Mutuality Quotes

[...] he would see that birth and death were only two tremendous moments in an eternal waking, and his face would glow with amazement as he understood this; he would feel - gently he grasped the copper handle of the door - the warmth of the mountains, woods, rivers and valleys, would discover the hidden depths of human existence, would finally understand that the unbreakable ties that bound him to the world were not imprisoning chains and condemnation but a kind of clinging to an indestructible sense that he had a home; and he would discover the enormous joys of mutuality which embraced and animated everything: rain, wind, sun and snow, the flight of a bird, the taste of fruit, the scent of grass; and he would suspect that his anxieties and bitterness were merely cumbersome ballast required by the live roots of his past and the rising airship of his certain future, and, then - he started opening the door - he would finally know that our every moment is passed in a procession across dawns and day's-ends of the orbiting earth, across successive waves of winter and summer, threading the planets and the stars. Suitcase in hand, he stepped into the room and stood there blinking in the half-light. ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tired into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one destiny, affects all indirectly. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Productive collaborations between family and school, therefore, will demand that parents and teachers recognize the critical importance of each other's participation in the life of the child. This mutuality of knowledge, understanding, and empathy comes not only with a recognition of the child as the central purpose for the collaboration but also with a recognition of the need to maintain roles and relationships with children that are comprehensive, dynamic, and differentiated. ~ Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

If, in the name of liberty, we allow individuals to act in a way that damages the wellbeing of the whole, it will inevitably mean the breakdown of mutuality, thereby changing the very nature of our society. ~ David Blunkett

NEED SHAME BINDS When these needs are neglected, children are given the message that their needs are not important, and they lose a sense of their own personal value. They are not worth someone being there for them. They get the feeling they do not matter. As their needs are chronically rejected, children stop believing they have the right to depend on anyone. These dependency needs rely on the interpersonal bridge and the bond of mutuality for their fulfillment. The interpersonal bridge is broken when one is abandoned through neglect. Since we have no one to depend on, we come to believe that we have no right to depend on anyone. We feel shame when we feel needy. Since these needs are basic needs, i.e., needs we cannot be fully human without, we have to get them met in abortive ways. ~ John Bradshaw

It's not the number of contacts you cultivate but the diversity and depth of connections that leverage your opportunity to use best talents more often to accomplish more. ~ Kare Anderson

All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mentoring is a mutuality that requires more than meeting the right teacher: the teacher must meet the right student. ~ Parker J. Palmer

We never have as great an opportunity to show self-comfort as when others around us aren't. Hint: Don't be a jerk because someone else is. Praise the behaviors in others that you most want to flourish. ~ Kare Anderson

Pornography also eroticizes male supremacy. It makes dominance and subordination feel like sex; it makes hierarchy feel like sex; it makes force and violence feel like sex; it makes hate and terrorism feel like sex; it makes inequality feel like sex. Pornography keeps sexism sexy. It keeps sexism necessary for some people to have sexual feelings. It makes reciprocity make you go limp. It makes mutuality leave you cold. It makes tenderness and intimacy and caring make you feel like you're going to disappear into a void. It makes justice the opposite of erotic; it makes injustice a sexual thrill. ~ John Stoltenberg

Whatever most captures your mind controls your life. ~ Kare Anderson

And this is the great challenge of our time, the evolutionary imperative for the masculine to see through and overcome its hubris and one-sidedness, to own its own unconscious shadow, to choose to enter into a fundamentally new relationship of mutuality with the feminine in all its forms. ~ Richard Tarnas

In the course of a short city-block this frantic old woman frenetically caricatured the features of forty or fifty passers-by, in a quick-fire sequence of kaleidoscopic imitations, each lasting a second or two, sometimes less, and the whole dizzying sequence scarcely more than two minutes.

