46 Quotes Tagged: intimacy

"It can be shown experimentally that eidetic perception evokes affection, and that candidness mobilizes positive feelings, so that there is even such a thing as "one-sided intimacy" - a phenomenon well known, although not by that name, to professional seducers, who are able to capture their partners without becoming involved themselves. This they do by encouraging the other person to look at them directly and to talk freely, while the male or female seducer makes only a well-guarded pretense of reciprocating."

There is no medicine that can ignite the bond of love. Friendship is compulsory, love comes around when friendship ripes, and sex is a matter of choice.

I want to be very close to someone I respect and admire and have somebody who feels the same way about me.

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.

If you take away the big words and the solemn face, there is still plenty left, so there is no need to be scared.

The opposite of Loneliness is not Togetherness , It's Intimacy

A man who lives with his wife is safer and more venerable than a man who lives with a tramp.

Philip was silent. These discussions of personal relations always made him uncomfortable. They threatened his solitude - that solitude which, with a part of his mind, he deplored (for he felt himself cut off from much he would have liked to experience), but in which alone he felt himself free. At ordinary times he took this inward solitude for granted, as one accepts the atmosphere in which one lives. But when it was menaced, he became only too painfully aware of its importance to him; he fought for it, as a choking man fights for air. But it was a fight without violence, a negative battle of retirement and defence.

In avoiding all pain and seeking comfort at all cost, we may be left without intimacy or compassion; in rejecting change and risk we often cheat ourselves of the quest; in denying our suffering we may never know our strength or our greatness.

Loneliness makes us more capable of true intimacy if ever better opportunities do come along. We might be isolated for now, but we'll be capable of far closer, more interesting bonds with anyone we do eventually locate.

When people know you too well, they eventually see your damage, your weirdness, carelessness, and mean streak. They see how ordinary you are after all, that whatever it was that distinguished you in the beginning is the least of who you actually are. This will turn out to be the greatest gift we can offer another person: letting them see, every so often, beneath all the trappings and pretense to the truth of us.

Work among all its abstracts, is actually intimacy, the place where the self meets the world.

Was Mrs. Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people- there are many of them- who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling around them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behaviour- flirting- and if carried far enough, it is punishable by law. But no law- not public opinion, even- punishes those who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict, the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable. Was she one of these?

Loneliness chosen is always preferable to loneliness imposed

By keeping on being what we most intimately are, we can continually redefine ourselves so that we become what we have not been able to be. If we live this way, we surprise ourselves