Quotes & Sayings About Trying To Change Someone You Love

I think that natural beauty is very charismatic ... I just believe in enhancing who we are rather than trying to manipulate or change it too much. — Elle Macpherson

Don't be sorry;
Don't you cry.
It's enough
That you tried.
I love you,
And that won't change.
It's not your fault
Things worked out this way — Margo T. Rose

It was easy to be good and kind in times of plenty. The trying times were the moments that defined a man.
And love? Love was something that did much to change a person. It brought joy as it brought suffering, and in turn brought about those moments that defined one's character. Love gave life to the lifeless. It was the greatest of all living powers.
But, as with all things, love had a dark side to it. — Renee Ahdieh

Sweet Evelyn, I think, I should have loved you better.
Possessing perfect knowledge I hover above him as he hacks me to bits. I see his rough childhood. I see his mother doing something horrid to him with a broomstick. I see the hate in his heart and the people he had yet to kill before pneumonia gets him at eighty-three. I see the dead kid's mom unable to sleep, pounding her fists against her face in grief at the moment I was burying her son's hand. I see the pain I've caused. I see the man I could have been, and the man I was, and then everything is bright and new and keen with love and I sweep through Sam's body, trying to change him, trying so hard, and feeling only hate and hate, solid as stone. — George Saunders

A Christian marriage is [not] one with no problems or even a marriage with fewer problems. (It may well mean more problems.) But it does mean a life in which two people are able to accept each other and love each other in the midst of problems and fears. It means a marriage in which selfish people can accept selfish people without constantly trying to change them
and even accept themselves, because they realize personally that they have been accepted by Christ. — Keith Miller

- "How about flipping a coin;" she made a pretty remark and the two women turned around and
looked at her irritated.
- "That's right, go ahead, jock about it. You are not the one trying to change her heart, I am, and you
know damn well how painful that can be!"
Sand of Passion — Georgia Kakalopoulou

Steve [sports psychiatrist] had already taught me to try and stop worrying so much about pleasing everyone. We knew that this was one of my most draining flaws and he again used three groups to clarify my thinking. There would always be some people, Steve said, who would care about me and love me. In contrast there would also be a select group of people who would never warm to me - no matter what I did. And in the middle came the overwhelming mass who were largely indifferent to any of my failures or triumphs. I needed to understand that most people didn't really care what I did or said. All my anguish about how they might perceive me was redundant. Steve helped me realize that I spent too much time trying to please those oblivious people in the middle or, more problematically, the small group who would never change their critical opinion of me. I should concentrate on the people who really did show concern for me. — Victoria Pendleton

If you want to change from sex towards love, try to understand your sexuality. Watch it, watch the mechanicalness of it. See the futility, see the whole absurdity of it - it is not leading you anywhere. Become a little more refined, become a little more subtle. Look not for the body, but somebody's being. Watch, explore. Sooner or later you will find somebody who fits with you. — Rajneesh

Last spring, David had offered this crazy solution to our woes, only half in jest: ... "What if we admitted that we make each other nuts, we fight constantly and hardly ever have sex, but we can't live without each other, so we deal with it? And then we could spend our lives together- in misery, but happy to not be apart." Let it be a testimony to how desperately I love this guy that I have spent the last ten months giving that offer serious consideration. The other alternative in the backs of our minds, of course, was that one of us might change. He might become more open and affectionate, not withholding himself from anyone who loves him on the fear that she will eat his soul. Or I might learn how to ... stop trying to eat his soul. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I could write stories; I could hide from the world and make my own instead of trying to change it or live in it. I could make paper people and I would love them too; I could make them almost real. — Ally Condie

He wagged his finger in my face. "You're not SUPPOSED to do anything. YOU'RE the one trying to change ME. Remember? As far as I'M concerned, YOU can do anything you want."
"Except criticize you."
"Hey," he said, "if that's how you want to spend your life, getting on my case"
he threw out his arms
"be my guest." He turned his deep blue eyes on me. "And anyway
" He let it hang there. He was smirking.
Suddenly I felt as if I were on roller skates. "What?"
"I know why you're doing it."
I stopped. He walked on.
"Doing what?" I said. "What? Why?" I think I was babbling.
He flipped his answer as blithely as a candy wrapper over his shoulder: "You know. — Jerry Spinelli