And there were ludicrous imitations of the second and third order; for the people in the street, startled, outraged, bewildered by her imitations, took on these expressions in reaction to her; and those expressions, in turn, were re-reflected, re-directed, re-distorted, by the Touretter, causing a still greater degree of outrage and shock. This grotesque, involuntary resonance, or mutuality, by which everyone was drawn into an absurdly amplifying interaction, was the source of the disturbance I had seen from a distance. This woman who, becoming everybody, lost her own self, became nobody. This woman with a thousand faces, masks, personae- how must it be for her in this whirlwind of identities? The answer came soon- and not a second too late; for the build-up of pressures, both hers and others', was fast approaching the point of explosion. Suddenly, desperately, the old woman turned aside, into an alley-way which led off the main street. And there, with all the appearances of a woman violently sick, she expelled, tremendously accelerated and abbreviated, all the gestures, the postures, the expressions, the demeanours, the entire behavioural repertoires, of the past forty or fifty ~ Oliver Sacks

In the heart's deepest place, where the burden of ego is dropped and the mystery of soul is penetrated, a man finds the consciousness there not different in any way from what all other men may find. The mutuality of the human race is thus revealed as existing only on a plane where its humanness is transcended. This is why all attempts to express it in political and economic terms, no less than the theosophic attempts to form a universal brotherhood, being premature, must be also artificial. This is why they failed. ~ Paul Brunton

In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be ...
This is the inter-related structure of reality. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

For Christians engaged in racial reconciliation, in particular, solidarity is based upon our shared identity as followers of Christ who are bound together through our baptismal covenant. Thus, our solidarity must be evinced by what Duane Bidwell identifies as the characteristics of "helpful and healthful covenant partnerships": (1) relational justice (the sharing of power, opportunity, and rewards); (2) equal regard (an ethic of interdependent mutuality in which partners empathize with and seek the flourishing of one another); (3) mutual empowerment (the capacity to influence and be influenced by others without domination or losing one's identity); (4) respect for embodiment (honoring the body of the other, including their lived realities, as a reliable and trustworthy informant about them, the world, and the Divine); (5) and resistance to colonization (working to prevent and dismantle the internalization of harmful cultural beliefs). ~ Chanequa Walker-Barnes

All wars derive from lack of empathy: the incapacity of one to understand and accept the likeness or difference of another. Whether in nations or the encounters of race and sex, competition then replaces compassion, subjection excludes mutuality. ~ Marya Mannes

Your silence exists as does my self gathering. But so does the almost absolute silence of the world's dawning. In such suspension, before every utterance on earth, there is a cloud, an almost immobile air. The plants already breathe, while we still ask ourselves how to speak to each other, without taking breath away from them. ~ Luce Irigaray

When children have shame-based parents, they identify with them. This is the first step in the child's internalizing shame because the children carry their parent's shame. ABANDONMENT: THE LEGACY OF BROKEN MUTUALITY Shame is internalized when one is abandoned. Abandonment is the precise term to describe how one loses one's authentic self and ceases to exist psychologically. Children cannot know who they are without reflective mirrors. Mirroring is done by one's primary caregivers and is crucial in the first years of life. Abandonment includes the loss of mirroring. Parents who are shut down emotionally (all shame-based parents) cannot mirror and affirm their children's emotions. ~ John Bradshaw

We do not live so that we can eat, nor do we just eat so that we can live. Life is worth living in and of itself. Life cannot be satisfied when it is lived out as a consuming entity. When it is filled by that which satisfies a hunger that is both physical and spiritual in a mutuality that sustains both without violation of either, only then can life be truly fulfilling. ~ Ravi Zacharias

Laughter to begin with was probably glee at the misfortunes of others. The baring of the teeth in laughter hints at its savage ancestry. Animals have no malice, hence also no laughter. They never savor the sudden glory of Schadenfreude. It was its infectious quality that made of laughter a medium of mutuality. ~ Eric Hoffer

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The reason I withdrew from formal, regular, scheduled community was that I failed to experience the two things my doctoral thesis revealed men absolutely must experience to remain in community. First, men need confidentiality. They have to believe that what they disclose will remain in that room and never be shared with anyone - not a spouse, not a cousin in a far country, no one. Second, men need to experience mutuality. Men need to know that if they bring you in on whatever battles they have kept secret, you won't "leave them hanging," or pridefully conceal the truth about yourself. They need you to quickly match their personal disclosure. ~ James MacDonald

We believe in a single fundamental idea that describes better than most textbooks and any speech that I could write what a proper government should be: the idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another's pain, sharing one another's blessings - reasonably, honestly, fairly, without respect to race, or sex, or geography, or political affiliation. ~ Mario

