37 Quotes On Setting Boundaries

In today's fast-paced world, the ability to set and maintain boundaries is more essential than ever. Whether it's in our personal relationships, professional life, or self-care practices, setting boundaries helps us protect our mental and emotional well-being. Delving into this crucial aspect of life, we've curated a collection of 37 insightful quotes that illuminate the art and necessity of boundary setting. These quotes serve not only as reminders but as guiding lights, empowering you to define and uphold the limits that nurture your happiness and peace. Let's explore the wisdom and perspectives shared by thinkers, leaders, and creators on establishing healthy boundaries.

1. “No" is a complete sentence.” - Annie Lamott

2. “I like that: a little pressure on the understood boundaries of yourself. Sounded like something out of a self-awareness class, probably with yoga. See what kind of a pretzel you can tie yourself into and press on the understood... I was raving, if only to myself.” - Robin McKinley

3. “Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.” - Milan Kundera

4. “The need itself is not the call. ” - Charles E. Hummel

5. “Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions.” - Peggy Noonan

6. “We change our behavior when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing. Consequences give us the pain that motivates us to change.” - Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend

7. “If your boundary training consists only of words, you are wasting your breath. But if you 'do' boundaries with your kids, they internalize the experiences, remember them, digest them, and make them part of how they see reality.” - Henry Cloud

8. “Don't go overboard in praising required behavior: 'We have only done our duty' (Luke 17:10). But do go overboard when your child confesses the truth, repents honestly, takes chances, and loves openly. Praise the developing character in your child as it emerges in active, loving, responsible behavior.” - Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend

9. “Training moments occur when both parents and children do their jobs. The parent's job is to make the rule. The child's job is to break the rule. The parent then corrects and disciplines. The child breaks the rule again, and the parent manages the consequences and empathy that then turn the rule into reality and internal structure for the child.” - Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend

10. “We need to have a talk on the subject of what's yours and what's mine.” - Stieg Larsson

11. “every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world—that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimatesecrets of your marriage.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

12. “If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

13. “That's it on the maps; nature doesn't acknowledge frontiers. Neither can ecology... Where to begin to understand what we've only got a computerspeak label for, ecosystem? Where to decide it begins.” - Nadine Gordimer

14. “The most important distinction anyone can ever make in their life is between who they are as an individual and their connection with others.” - Anné Linden

15. “Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.” - Anne Carson

16. “There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

17. “Tolerance is nothing more than patience with boundaries.” - Shannon Alder

18. “The boundaries of this world are forever shifting – from day to night, joy to sorrow, love to hate, and from life itself to death; and who can say at what moment we may suddenly cross over the border, from one state of existence to another, like heat applied to some flammable substance? I have been given my own ever-changing margins, across which I move, continually and hungrily, like a migrating animal. Now civilized, now untamed; now responsive to decency and human concern, now viciously attuned to the darkest of desires.” - Michael Cox

19. “It was more than just material prosperity. America in 1960 was a country where restraint and boundaries were the natural conditions in all arenas. People married younger and stayed married; even with those added twenty-eight million, there were fewer divorces in 1960 than there had been a decade earlier. People did not have children unless they were married—only 2.5 percent of children were born out of wedlock, though the number in black households was disturbingly high—some 20 percent.” - Jeff Greenfield

20. “The only true borders lie between day and night, between life and death, between hope and loss.” - Erin Hunter

21. “Normally, he liked boundaries. Boundaries were the safety net. Boundaries kept people on the right path. But right now, he felt like rules were made to be broken and consequences were miles and miles away.” - Heather Burch

22. “The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.” - Siri Hustvedt

23. “All her life, Claire had had a problem figuring out where other people ended and she began. All her life, she’d taken on the world’s hurt; she held herself responsible. But why?” - Elin Hilderbrand

24. “Evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of any relationship is your responsibility. You do not have to passively accept what is brought to you. You can choose.” - Deborah Day

25. “Your choice is to be active or passive in your responses.” - Deborah Day

26. “Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.” - Marshall McLuhan

27. “Now I've been criticized for advocating that people push their boundaries because sometimes people get caught. Sometimes people get fired. Sometimes people lose their jobs because of pushing the boundaries too far, but it's an interesting experience. They found they didn't want to stay within those limitations that they were pushing. Once people find they can survive outside the limits, they're much happier. They don't want to feel trapped. So I think we can urge people to push the boundaries as far as they can, and if they get in trouble, fine; that's not too bad if that's what they want to do.” - Myles Horton

28. “There are limits to the dimension of fear. Until one meets the unknown. Then terror has no boundaries, no walls to keep it contained.” - Carol Hedges

29. “That all opposites—such as mass and energy, subject and object, life and death—are so much each other that they are perfectly inseparable, still strikes most of us as hard to believe. But this is only because we accept as real the boundary line between the opposites. It is, recall, the boundaries themselves which create the seeming existence of separate opposites. To put it plainly, to say that "ultimate reality is a unity of opposites" is actually to say that in ultimate reality there are no boundaries. Anywhere.” - Ken Wilber

30. “Be in your own skin, as an act of self-loving.” - H Raven Rose

31. “When I ask French parents what they most want for their children, they say things like "to feel comfortable in their own skin" and "to find their path in the world." They want their kids to develop their own tastes and opinions. In fact, French parents worry if their kids are too docile. They want them to have character. But they believe that children can achieve these goals only if they respect boundaries and have self-control. So alongside character, there has to be cadre.” - Pamela Druckerman

32. “The only real conflict you will ever have in your life won’t be with others, but with yourself.” - Shannon L. Alder

33. “Values are sometimes worth living and dying for, and are certainly worth dating and breaking up over.” - Henry Cloud and John Townsend

34. “In heated rooms, he often felt the outlines of his body, the border between him and the external world, grow disturbingly fuzzy.” - Ryu Murakami

35. “And after we have shown each other how we have set and kept the clear, healthy boundaries that help us live side by side with each other, let us risk remembering that we never stop silently loving those we once loved out loud.” - Oriah Mountain Dreamer

36. “Every woman that finally figured out her worth, has picked up her suitcases of pride and boarded a flight to freedom, which landed in the valley of change.” - Shannon L. Alder

37. “People who violate your boundaries are thieves. They steal time that doesn’t belong to them.” - Elizabeth Grace Saunders