you have to be very careful when you give to others that you don't tell them how great you are rather than how much you value them.

I'm not sure there can be loving without commitment, although commitment takes all kinds of forms, and there can be commitment for the moment as well as commitment for all time. The kind that is essential for loving marriages - and love affairs, as well - is a commitment to preserving the essential quality of your partner's soul, adding to them as a person rather than taking away.

The answer doesn't lie in learning how to protect ourselves from life-it lies in learning how to become strong enough to let a bit more of it in.

Loving someone means helping them to be more themselves, which can be different from being what you’d like them to be, although often they turn out the same

Life is like fording a river, stepping from one slippery stone to another, and you must rejoice every time you don't lose your balance, and learn to laugh at all the times you do.

Until you divest yourself of the notion that you are a collection of needs, an empty vessel that someone else must fill up, there will be no safe place to harbor yourself, no safe shore to reach. As long as you think mostly of getting, you will have nothing real to give.

It can be much harder to be on the receiving end of a transaction than to be the one who gets to give. In fact, being given to can mean being taken from. There is a very strong connection between pride and giving, and those who do the giving get to feel that they are worthy, while those who are given to often feel that they are not.