All of us, when we engage in relatedness, fall under the gravitational influence of another's emotional world, at the same time that we are bending his emotional mind with ours. Each relationship is a binary star, a burning flux of exchanged force fields, the deep and ancient influences emanating and felt, felt and emanating. (142) ~ Thomas Lewis

More than money, talent, or your number of contacts, your capacity to create mutuality with others can transform you into a sought-after Opportunity Maker with whom people most want to align. Be the glue that sticks the right teams together to solve problems or seize opportunities sooner and better together. ~ Kare Anderson

Grouping and mutuality of countries and peoples in the Balkans is the only road that leads to economic, national and political liberation. ~ Dimitrije Tucovic

All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

And you know, when it comes to a long-term, committed relationship: Love is not enough. There are issues of honor, respect, mutuality, sacrifice, acceptance, supportiveness, similarity of life values and morality, to name only a few. They, too, don't come without struggling and striving, but, oh, are they worth it! ~ Laura C. Schlessinger

We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day. ~ Jack Gilbert

True community is based on upon equality, mutuality, and reciprocity. It affirms the richness of individual diversity as well as the common human ties that bind us together. ~ Pauli Murray

The opposite of heterosexual desire is the eroticising of sameness, a sameness of power, equality and mutuality. It is homosexual desire. ~ Sheila Jeffreys

Best way to gain greater credibility, clout and success: involve unexpected allies, ardently united around something specific that you all believe is meaningful. ~ Kare Anderson

All beings, including each one of us, enemy and friend alike, exist in patterns of mutuality, interconnectedness, co-responsibility and ultimately in unity. ~ Joan Halifax

The soul, in its loneliness, hopes only for "salvation." And yet what is the burden of the Bible if not a sense of the mutuality of influence, rising out of an essential unity, among soul and body and community and world? These are all the works of God, and it is therefore the work of virtue to make or restore harmony among them. The world is certainly thought of as a place of spiritual trial, but it is also the confluence of soul and body, word and flesh, where thoughts must become deeds, where goodness must be enacted. This is the great meeting place, the narrow passage where spirit and flesh, word and world, pass into each other. The Bible's aim, as I read it, is not the freeing of the spirit from the world. It is the handbook of their interaction. It says that they cannot be divided; that their mutuality, their unity, is inescapable; that they are not reconciled in division, but in harmony. What else can be meant by the resurrection of the body? The body should be "filled with light," perfected in understanding. And so everywhere there is the sense of consequence, fear and desire, grief and joy. What is desirable is repeatedly defined in the tensions of the sense of consequence. ~ Wendell Berry

Though public pronouncements of Israeli officials emphasize peace and mutuality, unilateralism actually drives Israeli actions. ~ Douglas Feith

The very ingredients that nurture love - mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other - are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire. ~ Esther Perel

There's no key to great relationships, there's simply a well worn welcome mat. ~ Curtis Tyrone Jones

Friendship is something that creates equality and mutuality, not a reward for finding equality or a way of intensifying existing mutuality. ~ Rowan Williams

Should you operate upon your clients as objects, you risk reducing them to less than human. Following the culture of appropriation and mastery your clients become a kind of extension of yourself, of your ego. In the appropriation and objectification mode, your clients' well-being and success in treatment reflect well upon you. You "did" something to them, you made them well. You acted upon them and can take the credit for successful therapy or treatment. Conversely, if your clients flounder or regress, that reflects poorly on you. On this side of things the culture of appropriation and mastery says that you are not doing enough. You are not exerting enough influence, technique or therapeutic force. What anxiety this can breed for some clinicians!



DBT offers a framework and tools for a treatment that allows clients to retain their full humanity. Through the practice of mindfulness, you can learn to cultivate a fuller presence to the moments of your life, and even with your clients and your work with them. This presence potentiates an encounter between two irreducible human beings, meeting professionally, of course, and meeting humanly. The dialectical framework, which embraces contradictions and gives you a way of seeing that life is pregnant with creative tensions, allows for your discovery of your limits and possibilities, gives you a way of seeing the dynamic nature of reality that is anything but sitting still; shows you that your identity grows fr ~ Scott E. Spradlin

The central law of all wholesome life is reciprocity, mutuality ... But the group is valuable only as it permits personalities, not automatons, to emerge. ~ Norman Thomas

