David Richo > Quotes

“Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us.”
― David Richo

“Trust in someone means that we no longer have to protect ourselves. We believe we will not be hurt or harmed by the other, at least not deliberately. We trust his or her good intentions, though we know we might be hurt by the way circumstances play out between us. We might say that hurt happens; it’s a given of life. Harm is inflicted; it’s a choice some people make.”
― David Richo

“Humility means accepting reality with no attempt to outsmart it.”
― David Richo, The Five Things We Cannot Change: And the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them

“We do not create our destiny; we participate in its unfolding. Synchronicity works as a catalyst toward the working out of that destiny.”
― David Richo, The Power of Coincidence: How Life Shows Us What We Need to Know

“The foundation of adult trust is not "You will never hurt me." It is "I trust myself with whatever you do.”
― David Richo, Daring to Trust: Opening Ourselves to Real Love and Intimacy

“In a true you-and-I relationship, we are present mindfully, nonintrusively, the way we are present with things in nature.We do not tell a birch tree it should be more like an elm. We face it with no agenda, only an appreciation that becomes participation: 'I love looking at this birch' becomes 'I am this birch' and then 'I and this birch are opening to a mystery that transcends and holds us both.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds That Sabotage Our Relationships

“Our tears are precious, necessary, and part of what make us such endearing creatures.”
― David Richo, The Five Things We Cannot Change: And the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them

“When we feel unsafe with someone and still stay with him, we damage our ability to discern trustworthiness in those we will meet in the future.”
― David Richo

“In the hero stories, the call to go on a journey takes the form of a loss, an error, a wound, an unexplainable longing, or a sense of a mission. When any of these happens to us, we are being summoned to make a transition. It will always mean leaving something behind,...The paradox here is that loss is a path to gain.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult: A Handbook for Psychological and Spiritual Integration

“The more invested I am in my own ideas about reality, the more those experiences will feel like victimizations rather than the ups and downs of relating. Actually, I believe that the less I conceptualize things that way, the more likely it is that people will want to stay by me, because they will not feel burdened, consciously or unconsciously, by my projections, judgments, entitlements, or unrealistic expectations.”
― David Richo, Daring to Trust: Opening Ourselves to Real Love and Intimacy

“Self-actualization is not a sudden happening or even the permanent result of long effort. The eleventh-century Tibetan Buddhist poet-saint Milarupa suggested: "Do not expect full realization; simply practice every day of your life." A healthy person is not perfect but perfectible, not a done deal but a work in progress. Staying healthy takes discipline, work, and patience, which is why our life is a journey and perforce a heroic one.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

“Our higher needs include making full use of our gifts, finding and fulfilling our calling, being loved and cherished just for ourselves, and being in relationships that honor all of these. Such needs are fulfilled in an atmosphere of the five A’s by which love is shown: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing.”
― David Richo

“Synchronicity is a term used by Carl Jung to describe coincidences that are related by meaningfulness rather than by cause and effect.”
― David Richo

“The opposite of interpersonal trust is not mistrust. It is despair. This is because we have given up on believing that trustworthiness and fulfillment are possible from others. We have lost our hope in our fellow humans.”
― David Richo

“At every stage of life, our inner self requires the nurturance of loving people attuned to our feelings and responsive to our needs who can foster our inner resources of personal power, lovability, and serenity. Those who love us understand us and are available to us with an attention, appreciation, acceptance, and affection we can feel. They make room for us to be who we are.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

“There are five unavoidable givens, five immutable facts that come to visit all of us many times over: Everything changes and ends. Things do not always go according to plan. Life is not always fair. Pain is part of life. People are not loving and loyal all the time. These are the core challenges that we all face. But too often we live in denial of these facts. We behave as if somehow these givens aren’t always in effect, or not applicable to all of us. But when we oppose these five basic truths we resist reality, and life then becomes an endless series of disappointments, frustrations, and sorrows. In”
― David Richo, The Five Things We Cannot Change: And the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them

“We were born with four words engraved on our bodies and in our hearts: Love me, hold me.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly

“Real love does not come off the rack; it is uniquely tailored by the lover to the beloved. Part of the pain of letting go of someone who really loved you is letting go of being loved in that special way.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

“Most people think of love as a feeling but love is not so much a feeling as a way of being present.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

“once we understand that what happens beyond our control may be just what we need, we see that acceptance of reality can be our way of participating in our own evolution.”
― David Richo, The Five Things We Cannot Change: And the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them

“We don’t fear physical closeness because we fear proximity itself. Most of us earnestly want physical contact with those who love us. Rather we fear what we will feel when we get too close. The real fear, then, is of ourselves. This fear is not something to rebuke ourselves for. It is our deepest vulnerability, the very quality that makes us most lovable.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

“Transference is essentially a compulsion to return to our past in order to clear up emotionally backlogged business.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds That Sabotage Our Relationships

“The challenge is to find our destiny in exactly what we are refusing to engage in.”
― David Richo

“We can actually reconstruct our past by examining what we think, say, feel, expect, believe, and do in an intimate relationship now.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds That Sabotage Our Relationships

“The way we were first loved and the ways we have been loved ever since form our definition of what love means to us. Some people really feel loved when someone gives them a gift. Others experience it when people stand up for them. Still others feel loved when someone goes the extra mile to help them. If our mother showed love by holding us in our pain or joy, without engulfing or controlling us, that will be the behavior that always feels like love to us. We feel love now as we first received it; we give love the way others gave it to us. Thus, since love is unique to each person, we read and write love, receive and give it, in the style designed by our past experience. Yet, like good handwriting, our unique signature can be read by others.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly

“The heart itself cannot break, for its very nature is soft and open. What breaks open when we see things as they are is the protective shell of ego identity we have built around ourselves in order to avoid feeling pain. When the heart breaks out of this shell, we feel quite raw and vulnerable. Yet that is also the beginning of feeling real compassion for ourselves and others. —John Welwood Ordinary Magic”
― David Richo, When Love Meets Fear: Becoming Defense-less and Resource-full

“Once we love ourselves, people no longer look good to us unless they are good for us.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

“Our identity is like a kaleidoscope. With each turn we reset it not to a former or final state but to a new one that reflects the here-and-now positions of the pieces we have to work with. The design is always new because the shifts are continual. That is what makes kaleidoscopes, and us, so appealing and beautiful.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

“The biggest mistake we humans make is to become attached to someone’s being a certain way and then to think that will never change.”
― David Richo, The Five Things We Cannot Change: And the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them

“Bread takes the effort of kneading but also requires sitting quietly while the dough rises with a power all its own.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving