It's not just the number of friends you have, and it's not whether or not you're in a committed relationship. It's the quality of your close relationships that matters.
Interpretation
The depth and quality of close relationships are more important than the quantity of friends or the status of romantic involvement.
This quote emphasizes the importance of meaningful and quality relationships over mere numbers or categories of relationships. It suggests that true fulfillment and happiness come from deep connections with a few individuals rather than having many acquaintances or being in a relationship without emotional depth.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of social connections in mental health.
Being human means there's a wall-builder in each of us. Our minds naturally divide the world into me and not-me, us and them. For thousands of years, our sages have taught that we're all one, yet we still divide wherever we look.
It's the quality of your relationships that matters.
The good life is built with good relationships.
It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected.
People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner, and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely.
Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative.
I have been in love with the Palestinian people for many years. I have two great-grandsons that are rapidly learning about the people here and the anguish and suffering and deprivation of human rights that you have experienced ever since 1948.
Hugs make you feel psychologically more secure and together.
And Hermione was struggling to her feet in the wreckage, and three red-headed men were grouped on the ground where the wall had blasted apart. Harry grabbed Hermione's hand as they staggered and stumbled over stone and wood. 'No - no - no!' someone was shouting. 'No! Fred! No!' And Percy was shaking his brother, and Ron was kneeling beside them, and Fred's eyes stared without seeing, the ghost of his last laugh still etched upon his face.
How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.
I certainly respect the belief of the Hobby Lobby owners. On the other hand, they have no constitutional right to foist that belief on the hundreds and hundreds of women who work for them who don't share that belief.
A spiritual partnership is between people who promise themselves to use all of their experiences to grow spiritually. They use their emotions to show them how to create constructive and healthy and joyful consequences instead of destructive and unhealthy and painful consequences.
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