Mutuality Quotes

“Friendship- my definition- is built on two things. Respect and trust. Both elements have to be there. And it has to be mutual. You can have respect for someone, but if you don't have trust, the friendship will crumble.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

“It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.”
― John Joseph Powell, The Secret of Staying in Love

“We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day.”
― Jack Gilbert, Collected Poems

“All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Having belief means not just expecting others to meet our standards, but also being consistent and trustworthy in fulfilling our own assurances.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Trust isn't solely about keeping faith in others' promises; it's also about being dependable in the promises we've made to others.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“To believe is to not only hold others to their word but also to prove ourselves reliable in the guarantees we have offered.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Belief encompasses both trusting others to uphold their commitments and being steadfast in keeping the promises we have given.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“It is hard for us to recognize it now, but Peter and Paul were introducing the first Christian family to an entirely new community, a community that transcends the rigid hierarchy of human institutions, a community in which submission is mutual and all are free.”
― Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood

“...Relationship is not about positional authority but about dynamic mutuality.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci, Vulnerable Faith: Missional Living in the Radical Way of St. Patrick

“All of us, when we engage in relatedness, fall under the gravitational influence of another’s emotional world, at the same time that we are bending his emotional mind with ours. Each relationship is a binary star, a burning flux of exchanged force fields, the deep and ancient influences emanating and felt, felt and emanating.”
― Thomas Lewis, A General Theory of Love

“You are the
remedy of intensity
i need in my life, to
spin me out of the
miserable monotony
of working on life's
daily assembly
lines.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones

“On the land an oak will grow
On a bough an owl may stand
From lasting cloud a rain will fall
Upon the earth to water seed.

Each to each returns its need
To act upon the other's call
No locking ring may stay the hand
Nor halt the seasons as they flow.

- Little Song”
― John Fairfax, Adrift on the Star Brow of Taliesin

“There's no key to great relationships, there's simply a well worn welcome mat.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones

“One of the clearest paths to building strong and healthy relationships is practicing mutual
compassionate accountability.”
― Gina Senarighi, Love More, Fight Less: Communication Skills Every Couple Needs: A Relationship Workbook for Couples

“As educators, as scholars — really, as readers — contested engagement is an important part of our work. We must engage with each other, in part, where we each are, and push each other to reach beyond and differently, to unlearn so that we might learn differently.”
― Leigh Patel

“To respond to the call of the other is to be a full and active human being.”
― David Murphy, Relational Depth: New Perspectives and Developments

“Therapy requires a collaborative working relationship in which both partners act on the basis of their implicit confidence in the value and efficacy of persuasion rather than coercion, ideas rather than force, mutuality rather than authoritarian control.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“There are about 56 incidences of the phrase 'one another' in the New Testament in relation to the members being in the body...This is the mutual giving and receiving in the body...Without every member of the body functioning, the body will be crippled or handicapped.”
― Henry Hon, ONE: Unfolding God's Eternal Purpose from House to House

“Yeshua’s (Jesus’) very life and ministry demonstrate the mutual and respectful existence of divinity and humanity within each person.”
― Candi Dugas, Who Told You That You Were Naked?

“In contexts of massively unbalanced power, love seeks dispersed and accountable power. Mutuality recognizes common power to give to, receive from, learn from, and challenge. And it aims at common well-being.”
― Cynthia Moe-Lobeda

“In fact, they, by being helpers to humanity, were actually able to guide humanity, not be guided, and they could control and execute decisions, not wait for someone else to control and execute decisions! That same word was used to refer to women; God described women the same way he described himself. Therefore, although wives were commanded to be submissive, wives’ roles as “helpers” elevate them to have control on guidance and decisions, and with guiding her husband/making decisions while “helping” her husband, that would mean that a husband would also have to honor his wife as a “helper” and submit to her guidance under her role as a “helper.”
― Lucy Carter, Feminism and Biblical Hermeneutics

“Love is often mutual, and so is intolerance!”
― Lucy Carter, The Reformation

“The power of nature is life in association. Nothing stands alone.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, The Clan of One-Breasted Women

“Whenever an individual’s own needs become so primary that they obscure the perception of another’s needs, mutual concern and empathy cannot exist.”
― Judith V. Jordan PhD

“It's not enough for us to mourn and resist the suffering and oppression of 2SLGBTQIA+ folks. We must also dare to imagine a world in which we are all embraced and celebrated in life-giving mutuality. We must stir our imaginations to conceive of a Church where every member of this vibrant Body is recognized for the divine image we reflect.

And before we nod in easy agreement to this truth, we must also recognize that we have been conditioned into a crisis of imagination. We have lost so much of that creative capacity- and we must rekindle it! And one crucial way to do that is to elevate those lives and voices that demonstrate that imagination, found most often among those very people who live under that suffering and oppression.

As Walter Brueggemann reminds us, "It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“The most important sphere of giving, however, is not that of material things, but lies in the specifically human realm. What does one person give to another? He gives of himself, of the most precious he has, he gives of his life. This does not necessarily mean that he sacrifices his life for the other—but that he gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness—of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the others sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness. He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy. But in giving he cannot help bringing some thing to life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects back to him; in truly giving, he cannot help receiving that which is given back to him. Giving implies to make the other person a giver also and they both share in the joy of what they have brought to life. In the act of giving something is born, and both persons involved are grateful for the life that is born for both of them.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“It surprises many to learn that women don't give up consent when they get married.”
― Ngina Otiende, The Newlyweds: Pursuing Mutuality, Health, and Happiness in Marriage

“Every word mattered to them. Because Matthäi was taking them seriously, they took him seriously too.”
― Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Pledge