If a man has a sense of identity that does not depend on being shored up by someone else, it cannot be eroded by someone else. If a woman has a sense of identity that does not depend on finding that identity in someone else, she cannot lose her identity in someone else. And so we return to the central fact: it is necessary to be.
Many people, if they were to treat other people as they treat their spouses, would soon have not a friend in the world. Why it is assumed that marriage is more impervious to the effects of discourtesy than friendship, I do not know.
The more deeply the path is etched, the more it is used, and the more it is used, the more deeply it etched.
Most people ask of their friends that they understand them, but, on balance, I think I prefer a friend who understands himself.
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.
It is one of those quirks of human nature that you love the person whom you treat well, not necessarily the person who treats you well.
Self-affirmation cannot be found in love; it is a prior condition of genuine love.
Almost anything can be stretched to serve more people by being added to a white sauce or canned gravy or undiluted or very slightly diluted canned soup and served over noodles or rice. With chops or chocolate eclairs, however, the only solution is to claim you don't like them.
I saw one of the absolute truths of this world: each person is worrying about himself; no one is worrying about you. He or she is worrying about whether you like him, not whether he likes you. He is worrying about whether he looks prepossessing, not whether you are dressed correctly. He is worrying about whether he appears poised, not whether you are. He is worrying about whether you think well of him, not whether he thinks well of you. The way to be yourself. . . is to forget yourself.
It is possible to ruin a chicken in the cooking of it, but not easily. Short of burning it or letting it get dried out, you can hardly go wrong.
We can win the struggle to avoid responsibility for our personal lives, but if we do, what we lose is our lives.
cookbooks, I found, are intended for people with time to cook - and, surprisingly often, for people who already know how to cook.
There is no way of steering successfully between a failed situation and a failed self except by stopping and taking our bearings.
If life is envisioned as a continuously running motion picture, the keeping of a notebook stops the action and allows a meaningful scene to be explored frame by frame.
The person who conveys, 'I am nothing. Make me something,' may all his life have people trying to answer his hidden plea, but their answer will be in terms of, 'I am trying to make you something because you are nothing,' and, thus, the insult will be embedded in the response. It will be heard just as clearly as the attempt to help. And it will be hated.
People who are good to each other make each other good.
To live with the terrible truths about ourselves is the only way of not living them out. A need denied has infinitely more power than a need accepted.
At what age should one marry? As a rule of thumb, perhaps not until you are past the age of feeling strongly that you must marry.
It is characteristic to believe that those in need are given to, that the squeaky hinge is the one that gets the oil, but in the realm of emotions this is not so. It is the person who does not solicit liking and love, admiration and respect, sympathy and empathy to whom they are freely given.
One does not marry to become a judge of the spouse's behavior. If a marriage license is mistaken for a hunting license and disapproval, punishment, and threat of withdrawal of love are employed as weapons, all one bags is one's own unhappiness.