Gary Chapman > Quotes

“Forgiveness is not a feeling; it is a commitment.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate

“I am amazed by how many individuals mess up every new day with yesterday.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate

“Encouragement requires empathy and seeing the world from your spouse's perspective. We must first learn what is important to our spouse. Only then can we give encouragement. With verbal encouragement, we are trying to communicate, "I know. I care. I am with you. How can I help?" We are trying to show that we believe in him and in his abilities. We are giving credit and praise.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate

“People tend to criticize their spouse most loudly in the area where they themselves have the deepest emotional need.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate

“Real love" - "This kind of love is emotional in nature but not obsessional. It is a love that unites reason and emotion. It involves an act of the will and requires discipline, and it recognizes the need for personal growth.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate

“Love is something you do for someone else, not something you do for yourself.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages Singles Edition

“What we do for each other before marriage is no indication of what we will do after marriage.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate

“Love doesn't keep a score of wrongs. Love doesn't bring up past failures. None of us is perfect. In marriage we do not always do the right thing. We have sometimes done and said hurtful things to our spouses. We cannot erase the past. We can only confess it and agree that it was wrong. We can ask for forgiveness and try to act differently in the future. Having confessed my failure and asked forgiveness, I can do nothing more to mitigate the hurt it may have caused my spouse. When I have been wronged by my spouse and she has painfully confessed it and requested forgiveness, I have the option of justice or forgiveness. If I choose justice and seek to pay her back or make her pay for her wrongdoing, I am making myself the judge and her the felon. Intimacy becomes impossible. If, however, I choose to forgive, intimacy can be restored. Forgiveness is the way of love.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate

“The person who is "in-love" has the ilusion that his beloved is perfect.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate

“For love, we will climb mountains, cross seas, traverse desert sands, and endure untold hardships.
Without love, mountains become unclimbable, seas uncrossable, deserts unbearable, and hardships our lot in life.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts

“Love doesn't erase the past, but it makes the future different.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages Singles Edition

“Something in our nature cries out to be loved by another. Isolation is devastating to the human psyche. That is why solitary confinement is considered the cruelest of punishments.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts

“Respect begins with this attitude: "I acknowledge that you are a creature of extreme worth. God has endowed you with certain abilities and emotions. Therefore I respect you as a person. I will not desecrate your worth by making critical remarks about your intellect, your judgment or your logic. I will seek to understand you and grant you the freedom to think differently from the way I think and to experience emotions that I may not experience." Respect means that you give the other person the freedom to be an individual.”
― Gary Chapman

“Inside every child is an 'emotional rani's waiting to be filled with love. When a child really feels loved, he will develop normally but when the love tank is empty, the child will misbehave. Much of the misbehavior of children is motivated by the cravings of an empty 'love tank”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate

“Love is a choice you make everyday.”
― Gary Chapman

“The in-love experience does not focus on our own growth or on the growth and development of the other person. Rather, it gives us the sense that we have arrived and that we do not need further growth.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate

“Love is a verb.”
― Gary Chapman

“The best thing we can do with the failures of the past is to let them be history.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts

“People do not get married planning to divorce. Divorce is the result of a lack of preparation for marriage and the failure to learn the skills of working together as teammates in an intimate relationship.”
― Gary Chapman, Things I Wish I'd Known Before We Got Married

“Our most basic emotional need is not to fall in love but to be genuinely loved by another, to know a love that grows out of reason and choice, not instinct. I need to be loved by someone who chooses to love me, who sees in me something worth loving. That kind of love requires effort and discipline. It is the choice to expend energy in an effort to benefit the other person, knowing that if his or her life is enriched by your effort, you too will find a sense of satisfaction—the satisfaction of having genuinely”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts

“Forgiveness is not a feeling; it is a commitment. It is a choice to show mercy, not to hold the offense up against the offender. Forgiveness is an expression of love.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts

“All of us blossom when we feel loved and wither when we do not feel loved.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages for Singles

“Recent research has indicated that the average individual listens for only seventeen seconds before interrupting and interjecting his own ideas.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate

“Being in love is an emotional and obsessive experience. However, emotions change and obsessions fade. Research indicates that the average life span of the "in love" obsession is two years. For some it may last a bit longer; for some, a bit less. But the average is two years. Then we come down off the emotional high and those aspects of life that we disregarded in our euphoria begin to become important. Our differences begin to emerge and we often find ourselves arguing with the person whom we once though to be perfect. We have now discovered for ourselves that being in love is not the foundation for a happy marriage.”
― Gary Chapman

“In fact, true love cannot begin until the in-love experience has run its course.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts

“Psychologist William James said that possibly the deepest human need is the need to feel appreciated.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts

“You cannot force someone to accept an expression of love. You can only offer it. If it is not accepted, you must respect the other person's decision.”
― Gary Chapman

“Love is a choice.”
― Gary Chapman

“True love cannot begin until the "in love" experience has run it's course.”
― Gary Chapman

“Quality time does not mean that we have to spend our together moments gazing into each other’s eyes. It means that we are doing something together and that we are giving our full attention to the other person.”
― Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts