Top 280 Henry Cloud Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Trying to get through life on your own limited strength, knowledge, and resources leads to futility and a loss of hope. But in God’s economy, getting to the end of yourself is the beginning of hope.”

— Henry Cloud

252. “Empty people can’t love others very selflessly. They’re operating out of a vacuum of insecurities and needs. You’ve seen what happens when someone who has never had a warm, giving relationship enters into marriage, where those skills are required. It doesn’t work, and just telling them to “love themselves first” won’t work either.”

— Henry Cloud

253. “It does “take a village” to grow a person, and to sustain one.”

— Henry Cloud

254. “Blame is a sort of comfort food for the soul. It diverts us from the effort of owning responsibility.”

— Henry Cloud

255. “Proactive boundaries go beyond problem identification to problem solving. Your child needs to know that in protesting, she has only identified the problem, not solved it. A tantrum doesn’t solve anything. She needs to use these feelings to motivate her to action, to address the issue at hand. She should think about her responses and choose the best one available.”

— Henry Cloud

256. “Unsafe people blame others instead of taking responsibility.”

— Henry Cloud

257. “Safe people will help you help your child.”

— Henry Cloud

258. “Love does not begin with oneself. Love begins by receiving love, internalizing it, and then giving it away to others – paying it forward.”

— Henry Cloud

259. “This is a perfect picture of what you want to develop in the soul of your child: a desire to do the right things and to avoid the wrong ones because of empathic concern for others and because of a healthy respect for the demands of God’s reality.”

— Henry Cloud

260. “Psychologists call this dynamic a “not me” experience: People have a character structure that does not allow them to see certain realities as part of themselves. They project things onto others and cannot own their own flaws.”

— Henry Cloud

261. “One of the worst things you can die with is potential. Die with failures before you die with potential.”

— Henry Cloud

262. “You can be free from whatever situation surrounds you to the degree that you are willing to take responsibility and ownership for it, even if it’s not your fault.”

— Henry Cloud

263. “Make the endings a normal occurrence and a normal part of business and life, instead of seeing it as a problem.”

— Henry Cloud

264. “People who apologize quickly may act like they are sorry or as if they are interested in holiness, but they are really leading someone on. They may say all the words, and some are taken in by their tears and “sorrow.” But in reality they are more sorry about getting caught. They do not change, and the future will be exactly like the past.”

— Henry Cloud

265. “It is one thing to have safety in relationship; it is quite another to be truly known and accepted in this relationship.”

— Henry Cloud

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

— Henry Cloud

267. “Someone who does not own his need to change does not change, and the hurt is likely to continue.”

— Henry Cloud

268. “I learned that structure allows us to invest in the things that are important to us but don’t exist inside of us yet. There are plenty of other existing tasks, challenges, and crises that threaten to derail us, but for the things we want to build – for those getting-better goals we want to achieve – we have to create a space and a routine for bringing them into existence.”

— Henry Cloud

269. “Unsafe people lie instead of telling the truth.”

— Henry Cloud

270. “We were made to take in those patterns and to live by them. That is what parenting is about. We internalize the ways of our parents, and then live by them. Thus, we are destined to repeat troublesome internalized patterns of relating or performing until we become aware of them and change.”

— Henry Cloud

271. “We are in a constant position of being loved.”

— Henry Cloud

272. “Unsafe people only apologize instead of changing their behavior.”

— Henry Cloud

273. “But in reality they are more sorry about getting caught. They do not change, and the future will be exactly like the past.”

— Henry Cloud

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “Blocking a child’s ability to say no handicaps that child for life. Adults with handicaps like Robert’s have this first boundary injury: they say yes to bad things.”

— Henry Cloud

278. “What reason, other than the fact that I want this to work, do I have for believing that tomorrow is going to be different from today?”

— Henry Cloud

279. “No real and deep change occurs outside of relationship and trust, for that is the place where the heart lives. People often say, “I know that in my head, not in my heart.” For the heart to know it, the heart must return to the vulnerable place where the rules were first written on it. Through this sort of vulnerability, it can learn new rules.”

— Henry Cloud

280. “Fear gets us in touch with our very real vulnerability, and it gets us in touch with our need for others and God. Many times people treat others very insensitively because they are warding off their fears of being vulnerable.”

— Henry Cloud

281. “Not Dating Sadly, some people who really want to be dating are on the sidelines, wondering if they will ever find anyone, or if anyone will find them. This is often caused by boundary conflicts, when people withdraw to avoid hurt and risk, and end up empty-handed.”

— Henry Cloud

282. “Many frustrated people try to live their lives as others have defined them.”

— Henry Cloud

283. “Good boundaries, both those that help us manage ourselves and lead others, always produce freedom, not control.”

— Henry Cloud

284. “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

285. “Just like an unpruned rosebush, your endeavors will be merely average without pruning.”

— Henry Cloud

286. “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

287. “If you find passive leanings in yourself, begin looking at how costly this has been for you. Look at the opportunities missed, people who moved on, and places you never went. This may be painful, but it will help you to start moving out of the “on hold” position in life.”

— Henry Cloud

288. “The bigger issue is that your character as a person works best when you are “integrated.” In my book Integrity, I talked about how the word integrity comes from the Latin word meaning “whole,” and how business and leadership work best when a person has an integrated or whole character. They are then running on all cylinders and are the same person on the job as they are at home. They are able to use all of their capacities in both places and accomplish their vision.”

— Henry Cloud

289. “The other thing that often happens in the ending conversation is that the ender runs into resistance from the endee and loses the verbal joust. Being more adept at the conversational dance, the endee talks the ender out of the ending.”

— Henry Cloud