Meridel Le Sueur Quotes

One of the most important parts of my life has been community.

Try never to be the smartest person in the room. And if you are, I suggest you invite smarter people... or find a different room. In professional circles it's called networking. In organizations it's called team building. And in life it's called family, friends, and community. We are all gifts to each other, and my own growth as a leader has shown me again and again that the most rewarding experiences come from my relationships.

I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.

If there is anything interesting about my story it's the fact that it's not unique at all. I feel that I have been through what almost everyone I know has - a slow and gradual maturation process.

No human relation gives one possession in another—every two souls are absolutely different. In friendship or in love, the two side by side raise hands together to find what one cannot reach alone.

If we change in different directions, then we don't have any future anyway, do we? I think it's possible for two people to change together, to grow together and enrich instead of diminish each other. The sum of one and one, if they're the right ones, can be infinity! But so often one person drags the other down; one person wants to go up like a balloon and the other's a dead weight. I've always wondered what it would be like if both people, if a woman and a man both wanted to go up like balloons!

Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and relatives, despite all the waste of ceremony and fakery and the fact that out of an hour of conversation you may have only five minutes in which the old entente reappears, are the only real means for foreign ideas to enter your brain.

Think back to the most important experiences of your life, the highest highs, the greatest victories, the most daunting obstacles overcome. How many happened to you alone? I bet there are very few. When you understand that being connected to others is one of life's greatest joys, you realize that life's best comes when you initiate and invest in solid relationships.

He's a better person when she's around, and isn't that what friends are for, to raise you up and keep you at your best?

We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we've cleared the way.

A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation.

An unshared life is not living. He who shares does not lessen, but greatens, his life.

No book ever ends, when it's full of your friends.

We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves.

We can teach only if we are willing to learn.

Most people enter into relationships with an eye toward what they can get out of them, rather than what they can put into them. The purpose of a relationship is to decide what part of yourself you'd like to see "show up," not what part of another you can capture and hold. The purpose of a relationship is not to have another who might complete you; but to have another with whom you might share your completeness.

I don't know if we're cutting out, but a friend made a really fascinating suggestion to me; that maybe I could go higher.

Under the magnetism of friendship the modest man becomes bold; the shy, confident; the lazy, active; and the impetuous, prudent and peaceful.

No one can self-actualize without self-actualizing those around them.

Nothing perhaps affects man's character more than the company he keeps

You become like the people you spend the most time with.

People are shaped by friendship as much as by romance.

I don’t need someone to complete me, I need someone to make things a little bit better every now and again.

In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, "Here comes one who will augment our loves." For in this love "to divide is not to take away.

For you will never be what you ought to be until they [your fellow humans] are what they ought to be.