If we deny our anger, our pain, our ambition, or our goodness, we will suffer.

An essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one's own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker's world from the inside, step in inside his or her shoes.

Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.

Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a PROFOUND tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there.

The will to grow is, in essence, the same phenomenon as love. Genuinely loving people are, by definition, growing people.

I have said I have met Satan, and this is true. But it is not tangible. It no more has horns, hooves and a forked tail than God has a long white beard. Even the name, Satan, is just a name we have given to something basically nameless.

The problem of unmet expectations in marriage is primarily a problem of stereotyping. Each and every human being on this planet is a unique person. Since marriage is inevitably a relationship between two unique people, no one marriage is going to be exactly like any other. Yet we tend to wed with explicit visions of what a “good” marriage ought to be like. Then we suffer enormously from trying to force the relationship to fit the stereotype and from the neurotic guilt and anger we experience when we fail to pull it off.