[Addams's] idea was that the conflict between Pullman and his workers was analogous to the conflict between King Lear and his daughter Cordelia in Shakespeare's play: an old set of values, predicated on individualism and paternalism, had run up against a new set of values, predicated on mutuality and self-determination. ~ Louis Menand

The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual. ~ C. G. Jung

See others' slights or outright insults as opportunities to show equanimity, spurring observers to do the same, unified with you around a best side of us. Opportunity Makers demonstrate that being a strong team player is as important as being the leader. Think well of yourself. The subconscious can't take a joke. ~ Kare Anderson

Difficult roads can lead you to beautiful destinations; and the beauty of humanity is in our shared mutuality and intrinsic reciprocity, you are never alone in your difficulty, we are all made of the same stardust! The essence of spirituality and the bigger picture is to uncover who you truly are and share in that hard-won individuality; to be a force of good aligning with your gifts, talents and special qualities that we all grow from. We can transmute and transition every seemingly negative thought, emotion, and circumstance for our greater good and those around us. ~ Christine Evangelou

The traditional paradigm of parenting has been very hierarchical, the parent knows best and very top down. Conscious parenting topples [this paradigm] on its head and creates this mutuality, this circularity where both parent and child serve each other and where in fact, perhaps, the child could be even more of a guru for the parent ... teaching the parent how the parent needs to grow, teaching the parent how to enter the present moment like only children know how to do. ~ Shefali Tsabary

Let those who follow me continue to build with the plumb of honor, the level of truth, and the square of integrity, education, courtesy and mutuality. ~ John Wanamaker

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Man, by his very nature and of his own accord, strives toward self-realization, and that his set of values evolves from such striving. Apparently he cannot, for example, develop his full human potentialities unless he is truthful to himself; unless he is active and productive; unless he relates himself to others in the spirit of mutuality. Apparently he cannot grow if he indulges in a "dark idolatry of self" and consistently attributes all his own shortcomings to the deficiencies of others. He can grow, in the true sense, only if he assumes responsibility for himself. ~ Karen Horney

Pull in Friendships and Fresh Adventures: Five men are walking across the Golden Gate Bridge on an outing organized by their wives who are college friends. The women move ahead in animated conversation. One man describes the engineering involved in the bridge's long suspension. Another points to the changing tide lines below. A third asked if they've heard of the new phone apps for walking tours. The fourth observes how refreshing it is to talk with people who aren't lawyers like him.

Yes, we tend to notice the details that most relate to our work or our life experience.

It is also no surprise that we instinctively look for those who share our interests. This is especially true in times of increasing pressure and uncertainty. We have an understandable tendency in such times to seek out the familiar and comfortable as a buffer against the disruptive changes surrounding us. In so doing we can inadvertently put ourselves in a cage of similarity that narrows our peripheral vision of the world and our options. The result? We can be blindsided by events and trends coming at us from directions we did not see. The more we see reinforcing evidence that we are right in our beliefs the more rigid we become in defending them. Hint: If you are part of a large association, synagogue, civic group or special interest club, encourage the organization to support the creation of self-organized, special interest groups of no more than seven people, providing a few suggestio ~ Kare Anderson

To look deep into your child's eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood's self-regarding, yet unselfish, abandon. It is astonishing how often such mutuality had been realized - how frequently parents who had supposed that they couldn't care for an exceptional child discover that they can. The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances. There is more imagination in the world than one might think. ~ Andrew Solomon

Independence was as far as his mind could reach. Yet I think his mind groped further, towards what he could not see, the body's obscure, inalterable dream of mutuality. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Speak to their positive intent, especially when they appear to have none, and you are more likely to bring out their better side. ~ Kare Anderson

In such mysticism of prayer, the relationship of domination between God and humans has been transformed into one of love. That is precisely the mystical transformation that happens to prayer of supplication. The feudalistic patriarchal understanding of supplication often starts from the assumption that human beings have to go and knock on God's door and awaken "him" in order to present their petitions. The feudal lord then answers or refuses. If "he" has refused often enough even the most necessary things, the supplicant will go away and perhaps look elsewhere for salvation ...
Mystics have rarely cultivated the prayer of supplication; they have worked at a relationship based on mutuality. ~ Dorothee Solle

