David Richo Quotes

Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us.

A wound does not destroy us. It activates our self-healing powers. The point is not to "put it behind you" but to keep benefiting from the strength it has awakened.

The Five A’s (attention, appreciation, acceptance, affection, allowing) are simultaneously the fulfillment of our earliest needs, the requirements of adult intimacy and of universal compassion, and the essential qualities of mindfulness practice.

Once we make our relationship choices in an adult way, a prospective partner who is unavailable, nonreciprocal, or not open to processing feelings and issues, becomes, by those very facts, unappealing. Once we love ourselves, people no longer look good to us unless they are good for us.

What we are not changing, we are choosing.

We do not create our destiny; we participate in its unfolding. Synchronicity works as a catalyst toward the working out of that destiny.

Once we understand that what happens beyond our control may be just what we need, we see that acceptance of reality can be our way of participating in our own evolution.

Spirituality is the intersection of three paths: letting go of ego, an unconditional yes to the conditions of human existence, and an immeasurable compassion.

Most people think of love as a feeling, but love is not so much a feeling as a way of being present.

In the hero stories, the call to go on a journey takes the form of a loss, an error, a wound, an unexplainable longing, or a sense of a mission. When any of these happens to us, we are being summoned to make a transition. It will always mean leaving something behind,...The paradox here is that loss is a path to gain.

Humility means accepting reality with no attempt to outsmart it.

A healthy person is not perfect but perfectible, not a done deal but a work in progress. Staying healthy takes discipline, work, and patience, which is why our life is a journey and perforce a heroic one.

Our higher needs include making full use of our gifts, finding and fulfilling our calling, being loved and cherished just for ourselves, and being in relationships that honor all of these. Such needs are fulfilled in an atmosphere of the five A’s by which love is shown: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing.

Trust in someone means that we no longer have to protect ourselves. We believe we will not be hurt or harmed by the other, at least not deliberately. We trust his or her good intentions, though we know we might be hurt by the way circumstances play out between us. We might say that hurt happens; it’s a given of life. Harm is inflicted; it’s a choice some people make.

Mindfulness is an ancient meditation mode in which we let go of our fears, our attachments to control and being right, our expectations and entitlements, and our judgments of others. Instead of these popular strategies, we learn to simply stay present opening in the moment - with nothing in the way - so we can experience life as it occurs.

The foundation of adult trust is not “You will never hurt me.” It is “I trust myself with whatever you do.

The more invested I am in my own ideas about reality, the more those experiences will feel like victimizations rather than the ups and downs of relating. Actually, I believe that the less I conceptualize things that way, the more likely it is that people will want to stay by me, because they will not feel burdened, consciously or unconsciously, by my projections, judgments, entitlements, or unrealistic expectations.

We were born with four words engraved on our bodies and in our hearts: Love me, hold me.

We do not live on the Earth, we are a part of how the Earth lives.

At every stage of life, our inner self requires the nurturance of loving people attuned to our feelings and responsive to our needs who can foster our inner resources of personal power, lovability, and serenity. Those who love us understand us and are available to us with an attention, appreciation, acceptance, and affection we can feel. They make room for us to be who we are.

Bread takes the effort of kneading but also requires sitting quietly while the dough rises with a power all its own.

True optimism is not the prospect of control over pain or elimination of it but survival through it.

Early fear was felt cellularly and was indeed real. Defensive postures were necessary, but defenses generalize cellularly in adulthood and do not expire. It takes conscious work to undo them. Ironically, as long as we keep using defenses, we actually maintain the original force of the fear.

Acceptance is approval, a word with a bad name in some psychologies. Yet it is perfectly normal to seek approval in childhood and throughout life. We require approval from those we respect. The kinship it creates lifts us to their level, a process referred to in self-psychology as transmuting internalization. Approval is a necessary component of self-esteem. It becomes a problem only when we give up our true self to find it. Then approval-seeking works against us.

To be adult in relationship is not to be conflict-free, it's to resolve conflicts mindfully.