Quotes about Relationships

In Genesis God is multiplying the mystery of the Trinity in his image bearers by creating another individual who stands on level ground with the man and is completely different from, yet one with him. The oxygen hasn't grown thin after all. God is still vision casting--this time for male/female relationships.

The book of Ruth proves the point. "It is not good for the man to be alone" (Gen 2:18). The point being that men actually need their sisters to step up and answer God's call on their lives.

Jesus firmly and consistently reinforced human equality by spending a lot of time in the margins of society, most notably in relationships with women. He didn't simply bring relief and comfort to the down and out. He engaged, recruited, and mobilized for his kingdom people who didn't count for anything in the eyes of society or of religious leaders. His interactions with women violated patriarchal propriety and repeatedly shocked his disciples.

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.

Love is not "fulfilling" oneself through the use of another. Love is giving oneself to another, for the good of the other, and receiving the other as a gift.78 The lethal paradox of the age was that, for all its alleged humanism, it had ended up devaluing the human person into an economic unit, an ideological category, an expression of a class or race or ethnicity.

The love we give away is the only one we keep.

Nine times out of ten, when you extend your arms to someone, they will step in, because basically they need precisely what you need.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers.

A woman means by unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others. Thus each sex regards the other as basically selfish.

We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.

Relations are simply a tedious pack of people who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

To love others, we must first learn to love ourselves.