Top 280 Henry Cloud Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Do not let an out-of-control person be the cue for you to change your course. Just allow him to be angry and decide for yourself what you need to do.”

— Henry Cloud

152. “Appropriate boundaries don’t control, attack or hurt anyone. They simply prevent your treasures from being taken at the wrong time. Saying no to adults, who are responsible for getting their own needs met, may cause some discomfort. But it doesn’t cause injury.”

— Henry Cloud

153. “This also destroys our safety. If your boundaries have been injured, you may find that when you are in conflict with someone, you shut down without even being aware of it. This isolates us from love, and keeps us from taking in safe people.”

— Henry Cloud

154. “We were created for intimacy, to connect with someone with heart, soul, and mind. Intimacy occurs when we are open, vulnerable, and honest, for these qualities help us to be close to each other.”

— Henry Cloud

155. “In order for any of us to become fully functioning members of society, we must learn an interdependent dance with the community in which we live. We need each other. We need our friends. We need teaching and information from sources other than our parents. When we learn to use the community to meet our needs for relationship and truth, we can then be grounded wherever we find ourselves in life.”

— Henry Cloud

156. “If you are angry, even if someone else has sinned against you, it is your responsibility to do something about it.”

— Henry Cloud

157. “Many people cannot say, “I love you and I do not want to do that.” Such a statement does not make sense to them. They think that to love means to always say yes.”

— Henry Cloud

158. “Many times to set boundaries with someone is to risk losing the love that you have craved for a long time. To start to say no to a controlling parent is to get in touch with the sadness of what you do not have with them instead of still working hard to get it. This working hard keeps you away from the grief and keeps you stuck. But accepting the reality of who they are and letting go of the wish for them to be different is the essence of grief. And that is sad indeed.”

— Henry Cloud

159. “You will be amazed how much can change in your life when you finally begin to let go of what you can never have. All.”

— Henry Cloud

160. “If I can’t allow you to be a person in your own right, then I can’t empathize with you. I’ll always take your experience as meaning something about me. Or I’ll react to your feelings by thinking of myself, not you.”

— Henry Cloud

161. “Confrontation helps us learn about ourselves and change destructive patterns.”

— Henry Cloud

162. “But until then, you might find yourself laboring much longer than you should, still trying to get someone to change, thinking that one more coaching session will do the trick – or one more bit of encouragement, or one more session of feedback or confrontation. Or worse, one more concession.”

— Henry Cloud

163. “God has built emotions into our personalities for a reason: they are a signal. Much like a barometer measures atmospheric pressure, emotions work as a gauge to tell us the state of our soul.”

— Henry Cloud

164. “Self-control is a big deal in human performance. Getting better depends upon it. You cannot get better if it’s not you who has to get better. You are the performer, period. You are the only thing you can control.”

— Henry Cloud

165. “Denial of one’s need for others is the most common type of defense against bonding. If people come from a situation, whether growing up or later in life, where good, safe relationships were not available to them, they learn to deny that they even want them. Why want what you can’t have? They slowly get rid of their awareness of the need.”

— Henry Cloud

166. “There’s no better way to become a disintegrated character than to be your own authority.”

— Henry Cloud

167. “People who forgive can – and should – also be people who confront. What is not confessed can’t be forgiven.”

— Henry Cloud

168. “Change is frightening. It may comfort you to know, that if you are afraid, you are possibly on the right road – the road to change and growth. One businessman I know says that if he is not totally frightened at some point in every day, he is not stretching himself far enough. He is very successful at what he does.”

— Henry Cloud

169. “If what you dig up is painful or ugly, throw it away. That means to process it, mourn it, heal it, grieve it, repent of it, or whatever it takes to work it out of your system. You are growing a garden in your heart; some things you wish to increase, and others you need to weed out. Either way requires caretaking. That is your job as guardian of your heart.”

— Henry Cloud

170. “The leader’s job is to lead in ways such that people can do what they are best at doing: using their gifts and their brains to get great results.”

— Henry Cloud

171. “Unsafe people will never identify with others as fellow sinners and strugglers, because they see themselves as somehow “above all of that.”

— Henry Cloud

172. “Workers who continually take on duties that aren’t theirs will eventually burn out. It takes wisdom to know what we should be doing and what we shouldn’t. We can’t do everything.”

— Henry Cloud

173. “Many people do not think very often about what they think about. They just let their thoughts live inside their head, without observing or questioning them.”

