Top 100 Harriet Lerner Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The miracle is that your children will love you with all your imperfections if you can do the same for them.”

— Harriet Lerner

52. “I’m a good example of wanting to apologize only for my precise share of a problem – as I calculate it, of course – and I expect my husband Steve to apologize for his share, also as I calculate it. Since we’re not always of one mind on the math, it can lead to the theater of the absurd.”

— Harriet Lerner

53. “Intensity is not the same as intimacy, although we tend to confuse these two words.”

— Harriet Lerner

54. “Nothing is more fragile than a single snowflake,” it said. “But look what they can do when they stick together.”

— Harriet Lerner

55. “In my professional work I am struck by how often sibling relationships fall apart around the life-cycle stage of caring for elderly parents, and dealing with a parents death and it’s aftermath. Failed apologies have the most serious consequences at stressful points in the life-cycle, and loss is the most challenging adaptational task that family members have to come to terms with.”

— Harriet Lerner

56. “Differences don’t just threaten and divide us. They also inform, enrich, and enliven us.”

— Harriet Lerner

57. “The bolder and more courageous you are, the more you will learn about yourself.”

— Harriet Lerner

58. “Feeling inadequate is an occupational hazard of motherhood.”

— Harriet Lerner

59. “If only our passion to understand others were as great as our passion to be understood. Were this so, all our apologies would be truly meaningful and healing.”

— Harriet Lerner

60. “All the assertiveness training and communication skills in the world can’t prevent a relationship from becoming fertile ground for silence and stonewalling, or for anger and frustration, or for just plain hard times. No book or expert can protect us from the range of painful emotions that make us human. We can influence the other person through our words and silence, but we can never control the outcome. That said, what we can.”

— Harriet Lerner

61. “Indeed, in many situations wisdom lies in being strategic rather than spontaneous. This is especially true when we’re dealing with a difficult person, a hot issue, or a tense situation. The enormous challenge is to make wise decisions about how and when to say what to whom, and even before that, to know what we really want to say and what we hope to accomplish by saying it.”

— Harriet Lerner

62. “If what we are doing with our anger is not achieving the desired result, it would seem logical to try something different.”

— Harriet Lerner

63. “Yet all of us are vulnerable to intense, nonproductive angry reactions in our current relationships if we do not deal openly and directly with emotional issues from our first family – in particular, losses and cutoffs.”

— Harriet Lerner

64. “Nothing, but nothing, will block the awareness of anger so effectively as guilt and self-doubt. Our society cultivates guilt feelings in women such that many of us still feel guilty if we are anything less than an emotional service station to others.”

— Harriet Lerner

65. “No book or expert can protect us from the range of painful emotions that make us human.”

— Harriet Lerner

66. “Underground issues from one relationship or context invariably fuel our fires in another.”

— Harriet Lerner

67. “When anxiety disrupts functioning, it’s psychiatric illness.”

— Harriet Lerner

68. “We need to hear the sound of our voice for what we think and need.”

— Harriet Lerner

69. “But one of the hallmarks of emotional maturity is to recognize the validity of multiple realities and to understand that people think, feel, and react differently. Often we behave as if “closeness” means “sameness.”

— Harriet Lerner

70. “Our society cultivates guilt feelings in women such that many of us still feel guilty if we are anything less than an emotional service station to others.”

— Harriet Lerner

71. “You can’t evaluate a prospective partner if you insulate your relationship from your family and friends – and his.”

— Harriet Lerner

72. “Don’t count on the power of your love or your nagging to create something that wasn’t there to begin with.”

— Harriet Lerner

73. “Our society doesn’t promote self-acceptance and it never will. First of all, self-acceptance doesn’t sell products. Capitalism would fall if we liked ourselves the way we are now. Also, people who feel shamed and inadequate themselves tend to pass it on. I’m sure you’ve noticed that many individuals and groups try to enhance their self-esteem by diminishing others.”

— Harriet Lerner

74. “Don’t use “below-the-belt” tactics. These include: blam- ing, interpreting, diagnosing, labeling, analyzing, preaching, moralizing, ordering, warning, interrogating, ridiculing, and lecturing. Don’t put the other person down.”

— Harriet Lerner

75. “To listen with an open heart and ask questions to better help us understand the other person is a spiritual exercise, in the truest sense of the word.”

— Harriet Lerner

76. “Venting anger may serve to maintain, and even rigidify, the old rules and patterns in a relationship, thus ensuring that change does not occur.”

— Harriet Lerner

77. “Nothing you say can ensure that the other person will get it, or respond the way you want. You may never exceed his threshold of deafness.”

