Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Relationship

"Nothing destroys the potential for parents to have a close relationship with their children as disciplining through excessive fear. When children are still young, parents should be aware that one day their children will become independent. Parents who frequently use fear as a weapon create negative feelings in their children. When they grow up, those children are likely to rebel against their parents and go their own way." - Shlomo Wolbe, aka Wilhelm Wolbe

"A modern commentator made the observation that there re those who seek knowledge about everything and understand nothing. It is wonder - not mere curiosity - a sense of enchantment, of respect for the mysteries of love for the other, that is essential to the difference between a knowing that is simply a gathering of information and techniques and a knowing that seeks insight and understanding. It is wonder that reveals how intimate is the relationship between knowledge of the other and knowledge of the self, between inwardness and outwardness." - Seymour Cohen, fully Seymour Jay Cohen

"Life in this world is a very important reality, but it is not the ultimate reality... True growth in this world always calls for a dying to my own sinfulness, individualism and selfishness so that I might come closer to my true self in relationship to all others and to God. Thus, in the end, life and death are not diametrically opposed. Life involves a dying and dying is a way of life." - Charles Curran

"The only thing that brings a mother undiluted satisfaction is her relation to a son; it is quite the most complete relationship between human beings, and the one that is the most free from ambivalence. The mother can transfer to her son all the ambition which she has had to surpress in herself, and she can hope to get from him the satisfaction of all that has remained to her of her masculinity complex. Even a marriage is not firmly assured until the woman has succeeded in making her husband into her child and in acting the part of a mother towards him." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"Why you are born and why you are living depend entirely on what you are getting out of this world and what you are giving to it. I cannot prove that this is a balance of mathematical perfection, but my own observation of life leads me to the conclusion that there is a very real relationship, both quantitatively and qualitatively, between what you contribute and what you get out of this world." - Oscar Hammerstein II, fully Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hamerstein II

"Because I am the only person I will have a relationship with all of my life, I choose: To love myself the way I am now. To always acknowledge that I am enough just the way I am. To love, honor and cherish myself. To be my own best friend. To be the person I would like to spend the rest of my life with. To always take care of myself so that I can take care of others. To always grow, develop and share my love and life." - Ron and Mary Hulnick, formally H. Ronald Hulnick and

"A person who tries to keep everything about himself hidden will not have close friends. Building a close relationship with others requires self-disclosure." - Yitzchok Hutner

"The relationship between moral action and spiritual knowledge is circular, as it were, and reciprocal. Selfless behavior makes possible an accession of knowledge, and the accession of knowledge makes possible the performance of further and more genuinely selfless actions, which in their turn enhance the agent’s capacity for knowing... A man undertakes right action (which includes, of course, right consciousness and right meditation), and this enables him to catch a glimpse of the Self that underlies his separate individuality. Having seen his own self as the Self, he becomes selfless (and therefore acts selflessly) and in virtue of selflessness he is to be conceived as unconditioned." - Aldous Leonard Huxley

"Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person... Love is an attitude which determines how we relate to the world... Love is an activity of our spirit... Loving others is impossible until we love ourselves." - Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

"Our culture needs a great deal more than a changed lifestyle. In the Western mind, thought-structures and the relationship between consciousness and matter are badly out of balance, so that our world has become wholly pervaded by a materialism that is threatening to squash us to death. We are in a state of materialistic hypertrophy, and our eventual self-destruction would in fact be no more than the logical consequence of our attitudes." - Holger Kalweit

"In surrender we can both give and receive. Relationships take on a different meaning. We learn to be in someone’s life without being in their dance. A relationship becomes important not because it satisfies personality needs but because it’s the pathway to wholeness." - Gloria D. Karpinski

"A man could not have anything upon his conscience if God did not exist, for the relationship between the individual and God, the God-relationship, is the conscience, and that is why it is so terrible to have even the least thing upon one’s conscience, because one is immediately conscious of the infinite weight of God." - Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

"No love and no expression of love may, in the merely human and worldly sense, be deprived of a relationship to God. Love is a passionate emotion, but in this emotion, even before he enters into a relation with the object of his love, the man just first enter into a relationship with God, and thereby realize the claim that love is the fulfillment of the law." - Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

"Subjectivity is the truth. By virtue of the relationship subsisting between the eternal truth and the existing individual, the paradox came into being. Let us now go further, let us suppose that the eternal essential truth is itself a paradox. How does the paradox come into being? By putting the eternal essential truth into juxtaposition with existence. Hence when we posit such a conjunction with the truth itself, the truth becomes a paradox. The eternal truth has come into being in time: this is the paradox." - Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

"The God-relationship determines what love is between man and man, then love is kept from pausing in any self-deception or illusion, while certainly the demand for self-abnegation and sacrifice is again made more infinite. The love which does not lead to God, the love which does not have this as its sole goal, to lead the lovers to love God, stops at the purely human judgment as to what love and what love’s sacrifice and submission are; it stops and thereby escapes the possibility of the last and most terrifying horror of the collision: that in the love relationship there are infinite differences in the idea of what love is." - Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