I don't believe an accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers. It makes them siblings, gives them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at. ~ Maya Angelou

The one thing that is truly monstrous is the idea of another person being unreachable. I think this is what lies behind our fear of people we imagine to be evil: the belief that they are wholly beyond our reach, beyond our appeal and our compassion, because they have alienated themselves completely from the rest of humanity and thereby rendered themselves inhuman ... But there is mutuality involved. For us to accept another person's alienation is simultaneously to alienate ourselves from him - to become complicit. When we decide to accept that another person is unreachable, we may cut him off, send him away, but we have set ourselves adrift as well. ~ Leah Hager Cohen

Becoming more deeply connected with those you admire and love bolsters, in you, the traits you most admire in them. Recognize behaviors that most upset you so, like defensive driving, you see potential "crashes" sooner and avoid them. ~ Kare Anderson

Mutuality is accomplished by two whole persons; and if each partner truly intends to be but the fraction of a relationship (thinking my whole makes up half of us) he or she will soon discover that these halves do not fit perfectly together. The mathematics can work only if each subtracts something of himself or herself, shears it off, and lays it aside forever. There will come, then, a moment of shock when one spouse realizes, 'you won't want the whole of me? Not the whole of me, but only a part of me, makes up the whole of us?" P 45 ~ Walter Wangerin Jr.

To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other. The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles – desire, possession, love, dream, adventure – worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us – giving, conquering, uniting – will not lose their meaning. On the contrary, when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

But it is the nature of narcissistic entitlement to see the situation from only one very subjective point of view that says "My feelings and needs are all that matter, and whatever I want, I should get." Mutuality and reciprocity are entirely alien concepts, because others exist only to agree, obey, flatter, and comfort – in short, to anticipate and meet my every need. If you cannot make yourself useful in meeting my need, you are of no value and will most likely be treated accordingly, and if you defy my will, prepare to feel my wrath. Hell hath no fury like the Narcissist denied.

Narcissists hold these unreasonable expectations of particularly favorable treatment and automatic compliance because they consider themselves uniquely special. In social situations, you will talk about them or what they are interested in because they are more important, more knowledgeable, or more captivating than anyone else. Any other subject is boring and won't hold interest, and, in their eyes, they most certainly have a right to be entertained. In personal relationships, their sense of entitlement means that you must attend to their needs but they are under no obligation to listen to or understand you. If you insist that they do, you are "being difficult" or challenging their rights. How dare you put yourself before me? they seem to (or may actually) ask. And if they have real power over you, they feel entitled to use you as they see fit and you must not question their authority. A ~ Sandy Hotchkiss

The mere fact that we live in the United States means that we are caught in a network of inescapable mutuality. Therefore, no American can afford to be apathetic about the problem of racial justice. It is a problem that meets every man at his front door. The racial problem will be solved in America to the degree that every American considers himself personally confronted with it. Whether one lives in the heart of the Deep South or on the periphery of the North, the problem of injustice is his problem; it is his problem because it is America's problem. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Prayer is actually setting out a tuning fork. All you can really do in the spiritual life is to get tuned to receive the always present message. Once you are tuned, you will receive, and it as nothing do to with worthiness or the group you belong to but only the inner resonance and a capacity for mutuality. The Sender is absolutely and always present and broadcasting; the only change is with the receiver station. ~ John Predmore

Imagine living in a world where there is no domination, where females and males are not alike or even always equal, but where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interaction. ~ Bell Hooks

With our technologies
ones of incalcuable power: earth-restoring, planet preserving
we can rediscover an intimacy, a mutuality with the natural world, that is not primitive (though based in part on fear), but knowing. It might even be possible to relearn a life of awe. And inhabit the landscape without violation. With the least violation. ~ Janet Kauffman

Loving is limbically distinct from in love. Loving is mutuality ; loving is synchronous attunement and modulation. As such, adult love depends critically upon knowing the other. In love demands only the brief acquaintance necessary to establish an emotional genre but does not demand that the book of the beloved's soul be perused from preface to epilogue. Loving derives from intimacy, the prolonged and detailed surveillance of a foreign soul. (207) ~ Thomas Lewis