Top 100 Harriet Lerner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If we only listened with the same passion that we feel about being heard.”

— Harriet Lerner

2. “Anxiety is extremely contagious, but so is calm.”

— Harriet Lerner

3. “Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.”

— Harriet Lerner

4. “Whole-hearted listening is the greatest spiritual gift you can give to the other person.”

— Harriet Lerner

5. “We cannot make another person change his or her steps to an old dance, but if we change our own steps, the dance no longer can continue in the same predictable pattern.”

— Harriet Lerner

6. “Anger is a tool for change when it challenges us to become more of an expert on the self and less of an expert on others.”

— Harriet Lerner

7. “The strongest relationships are between two people who can live without each other but don’t want to.”

— Harriet Lerner

8. “Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is to stop trying to be helpful.”

— Harriet Lerner

9. “An intimate relationship is one in which neither party silences, sacrifices, or betrays the self and each party expresses strength and vulnerability, weakness and competence in a balanced way.”

— Harriet Lerner

10. “People marry with a deep longing that their partner will tend to their wounds, not throw salt in them. Honor your partner’s vulnerability.”

— Harriet Lerner

11. “If you pursue a distancer, he or she will distance more. Consider it a fundamental law of physics.”

— Harriet Lerner

12. “Keep in mind that the tendency to be judgmental – toward yourself or another person – is a good barometer of how anxious or stressed out you are. Judging others is simply the flip side of judging yourself.”

— Harriet Lerner

13. “Telling a true story about personal experience is not just a matter of being oneself, or even or finding oneself. It is also a matter of choosing oneself.”

— Harriet Lerner

14. “Believing that all women should want to be mothers makes about as much sense as believing that all men should want to be engineers.”

— Harriet Lerner

15. “The rush of sexual attraction can act like a drug and blur our capacity for clear thinking. This can lead us to distance ourselves from our friends or even abandon our life plan for someone who couldn’t otherwise be relied on to water our plants and feed our cat.”

— Harriet Lerner

16. “The more we seek exclusivity in friendship, the more it becomes obligatory and the less likely it is to fulfill the wonderful vision of what true friendship can be.”

— Harriet Lerner

17. “It is an act of courage to acknowledge our own uncertainty and sit with it for a while.”

— Harriet Lerner

18. “If you pay attention, you may find that it is not fear that stops you from doing the brave and true thing in your daily life. Rather, the problem is avoidance. You want to feel comfortable, so you avoid doing the thing that will evoke fear and other disquieting emotions. Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run, but it will never make you less afraid.”

— Harriet Lerner

19. “Being who we are requires that we can talk openly about things that are important to us, that we take a clear position on where we stand on important emotional issues, and that we clarify the limits of what is acceptable and tolerable to us in a relationship.”

— Harriet Lerner

20. “We can influence the other person through our words and silence, but we can never control the outcome.”

— Harriet Lerner

21. “When we do not put our primary emotional energy into solving our own problems, we take on other people’s problems as our own.”

— Harriet Lerner

22. “As long as we can feel hope, there is hope.”

— Harriet Lerner

23. “The challenge in all intimate relationships is to preserve both the “I” and the “we” without losing either when the going gets tough. If we’re faced with a choice, we need to choose speech over silence, keep our behavior in line with our stated values and beliefs – and save ourselves first.”

— Harriet Lerner

24. “Whatever brings you joy and zest will enhance your ability to act bravely.”

— Harriet Lerner

25. “Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships.”

— Harriet Lerner

26. “Wherever you find a wife and mother-in-law slugging it out, you’ll find a son who’s not speaking up to either his mother or his wife.”

— Harriet Lerner

27. “Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.”

— Harriet Lerner

28. “We will be in tune with our bodies only if we truly love and honor them. We can’t be in good communication with the enemy.”

— Harriet Lerner

29. “Anger is inevitable when our lives consist of giving in and going along; when we assume responsibility for other people’s feelings and reactions; when we relinquish our primary responsibility to proceed with our own growth and ensure the quality of our own lives; when we behave as if having a relationship is more important than having a self.”

— Harriet Lerner

30. “Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.”

— Harriet Lerner

31. “Through words we come to know the other person – and to be known. This knowing is at the heart of our deepest longings for intimacy and connection with others. How relationships unfold with the most important people in our lives depends on courage and clarity in finding voice.”

— Harriet Lerner

32. “If you want a recipe for relationship failure, just wait for the other person to change first.”

— Harriet Lerner

33. “Love alone is never a good enough reason to marry.”

— Harriet Lerner

34. “Silence can pose a greater threat than the difficult truth.”

— Harriet Lerner

35. “Fear has never helped anybody make good choices. It leads to clinging when we should be walking.”

— Harriet Lerner

36. “Although it’s not useful to drown in despair, it’s also not useful to keep a ‘positive attitude’ when this means concealing or denying real emotions.”

— Harriet Lerner

37. “Letting go of anger and hate requires us to give up the hope for a different past, along with the hope of a fantasized future. What we gain is a life more in the present, where we are not mired in prolonged anger and resentment that doesn’t serve us.”

— Harriet Lerner

38. “Your children are not little mirrors reflecting back the good or bad job you’ve done.”

— Harriet Lerner

39. “The best apologies are short, and don’t go on to include explanations that run the risk of undoing them. An apology isn’t the only chance you ever get to address the underlying issue. The apology is the chance you get to establish the ground for future communication. This is an important and often overlooked distinction.”

— Harriet Lerner

40. “Being in touch with our bodies, or more accurately, being our bodies, is how we know what is true. Harriet.”

— Harriet Lerner

41. “When you can’t see yourself objectively, you won’t see anyone else objectively, either.”

— Harriet Lerner

42. “We all fear change, even as we seek it.”

— Harriet Lerner

43. “We cannot survive when our identity is defined by or limited to our worst behavior. Every human must be able to view the self as complex and multidimensional. When this fact is obscured, people will wrap themselves in layers of denial in order to survive. How can we apologize for something we are, rather than something we did?”

— Harriet Lerner

44. “Those of us who are locked into ineffective expressions of anger suffer as deeply as those of us who dare not get angry at all.”

— Harriet Lerner

45. “We diminish people when we don’t allow them to help us, or when we act like we don’t need anything from them and they have nothing to offer us. We also diminish them when we allow them to go on and on, even after we’ve exceeded our capacity to pay attention.”

— Harriet Lerner

46. “People’s sense of self worth is pivotal to their ability to look clearly at the hurt they’ve caused. The more solid one’s sense of self regard, the more likely that that person can feel empathy and compassion for the hurt party, and apologize from an authentic center.”

— Harriet Lerner

47. “Fear is a message – sometimes helpful, sometimes not – but often conveying critical information about our beliefs, our needs, and our relationship to the world around us.”

— Harriet Lerner

48. “Sometimes, the failure of the other person to apologize when they should hits us harder than the deed they should apologize for.”

— Harriet Lerner

49. “What initially attracts us and what later becomes ‘the problem’ are usually one and the same.”

— Harriet Lerner

50. “Feeling essentially superior to other people is as sure a sign of poor self-esteem as feeling essentially inferior.”

— Harriet Lerner