J Coudert Quotes & Sayings

It is one of those quirks of human nature that you love the person whom you treat well, not necessarily the person who treats you well. — Jo Coudert

If life is envisioned as a continuously running motion picture, the keeping of a notebook stops the action and allows a meaningful scene to be explored frame by frame. — Jo Coudert

Self-affirmation cannot be found in love; it is a prior condition of genuine love. — Jo Coudert

Most people ask of their friends that they understand them, but, on balance, I think I prefer a friend who understands himself. — Jo Coudert

At what age should one marry? As a rule of thumb, perhaps not until you are past the age of feeling strongly that you must marry. — Jo Coudert

If a man has a sense of identity that does not depend on being shored up by someone else, it cannot be eroded by someone else. If a woman has a sense of identity that does not depend on finding that identity in someone else, she cannot lose her identity in someone else. And so we return to the central fact: it is necessary to be. — Jo Coudert

We find what we expect to find. We do not see the world as it is but as we are. — Jo Coudert

We can win the struggle to avoid responsibility for our personal lives, but if we do, what we lose is our lives. — Jo Coudert

Operating in an unlit world, the unconscious mind is a brilliant detective. — Jo Coudert

The people trying to change others can conveniently be termed the angry, while the people trying to change themselves might be called the guilty, although it would be just as descriptive to speak of the controlling and the dependent, or the paranoid and the repressive, or, inelegantly, the screamers and the criers. In some circles, attaching labels to people rates only a little higher than chicken stealing, because ... a label immediately ends attempts to understand the individual. — Jo Coudert

Cookbooks, I found, are intended for people with time to cook - and, surprisingly often, for people who already know how to cook. — Jo Coudert

It is rewarding to find someone you like, but it is essential to like yourself. It is quickening to recognize that someone is a good and decent human being, but it is indispensable to view yourself as acceptable. It is a delight to discover people who are worthy of respect and admiration and love, but it is vital to believe yourself deserving of these things. — Jo Coudert

It is possible to ruin a chicken in the cooking of it, but not easily. Short of burning it or letting it get dried out, you can hardly go wrong. — Jo Coudert

You do not need to be loved, not at the cost of yourself. The single relationship that is truly central and crucial in a life is the relationship to the self. — Jo Coudert

If you defy the system long enough you'll be rewarded. At first life takes revenge and reduces you to a sniveling mess. But keep sniveling, have the madness, the audacity, to do what interests you, forget about your pension, and eventually life will say all right, we'll let you do it. — Jo Coudert

Almost anything can be stretched to serve more people by being added to a white sauce or canned gravy or undiluted or very slightly diluted canned soup and served over noodles or rice. With chops or chocolate eclairs, however, the only solution is to claim you don't like them. — Jo Coudert

What nonsense it is, this desire to be without limitations, this wish always to be seen in the most flattering light. We are anxious, not because we think so little of ourselves, but because we think so much of ourselves. We are anxious, not that we may appear in the worst light, but that we may not appear in the best light. Anxiety is born of self-consciousness, and it is alleviated to the exact extent that we can drop consciousness of the self. — Jo Coudert

There is no way of steering successfully between a failed situation and a failed self except by stopping and taking our bearings. — Jo Coudert

The unlived life is not worth examining ... Self-awareness, self-examination, self-consciousness are for the quiet moments. In the arena they are paralyzing. The self must not be held out of the arena until living skills have been learned. — Jo Coudert

Men fear being used; women fear being used up. — Jo Coudert

The more deeply the path is etched, the more it is used, and the more it is used, the more deeply it etched. — Jo Coudert

A cruel joke has been played on us. We are fated always to remember what we learned but never to recall the experiences that taught us. Who can remember being born? Yet, it is possible to speculate that anxiety has its roots in this experience, that dread of abandonment, fears of separation, intolerable loneliness go back to this moment. Who can remember being cared for as an infant? ... Who can remember being toilet-trained? ... Who can remember the attachment which developed to the parent of the opposite sex? ... We cannot remember but what we have forgotten lives on dynamically. — Jo Coudert

To live with the terrible truths about ourselves is the only way of not living them out. A need denied has infinitely more power than a need accepted. — Jo Coudert

The divorced person is like a man with a black patch over one eye: he looks rather dashing but the fact is that he has been through a maiming experience. — Jo Coudert

Many people, if they were to treat other people as they treat their spouses, would soon have not a friend in the world. Why it is assumed that marriage is more impervious to the effects of discourtesy than friendship, I do not know ... — Jo Coudert

Hardening of the hearteries is the most serious affliction besetting marriage, and warm, good-humored, approving words are the only effective preventive. — Jo Coudert

I saw one of the absolute truths of this world: each person is worrying about himself; no one is worrying about you. He or she is worrying about whether you like him, not whether he likes you. He is worrying about whether he looks prepossessing, not whether you are dressed correctly. He is worrying about whether he appears poised, not whether you are. He is worrying about whether you think well of him, not whether he thinks well of you. The way to be yourself ... is to forget yourself. — Jo Coudert

In order to plan your future wisely, it is necessary that you understand and appreciate your past. — Jo Coudert

Every life is a dilemma that must be solved by the person living it. — Jo Coudert

Of all the people you will know in a lifetime,
you are the only one you will never leave or lose.
To the question of your life,
You are the only answer.
To the problems of your life,
You are the only solution. — Jo Coudert