Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

No one worth possessing can be quite possessed.

Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality.

No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession.

Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom.

No human being can ever "own" another, whether in friendship, love, marriage or parenthood. Many human relationships have been ruined and happiness far too often changed to misery by a failure to understand this.

Love needs two things: it has to be rooted in freedom and it has to know the art of trust.

True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society.

If you love someone, set them free. If they come back they're yours; if they don't they never were.

It's a human right to be able to have a relationship.

It is a false belief to think you can own somebody, I'm out of that now. The man should understand he does not own the woman, and the woman should understand she does not own the man.

True love can exist only in freedom from possession.

And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom.

I want a man in my life, not in my house.

Life is all about the friendship and the love and the music. It sounds silly, but it is. I want to have that experience as much as I can as an adult, not as a kid doing something that people are telling her she has to do. If anyone gets in my way, I'm going to get them out of my way.

Too many people get married and lose themselves. You have to fiercely hold on to who you are, and you need to celebrate that in the other person because that's what made you fall in love in the first place.

If love means that one person absorbs the other, then no real relationship exists any more. Love evaporates; there is nothing left to love. The integrity of self is gone.

If I love you, what business is it of yours?

You know, it's possible for two humans to be in a relationship without there needing to be some public reason for that relationship.

I have a lady, she's a great lady. I love her a lot, she loves me. We're on the same page. Whenever that day happens when we're not on the same page we'll move forward with it. We're interested in having our lives be our lives right now and not a third person's vis-a-vis marriage and whatever that means.

A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other. Any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection, would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration.

The wonderful thing about my husband is that we are very good at being independent.

Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.

I love Will Smith and Jada Pinkett. You see the love, and you can see the support, and they partner on things and produce together. But she has a life, and he has a life.

Freedom and relationship are polar opposites - they both exist on the same continuum. You DO want a relationship - and you DO want freedom - what you really want is BALANCE, you want wholeness.

This desire to govern a woman -- it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.... But I do love you surely in a better way then he does." He thought. "Yes -- really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms.