Virginia Satir Quotes

Adolescents are not monsters. They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves. ~ Virginia Satir

Put together all the existing families and you have society. It is as simple as that. Whatever kind of training took place in the individual family will be reflected in the kind of society that these families create. ~ Virginia Satir

It's sad that children cannot know their parents when they were younger; when they were loving, courting, and being nice to one another. By the time children are old enough to observe, the romance has all too often faded or gone underground. ~ Virginia Satir

I feel that adolescence has served its purpose when a person arrives at adulthood with a strong sense of self-esteem, the ability to relate intimately, to communicate congruently, to take responsibility, and to take risks. The end of adolescence is the beginning of adulthood. What hasn't been finished then will have to be finished later. ~ Virginia Satir

Rearing a family is probably the most difficult job in the world. It resembles two business firms merging their respective resources to make a single product. All the potential headaches of that operation are present when an adult male and an adult female join to steer a child from infancy to adulthood. ~ Virginia Satir

The message sent is not always the message received. ~ Virginia Satir

Families and societies are small and large versions of one another. Both are made up of people who have to work together, whose destinies are tied up with one another. Each features the components of a relationship: leaders perform roles relative to the led, the young to the old, and male to female; and each is involved with the process of decision-making, use of authority, and the seeking of common goals. ~ Virginia Satir

I am me and I am okay. ~ Virginia Satir

I regard (parenting) as the hardest, most complicated, anxiety-ridden, sweat-and-blood-producing job in the world. Succeeding requires the ultimate in patience, common sense, commitment, humor, tact, love, wisdom, awareness, and knowledge. At the same time, it holds the possibility for the most rewarding, joyous experience of a lifetime, namely, that of being successful guides to a new and unique human being. ~ Virginia Satir

I believe the greatest gift I can conceive of having from anyone is to be seen by them, heard by them, to be understood and touched by them. ~ Virginia Satir

There are five freedoms:
The freedom to see and hear what is;
The freedom to say what you feel and think;
The freedom to feel what you actually feel;
The freedom to ask for what you want;
The freedom to take risks on your own behalf. ~ Virginia Satir

Life is not what it's supposed to be. It's what it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference. ~ Aleatha Romig

Once a human being has arrived on this earth, communication is the largest single factor determining what kinds of relationships he makes with others and what happens to him in the world about him. ~ Virginia Satir

So much is asked of parents, and so little is given. ~ Virginia Satir

You have learned what you have learned very well. It has helped you survive. ~ Virginia Satir

Each morning when you wake up, bow three times before the mirror and say, "The world is a better place because I am here. ~ Virginia Satir

We get together on the basis of our similarities; we grow on the basis of our differences. ~ Virginia Satir

Every word, facial expression, gesture, or action on the part of a parent gives the child some message about self-worth. It is sad that so many parents don't realize what messages they are sending. ~ Virginia Satir

Taste everything, but swallow only what fits. ~ Virginia Satir

Life is not the way it's supposed to be, it's the way it is. The way you cope with that is what makes the difference. ~ Virginia Satir

A growing body of clinical observation has pointed to the conclusion that the family therapy must be oriented to the family as a whole. ~ Virginia Satir

I want to love you without clutching, appreciate you without judging, join you without invading, invite you without demanding, leave you without guilt, criticize you without blaming, and help you without insulting. If I can have the same from you, then we can truly meet and enrich each other. ~ Virginia Satir

The recommended daily requirement for hugs is: four per day for survival, eight per day for maintenance, and twelve per day for growth. ~ Virginia Satir

Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understand, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not. ~ Virginia Satir

In the nurturing family ... parents see themselves as empowering leaders not as authoritative bosses. They see their job primarily as one of teaching their children how to be truly human in all situations. They readily acknowledge to the child their poor judgment as well as their good judgment; their hurt, anger, or disappointment as well as their joy. The behavior of these parents matches what they say. ~ Virginia Satir

