The cruelest affront is treating the person as exactly the person he is. We all long to be understood, but not for what we are. We long to be understood for what we might have been had all been for the best in the best of all possible worlds and, at the same time, to be forgiven for what we are.

Hardening of the hearteries is the most serious affliction besetting marriage, and warm, good-humored, approving words are the only effective preventive.

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.

The people trying to change others can conveniently be termed the angry, while the people trying to change themselves might be called the guilty, although it would be just as descriptive to speak of the controlling and the dependent, or the paranoid and the repressive, or, inelegantly, the screamers and the criers. In some circles, attaching labels to people rates only a little higher than chicken stealing, because ... a label immediately ends attempts to understand the individual.

Most people ask of their friends that they understand them, but, on balance, I think I prefer a friend who understands himself.

Affection may be abiding and love may be abiding, but the state of being in love is transitory.

Operating in an unlit world, the unconscious mind is a brilliant detective.