— Henry Cloud

174. “Only we know what we can and want to give, and only we can be responsible for drawing that line. If we do not draw it, we can quickly become resentful.”

— Henry Cloud

175. “Encourage your child to think for himself, disagree, and talk about his feelings while accepting your authority.”

— Henry Cloud

176. “God’s solution for “I can’t live that way anymore” is basically, “Good! Don’t live that way anymore. Set firm limits against evil behavior that are designed to promote change and redemption. Get the love and support you need from other places to take the kind of stance that I do to help redeem relationship. Suffer long, but suffer in the right way.” And when done God’s way, chances are much better for redemption.”

— Henry Cloud

177. “Mature, healthy people need other people; they don’t isolate themselves... Needing love isn’t being immature. Rather, it gives us the energy we need to go out and slay our dragons.”

— Henry Cloud

178. “People tend to look at dating sort of like a safari – like they’re trying to land the trophy.”

— Henry Cloud

179. “If you are uneasy about a relationship, ask yourself, Does this relationship breed more togetherness or more isolation within me? If you feel alone in the relationship, that’s not a good sign. But remem-ber: the first person to look at is yourself.”

— Henry Cloud

180. “Other children communicate with actions, such as tantrums, yelling, name-calling, and running away. The trick is to disallow this form of expression and encourage verbal communication. “I want to know what you are feeling, but I want to hear you tell me instead of show me.”

— Henry Cloud

181. “Dating is a place to practice how to relate to other people.”

— Henry Cloud

182. “Part of being made in God’s image is having a need to be in relationship.”

— Henry Cloud

183. “You can’t master people, but you can become a master at choosing and dealing with people.”

— Henry Cloud

184. “Who a person is will ultimately determine if their brains, talents, competencies, energy, effort, deal-making abilities, and opportunities will succeed.”

— Henry Cloud

185. “He didn’t have the ability to empathize with her because he could not get past himself.”

— Henry Cloud

186. “Don’t get mad. Set a limit!”

— Henry Cloud

187. “Independence is not an option for us. Remember, God existed without us.”

— Henry Cloud

188. “For love to work, each spouse has to realize his or her freedom. And boundaries help define the freedom we have and the freedom we do not have. Marriage is not slavery. It is based on a love relationship deeply rooted in freedom. Each partner is free from the other and therefore free to love the other. Where there is control, or perception of control, there is not love. Love only exists where there is freedom.”

— Henry Cloud

189. “It’s hard to give up playing God when you’ve been doing it a long time.”

— Henry Cloud

190. “Our relationship with Christ – and any other successful relationship – is based on freedom.”

— Henry Cloud

191. “In many contexts, until we let go of what is not good, we will never find something that is good. The lesson: good cannot begin until bad ends.”

— Henry Cloud

192. “The Bible teaches two themes throughout: the first is that we are created in the image of God and that we have incredible value. The second is that we are sinful and broken. There is the ideal, and there is the real. Both are true, and both need to be reconciled into a grace-giving relationship with God and others.”

— Henry Cloud

193. “Feelings signal our state of being. Feelings tell us how we are doing, what matters to us, what needs changing, what is going well, and what is going badly.”

— Henry Cloud

194. “With reactive boundaries, you fight the friend who constantly bugs you. With proactive boundaries, you decide you don’t need that kind of a friend.”

— Henry Cloud

195. “Controllers can’t respect others’ limits. They resist taking responsibility for their own lives, so they need to control others.”

— Henry Cloud

196. “What does “work out your salvation” mean? It means that now that God has delivered and saved us, we are to take responsibility to live a life that reflects him and his ways: daily dependence on God, trust, love, honesty, and all the things that are of him. And while we are doing that, he is doing miraculous, divine things to achieve his ends.”

— Henry Cloud

197. “Each spouse must take responsibility for the following things: Feelings Attitudes Behaviors Choices Limits Desires Thoughts Values Talents Love.”

— Henry Cloud

198. “Parents get into trouble when they don’t empathize with their child’s pain. They either overidentify with the pain of the child and give in, or they get angry at the child’s pain and go to war. Empathy and keeping the limit is the answer for both extremes.”

— Henry Cloud

199. “People who are uninvolved in character growth can be unsafe, because they are shut off from awareness of their own problems and God’s resources to transform those problems. Instead, they act out of their unconscious hurts, and then hurt others.”

— Henry Cloud

200. “Safe people, for example, admit their weaknesses. They are humble. And they prove their trustworthiness over time.”

— Henry Cloud