The elements in a relationship which seem impossible to share, the secretly disturbing, dissatisfying elements, are the most rewarding to share. This is a hard, risky, frightening thing to learn, and it needs to be re-learned over and over.

It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens.

Learning of all kinds goes on best, lasts best, and tends to lead itself on more when it grows out of a real focus of interest in the learner.

The state of empathy, or being empathic, is to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person.

The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.

Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming me.

I have learned that in any significant or continuing relationship, feelings which are persistent had best be expressed. If they are expressed as feelings owned by me, the result may be temporarily upsetting but ultimately far more rewarding than any attempt to deny or conceal them.