Feelings of intimacy can help us feel more connected to the people we love. Intimacy is a decision.
It’s a risk too, because intimacy demands vulnerability and authenticity.
When you feel intimate, you feel safe enough to let down your guard.
You let another person see the real you.
You may even discover parts of you that you haven’t met before.
Being seen (and accepted) on this deep level is healing and freeing. It can help us remember who we really are.
When you allow yourself to ‘go there’, you find that intimacy evokes feelings of connection and closeness.
What does intimacy mean to you? Check out these 40 quotes for inspiration.
- I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other’s wounds; they repair the broken skin. — Lauren Oliver
- The deepest moments of intimacy occur when you’re not talking. — Patricia Love
- Intimacy is a totally different dimension. It is allowing the other to come into you, to see you as you see yourself. — Osho
- Real intimacy is a sacred experience. It never exposes its secret trust and belonging to the voyeuristic eye of a neon culture. Real intimacy is of the soul, and the soul is reserved. — John O'Donohue
- Intimacy is not something that just happens between two people; it is a way of being alive. At every moment, we are choosing either to reveal ourselves or to protect ourselves, to value ourselves or to diminish ourselves, to tell the truth or to hide. To dive into life or to avoid it. Intimacy is making the choice to be connected to, rather than isolated from, our deepest truth at that moment. — Geneen Roth
- If fear is the great enemy of intimacy, love is its true friend. — Henri Nouwen
- Real intimacy is only possible to the degree that we can be honest about what we are doing and feeling. — Joyce Brothers
- Intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them and their response is ‘you’re safe with me’, that’s intimacy. — Taylor Jenkins Reid
- Intimacy transcends the physical. It is a feeling of closeness that isn’t about proximity but of belonging. It is a beautiful emotional space in which two become one. — Steve Maraboli
- Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone — and finding that that's OK with them. — Alain de Botton
- Real intimacy is a sacred experience. It never exposes its secret trust and belonging to the voyeuristic eye of a neon culture. Real intimacy is of the soul, and the soul is reserved. — John O'Donohue
- The trick ... is to find the balance between the bright colors of humor and the serious issues of identity, self-loathing, and the possibility for intimacy and love when it seems no longer possible or, sadder yet, no longer necessary. ― Wendy Wasserstein
- If you age with somebody, you go through so many roles – you’re lovers, friends, enemies, colleagues, strangers; you’re brother and sister. That’s what intimacy is if you’re with your soulmate. — Cate Blanchett
- Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are. — Amy Bloom
- Passion is the quickest to develop, and the quickest to fade. Intimacy develops more slowly, and commitment more gradually still. — Robert Sternberg
- It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;—it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others. — Jane Austen
- Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give. — Bertrand Russell
- Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. — Rollo May
- Intimacy is not purely physical. It’s the act of connecting with someone so deeply, you feel like you can see into their soul. — Reshall Varsos
- You can’t find intimacy—you can’t find home—when you’re always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood. — Junot Díaz
- True intimacy is a human constant. People of all types find it equally hard to achieve, equally precious to hold. Age, education, social status, make little difference here; even genius does not presuppose the talent to reveal one's self completely and completely absorb one's self in another personality. Intimacy is to love what concentration is to work: a simultaneous drawing together to attention and release of energy. — Robert Grudin
- There's nothing more intimate in life than simply being understood. And understanding someone else. — Brad Meltzer
- This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark. — Elizabeth Gilbert
- Intimacy is the deep connection, where your souls and skins are one distance, age, silence and the like fails to ravage. — Priya Lakshmi
- Intimacy doesn’t have all that much to do with backseats of cars. Real intimacy is brushing your teeth together. — Gabrielle Zevin
- The need for love and intimacy is a fundamental human need, as primal as the need for food, water, and air. — Dean Ornish
- The promise of intimacy is also its risk: the more intimacy two people share, the more power they give to each other to cause hurt. — Karen J. Prager
- To have someone understand your mind is a different kind of intimacy altogether. — Farraz Kazi
- Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships. — Harriet Lerner
- You know what intimacy is? It’s into-me-you-see … it’s allowing someone to know who you are when you have all these defenses to keep them from knowing. — Martin De Maat
- Real connection and intimacy is like a meal, not a sugar fix. — Kristin Armstrong
- Physical intimacy isn’t and can never be an effective substitute for emotional intimacy. — John Green
- The highest form of love is the love that allows for intimacy without the annihilation of difference. — Parker J. Palmer
- The whole point of intimacy is to serve each other in growth and love, hopefully in better ways than we can serve ourselves. Otherwise, why engage in intimacy if your growth and love are served more by living alone? Intimacy is about growing more than you could by yourself, through the art of mutual gifting. — David Deida
- The purpose of an intimate relationship is not that it be a place where we can hide from our weaknesses, but rather where we can safely let them go. — Marianne Williamson
- 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 Powell
- If honesty is the key to intimacy, it means we don't have to be perfect and we don't have to pretend to be perfect. — Donald Miller
- Intimacy is not just physical; it is the deep bond of knowing. — Anonymous
- Only intimacy with the self will bring about true healing. — Deepak Chopra
- I don’t crave an intimacy that involves a touch of a hand, but instead one that causes a flame to burn in my soul. — Unknown
