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Human Relations Quotes and Quotations
 A sudden, bold, and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open.  Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it. Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you can find a rock. I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you. I respect only those who resist me, but cannot tolerate them. I wish everybody would go back into the closet. It is in vain to hope to please all alike. Let a man stand with his face in what direction he will, he must necessarily turn his back on one half of the world. Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don't even look at one another. They are just a lot of isolated individuals jiggling in a kind of self-hypnosis and dancing with others only to remind themselves that we are not completely alone in this world. One kind word can warm three winter months. Outside, among your fellows, among strangers, you must preserve appearances, 100 things you cannot do; but inside, the terrible freedom! The easiest kind of relationship for me is with 10,000 people. The hardest is with one. The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself. The ultimate indignity is to be given a bedpan by a stranger who calls you by your first name. There is no society or conversation to be kept up in the world without good nature, or something which must bear its appearance and supply its place. For this reason, mankind have been forced to invent a kind of artificial humanity, which is what we express by the word Good Breeding. When the man is at home, his standing in society is well known and quietly taken; but when he is abroad, it is problematical, and is dependent on the success of his manners. When you live next to the cemetery, you cannot weep for everyone. Almost all of our relationships begin, and most of them continue, as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods. When you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to feel any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel I ought to - like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes and are lost forever more. The wisest man I have ever known once said to me: 'Nine out of every ten people improve on acquaintance,' and I have found his words true. I am a part of all that I have met. At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring in fits and starts. The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity. We rarely confide in those who are better than we are. A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation. The fact is that the possession of a highly social conscience about large-scale issues is no guarantee whatever of reasonable conduct in private relations. With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe. Acquaintance, n: a person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to. In any relationship we feel an unconscious need to create, as it were, a new picture, a new edition of ourselves to present to the fresh person who claims our interest; for them, we in a strange sense wish to, and do, start life anew. Make yourself necessary to somebody. Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others. We accept every person in the world as that for which he gives himself out; only he must give himself out for something. We can put up with the unpleasant more easily than we can endure the insignificant. - Goethe Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant -impossible socially, but full-scale. It's the knockings and batterings we sometimes hear in each other that keep our intercourse from utter banality. We wander through this life together in a semi-darkness in which none of us can distinguish exactly the features of his neighbour. Only from time to time, through some experience that we have of our companion, or through some remark that he passes, he stands for a moment close to us, as though illuminated by a flash of lightning. Then we see him as he really is. A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world: everyone you meet is your mirror. It is always safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem. I was born modest; not all over, but in spots. A modest man is usually admired - if people ever hear of him. When the Quaker Penn kept his hat on in the royal presence, Charles (King Charles II) politely removed his, explaining that it was the custom in that place for only one person at a time to remain covered. If you treat men the way they are you never improve them. If you treat them the way you want them to be, you do. - Goethe See everything: overlook a great deal: correct a little. The more you let yourself go, the less others let you go. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received. At bottom the world isn't a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone, to let someone know that we know he's there with his questions; to disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to his side of the standing argument. I reckon there's as much human nature in some folks as there is in others, if not more. If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? Science may have found a cure for most evils: but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings. The go-between wears out a thousand sandals. Life is livable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions toward us by an almost instinctive network of taboos. I was taught when I was young that if people would only love one another, all would be well with the world. This seemed simple and very nice; but I found when I tried to put it in practice not only that other people were seldom lovable, but that I was not very lovable myself. It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others. Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers. 
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