Integrity means congruence. Words and behavior match.
One of the hardest expressions of self-assertiveness is challenging your limiting beliefs.
Romantic love is a passionate spiritual-emotional-sexual attachment between a man and a woman that reflects a high regard for the value of each other’s person.
Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.
The music that inspires the souls of lovers exists within themselves and the private universe they occupy. They share it with each other; they do not share it with the tribe or with society. The courage to hear that music and to honor it is one of the prerequisites of romantic love.
Integrity is the integration of ideals, convictions, standards, beliefs-and behavior. When our behavior is congruent with our professed values, when ideals and practice match up, we have integrity.
To live consciously means to seek to be aware of everything that bears on our actions, purposes, values, and goals – to the best of our ability, whatever that ability may be – and to behave in accordance with that which we see and know.
Romantic love can be terrifying. We experience another human being as enormously important to us. So there is surrender -not a surrender to the other person so much as to our feeling for the other person. What is the obstacle? The possibility of loss.
There is no value-judgment more important to a man – no factor more decisive in his psychological development and motivation – than the estimate he passes on himself.
It is painful to face the self we know we have never had the integrity to honor and assert.
There is only one reality – the reality knowable to reason. And if man does not choose to perceive it, there is nothing else for him to perceive; if it is not of this world that he is conscious, then he is not conscious at all.
One of the characteristics of love relationships that flower is a relatively high degree of mutual self-disclosure.
Anyone who really loves you wants you to be authentic. And anyone who doesn’t want you to be authentic doesn’t really love you.
It is very difficult to accept in others emotions you cannot accept in yourself.
It is a curious paradox of human history that a doctrine that tells human beings to regard themselves as sacrificial animals has been accepted as a doctrine representing benevolence and love for mankind.
Fear and pain should be treated as signals not to close our eyes but to open them wider.
If you are terrified of making mistakes, you will be reluctant to acknowledge them when you do make them-and therefore you will not correct them.
For “I” to become “we” and yet remain “I,” is one of the great challenges of marriage.
Loving consciously does not mean subjecting your relationship to endless analysis. It means something much simpler: paying attention. Noticing. This requires presence.
Suffering is just about the easiest of all human activities; being happy is just about the hardest. And happiness requires, not surrender to guilt, but emancipation from guilt.