Tao Te Ching
Relationship
Although monks and nuns might live alone in caves for years, relationship remains important. A popular Tibetan folk tale describes solitary saints in caves periodically coming down to the villages, getting maligned and beaten, all as part of their practice to develop more true compassion. We easily experience the great divide between doing something for our personal satisfaction compared to do something because we think it will help someone. Wealth, fame, and power claim to take precedence in human motivation; but, finding and maintaininga good relationship could be the main relationship behind the frantic struggles for wealth, fame, and power.
Quotes (51)
“The family is society in embryo; it is the native soil… so that within a small circle a basis of moral practice is created, and this is later widened to include human relationships in general.”
“When you like a flower, you just pluck it. But when you love a flower, you water it daily.”
“‘Love' is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.”
“Sex is not a game. It gives rise to very real enduring emotional and practical consequences. To ignore this it to debase yourself and to disregard the significance of human relationships.”
“Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.”
“Man's relationship to the world of Spirit is established by reasoning; speech follows after it. If a man possesses no knowledge of reasoning, he is incapable of expressing truth.”
“Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.”
“If they hastily seek consummation and merely attain a moment's pleasure; not only will the woman not be happy, neither will the man and the relationship will surely fail in the long run.”
“The relation of the sexes is really the invisible and central point of all action and conduct... the cause of war and the end of peace; the basis of what is serious, the key to all illusions, and the meaning of all mysterious hints.”
“The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.”
“All love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction. Love is therefore the only law of life. He who loves lives, he who is selfish is dying. Therefore love for love's sake, because it is the only law of life, just as you breathe to live.”
“Unconsecrated unions produce relationships that are just as numerous and as complicated as those created by a marriage, but more solid.”
“Love can flourish only as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought of duty. To say that it is your duty to love so-and-so is the surest way to cause you to hate him of her.”
“Seldom—or perhaps never—does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothy and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain.”
“the psychological relationship between the sexes… the real domain of woman. Woman's psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos.”
“A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude. If they succeed in loving the distance between them, a wonderful living side by side can grow up.”
“The basic reality in life is not politics, nor industry, but human relationships—the associations of a man with a woman... the family is greater than the State, devotion and despair sink deeper into the heart than economic strife, in the end our happiness lies not in possessions, place, or power, but in the gift and return of love.”
“religious, political, personal… symbols, ideas, beliefs… are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man in every relationship.”
“While logic can deal only with fixed immutable concepts which have been isolated by our intellect from their background and their relationships, symbols have the living quality of establishing spontaneous connections with objects of diverse character but similar tendency.”
“If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers...”
“Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.”
“A relationship with no combat in it is dull, and a relationship with too much combat in it is toxic. What is desirable is a relationship with a certain optimum of conflict.”
“Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one… Marriage is the reunion of the separated duad, the recognition of a spiritual identity”
“Marriage is not a love affair. Marriage is a comitment to that which you are, that person is literally your other half. A love affair is a relationship for pleasure and when it gets to be unpleasureable, it's off. Marriage is a life commitment , the prime concern of your life. If it's not the prime concern, you're not married.”
“I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”
“the closer the relationship, the more easily the dagger goes in, the more we feel it, and the harder it is to heal. Often, the greatest wounds come from our families... The anger and the pain from that relationship is often our greatest wound.”
“The very nature of our practice is to see through the expectations and illusions in our relationships.”
“No part of us is unrelated to other parts, even down to the single cell. Every cell probably knows the whole of us. There is a new consciousness implied in these premises; namely, that reality is a complex, interrelated and integral structure, including our own body-mind-emotions-spirit, as well as our relationship to others and to our environment.”
“When we love, we think that we love an object. But really, love is inherent without the subject and only reflects to the object.”
“sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner's prize is the loser [and] The most serious struggles are those for sexual property. For this wars are fought, lives are generously risked, great schemes are initiated.”
“When people are young and 'in love,' they have strong biological bonds, genes and hormones creating attraction and a kind of genetic glue. When older though and into or past their main reproductive years, that gene-hormone-glue dissolves and continuing the relationship requires a re-negotiation, a more rational foundation, a more conscious choice.”
“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”
“Here's all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid. ("And the reason men are stupid is that women are crazy." - Shan Dao)”
“Whenever we talk about relationship, we manage to reduce ourselves into just simply one louse trying to fight another louse in the crack of a seam in our shirt — psychiatrists, marriage counselors, physicians, and local gurus all do that.”
“We've got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can't just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it's going to get on by itself. You've got to keep watering it. You've got to really look after it and nurture it.”
“By accepting and yielding to that groundlessness, I can discover that I have always been grounded in Indra's Net, not as a self-enclosed being but as one manifestation of a web of relationships which encompasses everything.”
“The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.”
“evolution not only invented romantic love, but, from the beginning, corrupted it.”
“[John] meets Yoko Ono at this art show and he thinks that she is just the grooviest, funniest, spaciest thing he’s ever met. He can’t imagine anyone more spaced out than Yoko Ono. And then he falls for her... [breaking up the Beatles] is kind of a nasty ball and chain that’s going to stick with her. I’m sure they loved each other. I’m convinced that those two were totally hellbent and passionate about their relationship to each other, even when it was troublesome.”
“Love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death.”
“Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity… We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?”
“Love is from the heart and - like sake - joyful at night, painful in the morning - and appropriate for concubines. Marriage is from the head and long term.”
“Relationships chisel the final shape of one’s being. I am me, and you.”
“people go to work for Walmart because they want a job, people go to work at Costo because they want a future and a sense of belonging to a team.”
“It's not how smart the people in the organization are; it's how well they work together that is the true indicator of future success or the ability to manage through struggle.”
“regeneration through loss ... A divorce that feels like death itself can lead to a happier, healthier relationship. The nightmare of getting fired ends up being the best thing that ever happened. A debilitating illness that is initially met with alarm and refusal transforms into new dimensions of compassion.”
“Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism... [it] tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can... go traveling in distant lands, sample various kinds of relationships, try different cuisines, different styles of music...”
“this sense of having a living relationship with the earth's resources is nedessary for us to change the way we relate to them and treat them... if human beings acted with emotional awareness of plants' yearning to live, life on our earth would be a great eal healthier.”
“Essentially the same problem arises whether it is in our relationships to other human beings, to animals, or to the planet—and the solution is also the same: cultivating a much broader awareness of the chains of causality that link us to other, and cultivating the feelings of closeness that can inspire us to act.”
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