Robert J. Waldinger

“Sibling relationships have been underemphasised in learning about child development.”

“An essential question regarding treatment is whether psychodynamic therapy is effective for specific disorders.”

“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.”

“Marriage is actually one of the things that keeps you happy.”

“It's the quality of your relationships that matters.”

“Poor parenting may be reflected in poor sibling relationships.”

“More than half of the complaints that patients bring to their doctors are emotional in origin. Most often, they include troubled or absent connections with loved ones.”

“When it comes to health care policy, we keep failing to take seriously the value of human relationships. The cost of this oversight is staggering.”

“The fact remains that many of the most creative and innovative hypotheses that are eventually verified by empirical research are born in the consulting room out of practitioners' work with individual patients.”

“It seems older people maximize their well-being more - they start to realize that life is short.”

“Insurance companies, government agencies, and the pharmaceutical industry all push for mental health care that is brief, intermittent, and focused on quick fixes, despite the fact that many people struggle with emotional difficulties that can only be addressed over time using special psychodynamic skills.”

“Once you've taken account of the quality of sibling relationships, knowing about the quality of parenting doesn't add much information.”

“Putting labels on entire groups of people makes things much simpler. If all New Yorkers are pushy, or all politicians are dishonest, we don't have to do the hard work of figuring out who's who.”

“In medicine, we spend billions each year on doing and a fraction of that amount on listening and reflecting.”

“Far from the stereotype that psychodynamic treatments are appropriate only for the 'worried well,' a growing body of evidence points to their efficacy in dealing with the most pressing mental health problems of our time.”

“We make artificial divisions everywhere: Democrats and Republicans, black and white, millennials and baby boomers. Even those of us who are against building walls find ourselves pointing accusing fingers at those wall-builders.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people make and how those choices work out for them, those pictures are almost impossible to get.”

“As we grow up, we're constantly defining ourselves. In my case: Caucasian, male, born in Iowa, live in Boston, Zen Buddhist, good at learning languages. With countless labels, I build up this creation I call my self.”