Top 140 Esther Perel Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Mystery is not always about travelling to new places, it is about looking with new eyes.”

— Esther Perel

2. “Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness.”

— Esther Perel

3. “People cheat on each other in a hundred different ways: indifference, emotional neglect, contempt, lack of respect, years of refusal of intimacy. Cheating doesn’t begin to describe the ways that people let each other down.”

— Esther Perel

4. “It’s our imagination that’s responsible for love, not the other person.”

— Esther Perel

5. “If you start to feel that you have given up too many parts of yourself to be with your partner, then one day you will end up looking for another person in order to reconnect with those lost parts.”

— Esther Perel

6. “Erotic intelligence stretches far beyond a repertoire of sexual techniques. It is an intelligence that celebrates curiosity and play, the power of the imagination, and our infinite fascination with what is hidden and mysterious.”

— Esther Perel

7. “When there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.”

— Esther Perel

8. “It takes two people to create a pattern, but only one to change it.”

— Esther Perel

9. “Love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of romance, it is the beginning.”

— Esther Perel

Featured in: Romance Quotes

10. “Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.”

— Esther Perel

11. “Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.”

— Esther Perel

12. “Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery.”

— Esther Perel

13. “Our partner’s sexuality does not belong to us. It isn’t just for and about us, and we should not assume that it rightfully falls within our jurisdiction.”

— Esther Perel

14. “Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other.”

— Esther Perel

15. “Very often we don’t go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.”

— Esther Perel

16. “The very ingredients that nurture love – mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other – are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.”

— Esther Perel

17. “On some level we trade passion for security, that’s trading one illusion for another. It’s a matter of degree. We can’t live in constant fear, but we can’t live without any. The fear of loss is essential to love.”

— Esther Perel

18. “You never know your partner as well as you think.”

— Esther Perel

19. “It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy.”

— Esther Perel

20. “In my community there were two groups of people, There were the ones who did not die and the ones who came back to life.”

— Esther Perel

21. “Everyone should cultivate a secret garden.”

— Esther Perel

22. “The secret to desire in a long-term relationship.”

— Esther Perel

23. “Once divorce carried all the stigma. Now, choosing to stay when you can leave is the new shame.”

— Esther Perel

24. “Romantics value intensity over stability. Realists value security over passion. But both are often disappointed, for few people can live happily at either extreme.”

— Esther Perel

25. “Women – – and men – – need to understand that a woman’s transition is often much longer. The caretaker must leave the place of orientation to the needs of others to the place where she focuses on herself.”

— Esther Perel

26. “Modern love is the enterprise that everyone wants to be a part of, yet there’s a fifty percent divorce rate in round one and a sixty-five percent divorce rate in round two.”

— Esther Perel

27. “In desire, there must be some small amount of tension. And that tension comes with the unknown, the unpredictable. You can close yourself off at home and say, “Whew, at last I’m in a place where I don’t have to worry,” or you can keep yourself open to the mystery and elusiveness of your partner.”

— Esther Perel

28. “Most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day – the erotic mind is not very politically correct.”

— Esther Perel

29. “I want to engage people in an honest, enlightened, and provocative conversation about the nature of erotic desire and the intricacies of intimacy and sexuality. The object of my game is to bring nonjudgmental, multicultural understanding to the challenges and choices of modern relationships.”

— Esther Perel

30. “Success, to me, is helping one person or many people counter the isolation and pseudoconnectivity of our lives by boosting their ability to connect to themselves and to others.”

— Esther Perel

31. “Today, our sexuality is an open-ended personal project; it is part of who we are, an identity, and no longer merely something we do.”

— Esther Perel

32. “Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Love is about having; desire is about wanting.”

— Esther Perel

33. “When we seek the gaze of another, it isn’t always our partner we’re turning away from, but the person we have ourselves become.”

— Esther Perel

34. “When you pick a partner, you pick a story. So what kind of story are you going to write? You are the editors of your life stories. Write well and edit often. And remember... a life story is not a love story. You can love a lot more people than you can make a life with.”

— Esther Perel

35. “Sometimes, when we seek the gaze of another, it isn’t our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become. We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves.”

— Esther Perel

36. “Freud described eros as the life instinct, doing battle with thanatos, the death instinct.”

— Esther Perel

37. “We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.”

— Esther Perel

38. “In our consumer culture, we always want the next best thing: the latest, the newest, the youngest. Failing that, we at least want more: more intensity, more variety, more stimulation. We seek instant gratification and are increasingly intolerant of any frustration. Nowhere are we encouraged to be satisfied with what we have, to think, “this is good. This is enough.”

— Esther Perel

39. “The smaller we feel in the world, the more we need to shine in the eyes of our partner.”

— Esther Perel

40. “We are most intensely excited when we are a little off-balance, uncertain, “poised on the perilous edge between ecstasy and disaster.”7.”

— Esther Perel

41. “All relationships live in the shadow of the third, for it is the other that solders our dyad. In his book Monogamy, Adam Phillips writes, “The couple is a resistance to the intrusion of the third, but in order for it to last it is indispensable to have enemies. That is why the monogamous can’t live without them. When we are two, we are together. In order to form a couple, we need to be three.”

— Esther Perel

42. “Our partners do not belong to us; they are only on loan, with an option to renew – or not. Knowing that we can lose them does not have to undermine commitment; rather, it mandates an active engagement that long-term couples often lose. The realization that our loved ones are forever elusive should jolt us out of complacency, in the most positive sense.”

— Esther Perel

43. “Affairs can be powerful detonators. They can invigorate a marriage that’s flat, jolt people out of years of complacency. Fear of loss rekindles desire, makes people have conversations they haven’t had in years, takes them out of their contrived illusion of safety.”

— Esther Perel

44. “The shift from shame to guilt is crucial. Shame is a state of of self-absorption, while guilt is an emphatic, relational response, inspired by the hurt you have caused another.”

— Esther Perel

45. “The more we trust, the farther we are able to venture.”

— Esther Perel

46. “The body often contains emotional truths that words can too easily gloss over.”

— Esther Perel

47. “The attraction of dating is that you don’t take yes for granted – – you’re fully engaged, there’s seductiveness, tension.”

— Esther Perel

48. “We expect one person to give us what once an entire village used to provide, and we live twice as long.”

— Esther Perel

49. “Today, monogamy is one person at a time.”

— Esther Perel

50. “Monogamy used to mean one person for life. Now monogamy means one person at a time.”

— Esther Perel