"All relationship is based on the image that you have built around another and the other has built about you... What is relationship? If the image has come to an end, which is the content of consciousness that makes up your consciousness, when the various images you have about yourself, about everything, come to an end, then what is the relationship between you and her? Then is there an observer observing apart from the thing it has observed? Or is it a total movement of love in relationship? Are you getting it? So love is a movement in relationship in which the observer is not." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Fear exists only in relationship to something, it does not exist by itself." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Reality comes into being only when the mind is still, not made still. Therefore, there must be no disciplining of the mind to be still. When you discipline yourself, it is merely a projected desire to be in a particular state. Such a state is not the state of passivity... Liberation is from moment to moment in the understanding of what is, when the mind is free, not made free. It is only a free mind that can discover, not a mind molded by a belief or shaped according to a hypothesis. Such a mind cannot discover. There can be no freedom is there is conflict, for conflict is the fixing of the self in relationship." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Relationship based on mutual need brings only conflict. However interdependent we are on each other, we are using each other for a purpose, for an end. With an end in view, relationship is not." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Relationship is surely the mirror in which you discover yourself." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Relationship means contact, communion. There cannot be communion where people are divided by ideas. A belief may gather a group of people around itself. Such a group will inevitably breed opposition and so form another group with a different belief. Ideas postpone direct relationship with the problem." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Relationship means to respond. The root meaning of that word, not what we have made of that word, is to respond completely to another, like responsibility. Do we ever respond totally with each other, or it is always a fragmentary response, a partial response?" - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Right thinking, surely, is entirely different from right thought. Right thought is static... Right thinking is the understanding of relationship from moment to moment, which uncovers the whole process of the self." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"The self is revealed only in relationship." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"The world is your problem and to comprehend it you must understand yourself... You exist only in relationship; otherwise you are not... Relationship is the mirror in which you can see yourself as you are... Preconception of what relationship should be... prevents the uncovering, the unfoldment of “what is.”" - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"To most of us, relationship is a term for comfort, for gratification, for security, and in that relationship we use property, ideas, and persons for our gratification. We use belief as a means of security." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Granted that nothing is ‘given’ as real except our world of desires and passions, that we can rise or sink to no other ‘reality’ than the reality of our drives - for thinking is only the relationship of these drives to one another." -

"More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible." - Tillie Olsen

"Marriage is not a union merely between two creatures - it is a union between two spirits; and the intention of that bond is to perfect the nature of both, by supplementing their deficiencies with the force of contrast, giving to each sex those excellencies in which it is naturally deficient; to the one, strength of character and firmness of moral will; to the other, sympathy, meekness, tenderness; and just so solemn and glorious as these ends are for which the union was intended, just so terrible are the consequences if it be perverted and abused; for there is no earthly relationship which has so much power to ennoble and exalt." -

"Only by means of reverence for life can we establish a spiritual and human relationship with both people and all living creatures within our reach." - Albert Schweitzer

"A relationship is not a way for us to exhibit our strengths but to find our balance." - Noah benShea

"If life’s journey be endless where is its goal? The answer is, it is everywhere. We are in a palace which has no end, but which we have reached. By exploring it and extending our relationship with it we are ever making it more and more our own." -

"We can make truth ours by actively modulating its inter-relations. This is the work of art; for reality is not based in the substance of things but in the principle of relationship. Truth is the infinite pursued by metaphysics; fact is the infinite pursued by science, while reality is the definition of the infinite which relates truth to the person. Reality is human; it is what we are conscious of, by which we are affected, that which we express." -

"From the perspective of the minuteness of our planet in relationship with the entire universe a person’s seeking honor is ridiculous." - Yechiel Michel Tukatinsky

"Relationship as a path leads us on a journey of the heart - which involves becoming more fully human, more available to life as a whole. Intimate relationships are ideally suited as this kind of path because they inspire our heart to open, while at the same time showing us where we are most stuck." - John Welwood

"Death ends a life, not a relationship." - Robert Anderson, fully Robert Woodruff Anderson

"The basic discovery bout any people is the discovery of the relationship between its men and women." - Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu

"There is only one way in which a person acquires a new idea; by combination or association of two or more ideas he already has into a new juxtaposition in such a manner as to discover a relationship among them of which he was not previously aware." - Francis A. Carter

"You do not need to be loved, not at the cost of yourself. The single relationship that is truly central and crucial in a life is the relationship to the self. Of all the people you will know in a lifetime, you are the only one you will never lose." - Jo Coudert

"No earthly purpose satisfies man’s longing to find his eternal reason for being... Man seeks incessantly for the meaning of life until he discovers the single eternal purpose for his existence. That purpose is the same for every man and woman. God created us because He longs to enter into fellowship with us. We belong to Him by right of creation. We can never know order and harmony in this life until we choose to establish a right relationship with God... Our search for meaning to life will end only when we establish that personal relationship with God and begin our walk with Him - for time and for eternity. Then comes that glorious personal fulfillment described in holy writ as the “peace that passes all understanding.”" - Jerry Falwell

"The magic of marriage is that it creates meaningful goals to work for, struggle for, sacrifice for. It is the joint struggle that gives the relationship its meaning, and keeps people alive." - Henry Gregor Felsen

"The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent." -

"The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society - more briefly, to find your real job, and do it." - Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a.k.a. Charlotte Anna (nee Perkins), Charlotte Perkins Stetson

"Abortion almost always symbolizes failure - the failure of a contraceptive, of a relationship, of a family, of a dream, even of a social system. Government need not add an extra lash to the whip." - Soma Golden, fully Soma Golden Behr

"Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

"Quantum physics teaches us that nothing exists in isolation. All of matter, from subatomic particles to galaxies, is part of an intricate web of relationship within a unified whole." - Gloria D. Karpinski

"Knowledge in relationship creates division... knowledge becomes a barrier in relationship... Where there is division there must be conflict. And therefore an action born out of conflict is a non-intelligent action. So intelligent action is an action that is without friction, without conflict... Dependence is an action of a mind that is not intelligent." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Life is relationship. Without relationship you cannot exist. But we have reduced that relationship to mere sensory responses." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Religion is really experiencing a state in which there is creation. This is not an idea, a process. It can be realized when there is freedom from self. There can be freedom from self only through understanding the self in relationship; but there can be no understanding in isolation." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Wisdom comes into being only when there is an understanding of knowledge and the freedom from the known... When there is freedom from the known then relationship changes totally." - Jiddu Krishnamurti