You do not need to be loved, not at the cost of yourself. Of all the people you will know in the lifetime, you are the only one you will never leave or lose.

Examining love is like examining a stocking: if you hold it up to the light and stretch it to search for snags, any snags there are may well run and ruin the stocking. In fact, if I may fashion Coudert's law from Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy, it is this: Love is not only changed by observation; it is changed for the worse.

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.

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

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.

Every life is a dilemma that must be solved by the person living it.

The divorced person is like a man with a black patch over one eye: he looks rather dashing but the fact is that he has been through a maiming experience.