What lingers from the parent's individual past, unresolved or incomplete, often becomes part of her or his irrational parenting. ~ Virginia Satir

It is now clear to me that the family is a microcosm of the world. To understand the world, we can study the family: issues such as power, intimacy, autonomy, trust, and communication skills are vital parts underlying how we live in the world. To change the world is to change the family. ~ Virginia Satir

Parents teach in the toughest school in the world - The School for Making People. You are the board of education, the principal, the classroom teacher, and the janitor ... ~ Virginia Satir

Communication is to relationships what breath is to life. ~ Virginia Satir

I want you to get excited about who you are, what you are, what you have, and what can still be for you. I want to inspire you to see that you can go far beyond where you are right now. ~ Virginia Satir

It is O. K. for me to feel angry and to express it in responsible ways. ~ Virginia Satir

My dream is to make families a place where adults with high self esteem can develop. I think we have reached a point where if we don't get busy on dreams of this sort, our end is in sight. We need a world that is as good for human beings as it is for technology. ~ Virginia Satir

Negotiating the adolescent stage is neither quick nor easy ... I have often said to parents, "If it isn't illegal, immoral, orfattening, give it your blessing." We do much better ... if we find and support all the places we can appropriately say yes, and say only the no's that really matter. ~ Virginia Satir

The Problem is never the problem! It is only a symptom of something much deeper. ~ Virginia Satir

I want to appreciate you without judging. Join you without invading. Invite you without demanding. Leave you without guilt. ~ Virginia Satir

I think if I have one message, one thing before I die that most of the world would know, it would be that the event does not determine how to respond to the event. That is a purely personal matter. The way in which we respond will direct and influence the event more than the event itself. ~ Virginia Satir

People prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty ~ Virginia Satir

No one's fingerprints are exactly the same as anyone else's. ~ Virginia Satir

Many people are living in an emotional jail without realizing it. ~ Virginia Satir

To see and hear what is here, instead of what should be, was, or will be. To say what I feel and think instead of what I should. To feel what I feel instead of what I ought. To ask for what I want instead of always waiting for permission. To take risks on my behalf, instead of choosing to be safe and not rock the boat. ~ Virginia Satir

We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth. ~ Virginia Satir

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. ~ Virginia Woolf

What matters is precisely this; the unspoken at the edge of the spoken. ~ Virginia Woolf

It's not funny, Joan. My bras are all in the first row, color-coded alphabetically from left to right, and then a row of panties, all folded in little squares, and then slips. And socks along the back row. Everything's so neat it makes me want to throw up. ~ Virginia Smith

Finally, I would thank, had I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America, who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the entomology, the geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine and will, I hope, not spare his services on the present occasion. ~ Virginia Woolf

Faces and faces, served out like soup-plates by scullions; coarse, greedy, casual; looking in at shopwindows with pendent parcels; ogling, brushing, destroying everything, leaving even our love impure, touched now by their dirty fingers. ~ Virginia Woolf

Naturally men are drowned in a storm, but it is a perfectly straightforward affair, and the depths of the sea are only water after all. ~ Virginia Woolf

When I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not. ~ Virginia Woolf

That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing - nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway, not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway. ~ Virginia Woolf

The phrase comes to him before the emotion; but we must add that he is nevertheless a born writer, a man who detests meals, servants, ease, respectability or anything that gets between him and his art; who has kept his freedom when most of his contemporaries have long ago lost theirs; who is ashamed of nothing but being ashamed; who says whatever he has it in his mind to say, and has taught himself an accent, a cadence, indeed a language, for saying it in which, though they are not English, but Irish, will give him his place among the lesser immortals of our tongue. ~ Virginia Woolf

So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words. ~ Virginia Woolf

Wrapped within another's arms further intensifies the divine beauty of a sunrise... ~ Virginia Alison

