Quotes about Intimacy

True intimacy is a human constant. People of all types find it equally hard to achieve, equally precious to hold. Age, education, social status, make little difference here; even genius does not presuppose the talent to reveal one's self completely and completely absorb one's self in another personality. Intimacy is to love what concentration is to work: a simultaneous drawing together to attention and release of energy.

The most intimate question we can ask, and the one that has the most spiritual power, is this: What or who am I?

Communication leads to community, that is, understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.

Each morning, the second they see each other,
they open easily, telling stories and dreams and secrets,
empty of ay fear or suspicious holding back.

To watch and listen to those two
is to understand how, as it's written,
sometimes when two beings come together,
Christ becomes visible...

There's no blocking the speechflow-river-running-
all-carrying momentum that true intimacy is.

If you want to end your suffering enter your pain.

"The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy... and intimacy creates understanding... and understanding creates love."

Weath is a measure of the degree to which we are willing to share intimacy with our world.

At least embarrasement is not an imitation.
It is intimacy for beginners....

Something in us doesn't want to be civilized, linked too closely with Apollo and all his humanitarian accomplishments--medicine, music, ideas. It doesn't want any kind of union, but desperately tries to preserve its individuality and integrity. Something in us wants to be wooden, untalkative, and impenetrable. It wants to revert to dumb nature. Something in us doesn't want to be loved or desired. A tree's beauty is purely unintended and purposeless.
Daphne is wooden. She is that which doesn't want to be communicative, available, friendly, present, or articulate. Instinctively she flees from the most noble of attentions, the most humane of admirers. She would rather be like a tree than a person, an it rather than a thou. The Daphne spirit is so pure that it has no use for the sentimentality of relationship.
Modern psychological thinking doesn't appreciate the necessity presented in this myth. We consider it normal and healthy to be intimate with each other and communicate well. We interpret flight from intimacy as neurotic, abnormal, and practically immoral. But within this myth, flight from interpersonal contact is the norm. Resistance to humanitarian sensitivity is valid. Disappearing from the human scene somehow protects and preserves Daphne in a completely acceptable way.
Rather than judge each other and ourselves for our failure to be sociable, we might reconsider our biases and assumptions, even our sentimentality, about relationship. Perhaps some of our narcissism is a symptomatic attempt recover as strong unrelated sense of self. How can we reach out to another anyway, if we don't have strong devotion to our individuality?

Many find it strange for a person to spend their life studying human happiness and intimacy.  I find it strange for anyone not to.

Chance and destiny are not adequate concepts for explaining karma. It's really a dance, isn't it!--a dance of sisters and brothers who come together by mysterious likeness and attraction. Their dances in turn come together with all the dances across the world. For some this can be joyless, even the dance of exploitation and murder, but for the Bodhisattva it is the great cotillion of intimacy.

live with passion and compassion, proceed with optimism, value disciplined thinking, be open to intimacy and love the mystery.

Technologies of the soul tend to be simple, bodily, slow and related to the heart as much as the mind.  Everything around us tells us we should be mechanically sophisticated, electronic, quick, and informational in our expressiveness - an exact antipode to the virtues of the soul.  It is no wonder, then, that in an age of telecommunications - which, by the way, literally means "distant connections" - we suffer symptoms of the loss of soul.  We are being urged from everyside to become efficient rather than intimate.

But violence does not equal aggression, and our sex need not follow our mistaken model of violence. There are, after all, different kinds of violence. There is the necessary violence of survival, of the killing of one's food, whether that food is lettuce, onion, duck, or deer. Then there are senseless forms of violence so often perpetuated by our culture: child abuse, rape, military or economic genocide, factory farms, industrial forestry, commercial fishing. But violence also can be like sex: a sacramental, beautiful,  and sometimes bittersweet interaction.

The heart of the matter is that there is nothing the matter with our hearts.  It is not love that is to blame.  But each of us has resistance to the very love we desire.  We also have resistance to the space and independence we need.  So we go back and forth, not letting ourselves have one or the other.  Sometimes it is difficult to accept that it is our own resistance, rather than other people or the world, that is responsible for out problems.  Try on the idea, though, because it has powerful consequences.  It means that you are in charge again, and are in a position in which you can do something about how your life goes.

It boils down to this:  Are you willing to have your relationships be a pathway to fully revealing yourself and your potential?  If your answer is yes, real intimacy can be yours on a dail basis.

You are not only a man, you are a superior man: a man who does his best to live as love in the world and in his intimacy, a man whose heart remains open and whose truth remains strong...

Two things I do value a lot, intimacy and the capacity for joy, didn't seem to be on anyone else's list. I felt like the stranger in a strange land, and decided I'd better not marry the natives.