— Harriet Lerner

78. “Kids want nothing more than for all the important adults in their life to get along.”

— Harriet Lerner

79. “We need to listen carefully to the wisdom of our symptoms and to try to decode their meaning, because some of us have learned to settle, to fall silent; to deny that unfair circumstances exist or matter, and then to call our compromises “life.” But our bodies, our deeper unconscious selves, remain harder to fool.”

— Harriet Lerner

80. “We’ll always be disappointed if we believe that we can plan for a peak experience and make it happen. True joy can’t be anticipated or planned. It just strikes.”

— Harriet Lerner

81. “We commonly confuse closeness with sameness and view intimacy as the merging of two separate I’s into one worldview.”

— Harriet Lerner

82. “Pretending can be a bold form of experimentation and inventiveness. In pretending joy or happiness, we may discover or enhance our capacity for it.”

— Harriet Lerner

83. “Many of our problems with anger occur when we choose between having a relationship and having a self.”

— Harriet Lerner

84. “The first world we find ourselves in is a family that is not of our choosing.”

— Harriet Lerner

85. “Self-help books for women are part of a multibillion-dollar industry, sensitively attuned to our insecurities and our purses.”

— Harriet Lerner

86. “My debt to feminism is simply incalculable. Feminism allowed me to see past a ‘reality’ that I had once taken as a given. It helped me to pay attention to countless voices, my own included, that I had been taught ‘don’t count.’ Feminism allows me to maintain hope.”

— Harriet Lerner

87. “A marital therapist recently teased me, “Are you writing another book to help women speak up? I’m trying to help my clients be quiet.” Then she said more seriously, “Why do people think they have to tell each other everything they feel?”

— Harriet Lerner

88. “Truth is, nothing you say can ensure that the other person will get it, or respond the way you want. You may never exceed his threshold of deafness. She may never love you, not now or ever. And if you are courageous in initiating, extending, or deepening a difficult conversation, you may feel even more anxious and uncomfortable, at least in the short run.”

— Harriet Lerner

89. “One might debate whether it is preferable to be a cat or a person, but why get into it? If you are reading this now, you are not a cat and never will be. So along with the good days, you’re going to experience the entire range of painful emotions that make us human.”

— Harriet Lerner

90. “Respect the fact that all you do and are now, has evolved for a good reason and serves an important purpose.”

— Harriet Lerner

91. “Moving in this direction requires us to clarify – to ourselves and others – what’s important to us. Having an authentic voice means that: We can openly share competence as well as problems and vulnerability. We can warm things up and calm them down. We can listen and ask questions that allow us to truly know the other person and to gather information about anything that may affect us. We can say what we think and feel, state differences, and allow the.”

— Harriet Lerner

92. “Remember that women have a long legacy of assuming responsibility for other people’s feelings and for caring for others at the expense of the self. Some of us may care for others by picking up their dirty socks or doing their “feeling work”; some by being less strong, self-directed, and competent than we can be so as to avoid threatening those important to us. Changing our legacy is possible but not easy. Think small to begin with, but think.”

— Harriet Lerner

93. “Differences don’t just threaten and divide us. They also inform, enrich, and enliven us. Indeed, differences are the only way we learn. If our intimate relationships were composed only of people identical to ourselves, our personal growth would come to an abrupt halt.”

— Harriet Lerner

94. “Likewise, the other person has a right to know us accurately, to consider the relationship and make plans for the future based on facts, not fantasies or projections.”

— Harriet Lerner

95. “Change requires courage, but the failure to change does not signify the lack of it.”

— Harriet Lerner

96. “It’s remarkable how many couples can precisely describe their particular pattern of painful fighting, and claim to be helpless to change it.”

— Harriet Lerner

97. “I feel calmed and relieved when my husband knocks at my study door in the middle of a fight, puts his arms around me, and says, “I love you. This is stupid. Let’s just drop it.” Like two kids in the sandbox, we’re suddenly light and playful again.”

— Harriet Lerner

98. “As many have observed, it is easy to tell a lie, but it is almost impossible to tell only one.”

— Harriet Lerner

99. “Separateness” does not mean emotional distance, which is simply one means of managing anxiety or emotional intensity. Rather, separateness refers to the preservation of the “I” within the “we” – the ability to acknowledge and respect differences and to achieve authenticity within the context of connectedness.”

— Harriet Lerner

100. “The right to be different, whether by choice or necessity, is our greatest right as human beings. And dealing with differences is the greatest of all human challenges. People react anxiously and fearfully to differences. We learn to hate, glorify, deny, exaggerate, or eradicate a difference. Or we try to get comfortable by shaming the different person or group.”

— Harriet Lerner