Jo Coudert Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

It is characteristic to believe that those in need are given to, that the squeaky hinge is the one that gets the oil, but in the realm of emotions this is not so. It is the person who does not solicit liking and love, admiration and respect, sympathy and empathy to whom they are freely given.

Jo Coudert
The person who conveys, 'I am nothing. Make me something,' may all his life have people trying to answer his hidden plea, but their answer will be in terms of, 'I am trying to make you something because you are nothing,' and, thus, the insult will be embedded in the response. It will be heard just as clearly as the attempt to help. And it will be hated.

Jo Coudert
The more deeply the path is etched, the more it is used, and the more it is used, the more deeply it etched.

Jo Coudert
It is one of those quirks of human nature that you love the person whom you treat well, not necessarily the person who treats you well.

Jo Coudert
One does not marry to become a judge of the spouse's behavior. If a marriage license is mistaken for a hunting license and disapproval, punishment, and threat of withdrawal of love are employed as weapons, all one bags is one's own unhappiness.

Jo Coudert
Examining love is like examining a stocking: if you hold it up to the light and stretch it to search for snags, any snags there are may well run and ruin the stocking. In fact, if I may fashion Coudert's law from Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy, it is this: Love is not only changed by observation; it is changed for the worse.

Jo Coudert
At what age should one marry? As a rule of thumb, perhaps not until you are past the age of feeling strongly that you must marry.

Jo Coudert
If a man has a sense of identity that does not depend on being shored up by someone else, it cannot be eroded by someone else. If a woman has a sense of identity that does not depend on finding that identity in someone else, she cannot lose her identity in someone else. And so we return to the central fact: it is necessary to be.

Jo Coudert
If you defy the system long enough you'll be rewarded. At first life takes revenge and reduces you to a sniveling mess. But keep sniveling, have the madness, the audacity, to do what interests you, forget about your pension, and eventually life will say all right, we'll let you do it.

Jo Coudert
There is no way of steering successfully between a failed situation and a failed self except by stopping and taking our bearings.

Jo Coudert
The divorced person is like a man with a black patch over one eye: he looks rather dashing but the fact is that he has been through a maiming experience.

Jo Coudert
Most people ask of their friends that they understand them, but, on balance, I think I prefer a friend who understands himself.

Jo Coudert
Self-affirmation cannot be found in love; it is a prior condition of genuine love.

Jo Coudert
It takes an enormous amount of energy, creative energy withdrawn from the total economy of the person, to hold a trait underground, and, unfortunately, needs and drives do not go underground alone; they carry with them useful parts of the personality, depriving it of richness and the possibility of a variety of response.

Jo Coudert
Hardening of the hearteries is the most serious affliction besetting marriage, and warm, good-humored, approving words are the only effective preventive.

Jo Coudert
We can win the struggle to avoid responsibility for our personal lives, but if we do, what we lose is our lives.

Jo Coudert
Every life is a dilemma that must be solved by the person living it.

Jo Coudert
Operating in an unlit world, the unconscious mind is a brilliant detective.

Jo Coudert
People who are good to each other make each other good.

Jo Coudert
To live with the terrible truths about ourselves is the only way of not living them out. A need denied has infinitely more power than a need accepted.

Jo Coudert