose with whom to live it: to live for oneself is no life.
-Menander
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The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
-Thomas Merton
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I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match.
-Arthur Miller
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There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
-Iris Murdoch
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You will always move toward anyone who increases you and away from anyone who makes you less.
-Mike Murdock
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Each relationship nurtures a strength or weakness within you.
-Mike Murdock
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Living with a saint is more grueling than being one.
-Robert Neville
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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.
-Octavio Paz
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The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands.
-Alexandria Penney
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I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you.
-Luigi Pirandello
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The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.
-Marcel Proust
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The entire sum of existence is the magic of being needed by just one other person.
-Vi Putnam
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A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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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.
-Anthony Robbins
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The quality of your life is the quality of your relationships.
-Anthony Robbins
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When people are like each other they tend to like each other.
-Anthony Robbins
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One can find women who have never had one love affair, but it is rare indeed to find any who have had only one.
-Fran
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You must constantly ask yourself these questions: Who am I around? What are they doing to me? What have they got me reading? What have they got me saying? Where do they have me going? What do they have me thinking? And most important, what do they have me becoming? Then ask yourself the big question: Is that okay? Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change.
-Jim Rohn
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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.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
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Nowadays love is a matter of chance, matrimony a matter of money and divorce a matter of course.
-Helen Rowland
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To be happy with a man you must understand him a lot and love him a little. To be happy with a woman you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all.
-Helen Rowland
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It is the things in common that make relationships enjoyable, bit it is the little differences that make them interesting.
-Todd Ruthman
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-Jean-Paul Sartre
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Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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A rusty nail placed near a faithful compass, will sway it from the truth, and wreck the argosy.
-Sir Walter Scott
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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.
-Bob Seger
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If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another s; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is Love.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship.
-Sydney Smith
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Every man becomes, to a certain degree, what the people he generally converses with are.
-Philip Dormer Stanhope
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You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them.
-Anthony Storr
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To take refuge with an inferior is to betray one's self.
-Publilius Syrus
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Relationships are the hallmark of the mature person.
-Brian Tracy
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If you don't want to deal with the devil, don't go in his shop. Keep on the Lord's side of the fence.
-Source Unknown
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It's true love because if he said quit drinking martinis but I kept on drinking them and the next morning I couldn't get out of bed, he wouldn't tell me he told me.
-Judith Viorst
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Never say I love you
If you really don't care.
Never talk about feelings
If they aren't really there.
Never hold my hand
If you are going to break my heart.
Never say you're going to
If you don't really plan to start.
Never look into my eyes
If all you do is lie.
Never say hello
If what you really mean is goodbye.
If you really mean forever
Then say you will try.
Never say forever
Cause forever makes me cry.
-Rebah A. Ward, June 14, 1998
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Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation. It is better be alone than in bad company.
-George Washington
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Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself, will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
-Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road from Leaves of Grass, 1891
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The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. I mean everything that I have said. I have the greatest contempt for optimism. As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it. As for marriage, of course that would be silly, but there are other and more interesting bonds between men and women. I will certainly encourage them. They have the charm of being fashionable.
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890
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If you're in a relationship and you want to make it work, you have to be a little selfless at times.
-Montel Williams
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Surround yourself with only people who are going to lift you higher.
-Oprah Winfrey
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Assumptions are the termites of relationships.
-Henry Winkler
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...since social relationships are always ambiguous, since my thought is only a unit, since my thoughts create rifts as much as they unite, since my words establish contacts by being spoken and create isolation by remaining unspoken, since an immense moat separates the subjective certitude that I have for myself from the objective reality that I represent to others, since I never stop finding myself guilty even though I feel I am innocent....
Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt
-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus
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It takes two men to make a brother.
-Israel Zangwill
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Books about Relationships
