Top 250 Marshall B. Rosenberg Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “NVC enhances inner communication by helping us translate negative internal messages into feelings and needs. Our ability to distinguish our own feelings and needs and to empathize with them can free us from depression.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

52. “We need to receive empathy to give empathy.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

53. “Keep in mind that other people’s actions can never ‘make’ you feel any certain way. Feelings are your warning indicators.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

54. “Our goal is to create a quality of empathic connection that allows everyone’s needs to be met.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

55. “Empathy allows us to re-perceive our world in a new way and move forward.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

56. “Empathy gives you the ability to enjoy another person’s pain.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

57. “You’ll find people less threatening if you hear what they’re needing rather than what they’re thinking about you.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

58. “Avoid ‘shoulding’ on others and yourself!”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

59. “The most dangerous of all behaviors may consist of doing things ’because we’re supposed to.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

60. “My ultimate goal is to spend as many of my moments in life as I can in that world that the poet Rumi talks about, ’a place beyond rightness and wrongness.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

61. “It’s harder to empathize with those who appear to possess more power, status, or resources.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

62. “When you are in a jackal environment, never give them the power to submit or rebel. We want to teach this to children very early: Never lose track that you are always free to choose. Don’t allow institutions to determine what you do.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

63. “We’re not taught to think in terms of needs. We don’t make nice dead people when we’re in touch with needs. Domination structures cannot maintain themselves when citizens are educated to be alive.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

64. “NVC self-forgiveness: connecting with the need we were trying to meet when we took the action that we now regret.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

65. “Unless we as social change agents come from a certain kind of spirituality, we’re likely to create more harm than good.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

66. “Don’t get addicted to your requests. Your objective is needs, not requests. Because then it becomes a demand.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

67. “I try never to hear what another person thinks of me. I enjoy life a lot more when I spend as little time as possible hearing or thinking about what other people think about me. I go to the needs behind the thoughts. Then I’m in a different world.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

68. “Anger tells us we’ve disconnected from life. The purpose in anger is to use it to come back to life.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

69. “Don’t hate the circumstance, you may miss the blessing.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

70. “Our ability to offer empathy can allow us to stay vulnerable, defuse potential violence, help us hear the word ‘no’ without taking it as a rejection, revive lifeless conversation, and even hear the feelings and needs expressed through silence.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

71. “Conventional compliments often take the form of judgments however positive, and are sometimes offered to manipulate the behavior of others. NVC encourages the expression of appreciation solely for celebration.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

72. “I never have to worry about another person’s response, only how I react to what they say.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

73. “Empathize, rather than put your “but” in the face of an angry person.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

74. “I think that there is a problem with rewards and consequences because in the long run, they rarely work in the ways we hope. In fact, they are likely to backfire.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

75. “When I am angry I have a judgment and an unmet need.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

76. “Fear of corporal punishment obscures children’s awareness of the compassion underlying the parent’s demands.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

77. “Life-Enriching Education: an education that prepares children to learn throughout their lives, relate well to others, and themselves, be creative, flexible, and venturesome, and have empathy not only for their immediate kin but for all of humankind.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

78. “To practice NVC, it’s critical for me to be able to slow down, take my time, to come from an energy I choose, the one I believe that we were meant to come from, not the one I was programmed into.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

79. “Always listen to what people need rather than what they are thinking about us.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

80. “Two things distinguish nonviolent actions from violent actions. First, you don’t see an enemy and second, your intention is not to make the other side suffer.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

81. “Expressing our vulnerability can help resolve conflicts.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

82. “Blaming and punishing others are superficial expressions of anger.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

83. “Never connect yourself with the other person’s pain. Just hear their need. Leave yourself out of the other person’s feelings and needs.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

84. “NVC helps us connect with each other and ourselves in a way that allows our natural compassion to flourish.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

85. “NVC is interested in learning that is motivated by reverence for life, by a desire to learn skills, to contribute better to our own well-being and the well-being of others.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

86. “Once you have access to key people in an organization, if you go into a meeting with enemy images of those people – then you are not going to connect.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

87. “A respectful understanding of another’s experience.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

88. “I don’t think you can have an authentic connection when one person is diagnosing the other.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

89. “It may be most difficult to empathize with those we are closest to.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

90. “How I choose to look at any situation will greatly affect whether I have the power to change it or make matters worse.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

91. “Children need far more than basic skills in reading, writing, and math, as important as those might be. Children also need to learn how to think for themselves, how to find meaning in what they learn, and how to work and live together.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

92. “A need is life seeking expression within us.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

93. “The key to fostering connection in the face of a ‘no’ is always hearing ‘yes’ to something else.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

94. “Punishment also includes judgmental labeling and the withholding of privileges.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

95. “We are responsible for what we hear other people say and for how we act.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

96. “Every time I mess up is a chance to practice.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

97. “People have been trained to criticize, insult, and otherwise communicate in ways that create distance among people.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

98. “Every message, regardless of form or content, is an expression of a need.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

99. “NO is always a YES to something else.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg

100. “Interpretations, criticisms, diagnoses, and judgments of others are actually alienated expressions of our unmet needs.”

— Marshall B. Rosenberg