Nothing is going to stay the same; nothing's gonna sound like in 1952. There's some stuff that has some elements of back in the day, like back in the 90's, back in the 80's or whatever. Some elements, but it's not going to be the same, exactly, sounding. And I love it, I've seen the music change. I've seen the flow and the energy go from turned up to turned down to back to turned up. I like to try different stuff. I don't like to do the same old thing over and over again. I don't like to be repetitive, that gets on my nerves. — Juicy J

If you're trying to change someone you love, you don't love them. It's the oddnesses, the most unique imperfections that you'd miss the most. That's the stuff you can't replace. Everything else is easy to come by. — Crystal Woods

Vonnegut was talking," I say today, "about the psychic effects of trauma." There's a sentence of Alice Miller's looping in my mind, about grandiose people and depressives, Narcissus and Echo: "Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact." It's the main thing I've learned from reading all this psychology: the future is always trying to feel like the past. When it does, it feels like selfishness, hurt, loss at the hands of others. The trick is to let it empty. Maybe this is another way to come unstuck in time. — Kristin Dombek

Boro-babu, the world does not change, you destroy yourself trying to change it, but it remains as it is. The world is very big, and we are very small. Why cause people who love you to go through such misery because of it? — Neel Mukherjee

I'm through accepting limits 'cause someone says they're so Some things I cannot change But till I try, I'll never know! Too long I've been afraid of Losing love I guess I've lost Well, if that's love It comes at much too high a cost! — Stephen Schwartz

Trying to change someone is easier than trying to accept them It's how we're programmed — Katie Kacvinsky

Tam let his hand drop to his neck and slowly circled his fingers around it. It was a free, gentle touch and Casen knew that if he asked him not to, he would remove his hand and nothing would change. He couldn't get the words out; it wasn't the touch he had a problem with, it was the far away look in Tam's eyes that said he wasn't in the room anymore. The look that suggested he was lying on the ground, as the rain fell in buckets and a stranger knelt over him, trying to keep him awake.
Casen blinked and looked away, as the urge to cry for that lost look threatened. — Elaine White

You love Robert, not me. You don't love Lord Stuffy, so I tried to be like Robert."
The sweet idiot! She felt like weeping again. She began to protest, but he cut her off.
"I don't drink and I don't gamble and I don't have a mistress. I'm dull. You told me so, the first time we met. So I tried to change." He frowned. "Not the mistress. I'll never do that."
"Good," she whispered.
"I'm trying to be like Robert, but I'm no good at it. I drank wine. And brandy, lots of it. I didn't like it and it made me sick. I played hazard and I lost." He looked momentarily cheerful and her heart sank. "But I didn't like that either. If I was a real man like Mr. Fox, or Robert, I'd have lost thousands."
The sadder he looked, the more her heart ached, a happy ache.
"I failed you, Caro. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I'll always be Lord Stuffy," he said, and closed his tortured, bloodshot eyes. — Miranda Neville

The people who help us grow toward true self offer unconditional love, neither judging us to be deficient nor trying to force us to change but accepting us exactly as we are. And yet this unconditional love does not lead us to rest on our laurels. Instead, it surrounds us with a charged force field that makes us want to grow from the inside out - a force field that is safe enough to take the risks and endure the failures that growth requires. — Parker J. Palmer

I'm trying to decide what's worse. Someone being gone, but still out there, or someone being gone forever, dead. I think someone being gone, but still out there, might be worse. Then there's always the chance, the hoping, the wondering if things might change. If maybe one day he'll come back. There's also the wondering about what his new life is like. The life without you. Is he happier? And if he is, you're left being sad, wondering what it would be like if you were happy with him. But when someone is dead, he's dead. He's not coming back. There is no second chance. Death is a period at the end of a sentence. Someone gone, but still out there, is an ellipsis ... or a question to be answered. — Samantha Schutz

Have you ever seen a stereogram?
The 'Truth' the Stereogram shows us is there in front of us. Training and work doesn't make us see it.
It's a point of view, a different way of looking at it.
When you see it you try to explain it to someone else and you
realize you can't.
It simple, super simple, yet almost impossible to explain.
There are 'techniques' to see them but some people may spend
years trying without results. Others can do it in seconds.
It doesn't change the fact that the image is there all the time in
front of us.
And it's Beautiful. — T.R. Cordon

I love nature, but I try to change it a little bit, not copy it, — Elsa Peretti

Sometimes in love it just gets to the point where I have to give up. I have to give up trying and I have to give up believing because I know things won't change. To me, giving up isn't being weak. Giving up is being strong enough to let go. — Taylor Swift

I want to tell everybody that you won't hear me trying to pop bottles in the club and all that kind of stuff. It's just not me and I think as long as you stay within your element and your age bracket, sure you're going a couple of young folks and teens, but that's not who I'm focused on. I'm really not. I love whoever supports, but I'm just not going to try and go back there because times have changed. If you don't move with the times, you'll get left off. I'm trying to change with the times. — Ginuwine

Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right, nor do Two Rights Make a Left.