He walks the soft grass, wet with fresh rain, jeans slung low on his hips and shirt hanging open, still dripping from the fevered maelstrom that set fire to the night sky. Fury in his step and passion furrowing his brow...He is my perfect storm... ~ Virginia Alison

University lectures are an obsolete practice inherited from the Middle Ages when books were scarce. Students should read, not listen. To swallow instruction from a lectern is like sipping through a straw. Lectures pander to the vanity of the lecturer and stimulate conflict between academics. ~ Virginia Woolf

[At the British Museum] For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word [in the time of Shakespeare] when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; (...)
[In] Professor Trevelyan's History of England [one can read that] wife-beating [or daughter-beating] was a recognized right of man (...) [A woman] could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband [or father].
Here I am asking why women did not write poetry in the Elisabethan age, and I am not sure how they were educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting-rooms to themselves; how many women had children before they were 21; what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night. They had no money evidently; (...) they were married whether they liked it or not (...) at fifteen or sixteen very likely... [Under these circumstances] It would have been extremely odd (...) for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
(...)
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet (...). Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anom, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. (...) And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf ~ Virginia Woolf

Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered ~ Virginia Woolf

If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way. ~ Alan Bennett

You send a girl to school in order to make friends - the right sort. ~ Virginia Woolf

When you readily throw words around like 'beautiful', 'gorgeous' and 'sexy'...Ensure the first person to hear them is the one who deserves them... ~ Virginia Alison

She had a right to his arm, though it was without feeling. He would give her, who was so simple, so impulsive, only twenty-four, without friends in England, who had left Italy for his sake, a piece of bone. ~ Virginia Woolf

Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write. For if Pride and Prejudice matters, and Middlemarch and Villette and Wuthering Heights matter, then it matters far more than I can prove in an hour's discourse that women generally, and not merely the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers, took to writing. ~ Virginia Woolf

How could any Lord have made this world? ... there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for this world to commit ... No happiness lasted. ~ Virginia Woolf

Thought [ ... ] had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until -you know the little tug- the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? ~ Virginia Woolf

He was so close his breath touched my cheek. Staring into his eyes, I could almost forget about the nightmare. I could almost forget about Mama. Like the woods back in Virginia, his eyes changed color with his mood - greener when he laughed and darker, like now, when he was angry or worried. They were kind, serious, intelligent eyes that crinkled in the corners when he smiled. ~ Katherine Fleet

There's a million stories glistening in her eyes if you just have time to look. ~ Virginia Frances Schwartz

I am a proud mother - that's another reason I love doing any kind of animation. When my son was growing up, if he was watching something animated and I was in it, that was way cooler to him than seeing me in a movie. ~ Virginia Madsen

For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited ~ Virginia Woolf

You won't finish that stocking tonight," he said, pointing to her stocking. That was what she wanted---the asperity in his voice reproving her. If he says it's wrong to be pessimistic probably it is wrong, she thought; the marriage will turn out all right.
"No," she said, flattening the stocking out upon her knee, "I shan't finish it."
And what then? For she felt that he was still looking at her, but that his look had changed. He wanted something--wanted the thing she always found it so difficult to give him; wanted her to tell him that she loved him. And that, no, she could not do. He found talking so much easier than she did. He could say things--she never could. So naturally it was always he that said the things, and then for some reason he would mind this suddenly, and would reproach her. A heartless woman he called her; she never told him that she loved him. But it was not so--it was not so. It was only that she never could say what she felt. ~ Virginia Woolf

The Little House was very happy as she sat on the hill and watched the countryside around her. She watched the sun rise in the morning and she watched the sun set in the evening. Day followed day, each one a little different from the one before ... but the Little House stayed just the same. ~ Virginia Lee Burton

Having pride is not good for the soul. ~ Virginia Garcia

May your glass always be full, may there always be a roof over your head, and may you dirty sinners be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you're dead. ~ Jason Jack Miller

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh ... Robert Schumann has been mentioned ... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath ... some of them with rather grim ends. ~ Stephen Fry