Which ever side you think is Correct. Great. That is what resonates with your perception... Dive deep within yourself to discover why you think you need to judge or change the person in your perception.. when the real change is the reflection in the mirror..reflected by the person you are trying to change... out of fear. Fear is the negative energies keeping you from the light of truth.

Be Yourself and Honor others for who they are. If we were all the same.. the world wouldn't have so many pretty colors and changes. — Jonathan Bailey

I'm an old man now. Old on the inside. I'm a drunk, and I hate to tell you, but I'm not prepared to change. So you have to figure out if you want to forgive me and love me like I am, or run away again. Or hell, stay here and hate me. Just ... know that I love you the best way I know how. I always have. I do the best I can. — Suzanne Palmieri

I'm on a constant path of self-discovery and change. I'm trying to become a better person, a nicer person. I love therapy - it's brilliant. — Julia Sawalha

If you think you are the mermaid, think again.
You are the ocean holding the mermaid afloat,
trying to change the world one dolphin at a time. — Kelli Russell Agodon

We don't need to justify love; it is there or not there. Real love is accepting other people the way they are without trying to change them. — Miguel Ruiz

Am touched that you are trying to comprehend me. A friend could not be more loving. I am more touched, still, that you are trying to understand - through rational thought - that which cannot be understood at all. There is no exact principle to be found here. The divine, as Boehme said, is unground - unfathomable, something outside the world as we experience it. But this is a difference of our minds, dearest one. I wish to arrive at revelation on wings, while you advance steadily on foot, magnifying glass in hand. I am a smattering wanderer, seeking God within the outer contours, searching for a new way of knowing. You stand upon the ground, and consider the evidence inch by inch. Your way is more rational and more methodical, but I cannot change my way." "I do have a dreadful love for understanding," Alma admitted. "Indeed you do love it, though it is not dreadful, — Elizabeth Gilbert

Trying to separate myself from my instincts of pessimism and cut out and define what it is that I really do love, what I'm here to be, why I'm here, and what I think is worth being alive for and fighting for. And those things change, but I think that that's something I am always chasing. — El-P

But beauty is about finding the right fit, the most natural fit, To be perfect, you have to feel perfect about yourself
avoid trying to be something you're not. For a goddess, that's especially hard. We can change so easily.
-Aphrodite — Rick Riordan

It's difficult to stop trying with the one you love. You always hope that this next time might work, might change everything for the better. — Donna Freitas

When you believe without knowing you believe that you are damaged at your core, you also believe that you need to hide that damage for anyone to love you. You walk around ashamed of being yourself. You try hard to make up for the way you look, walk, feel. Decisions are agonizing because if you, the person who makes the decision, is damaged, then how can you trust what you decide? You doubt your own impulses so you become masterful at looking outside yourself for comfort. You become an expert at finding experts and programs, at striving and trying hard and then harder to change yourself, but this process only reaffirms what you already believe about yourself
that your needs and choices cannot be trusted, and left to your own devices you are out of control (p.82-83) — Geneen Roth

You didn't like him, did you, Dad?"
"It wasn't that I didn't like him," my dad says slowly. "It was just that he lives in a completely different world, and I worried that he didn't really approve of you the way you are, that he was trying to change you into something else."
God, I never realized my dad was that perceptive..
"You see, the thing is," he says after we've both sat for a while in the sunshine, "the thing is that love is really the most important thing. I know it's hard for you to see it now" - he chuckles quietly- "but when I first laid eyes on your mother I thought she was fantastic, and I've never stopped loving her, not for a second. Oh yes, we've had our rough patches, and she can be a bit of an old battle-ax at times, but I still love her. That in-love feeling at the beginning settles down into a different, familiar sort of love, but it has to be there right from the start, otherwise it just won't work. — Jane Green