The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What's left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the idea that people often remember negative experiences more vividly than positive ones.
Bertolt Brecht emphasizes the tendency of humanity to focus on the pains and traumas they have endured rather than the love and affection they have received. The imagery of wounds leaving scars suggests that while joyful moments may fade, the marks of suffering endure in our memory, shaping our perspectives and experiences.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about trauma and healing in a mental health context.
The shrill voices of those who give orders Are full of fear like the squeakings of Piglets awaiting the butcher's knife, as their fat arses Sweat with anxiety in their office chairs.... Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but The rulers too.
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.
War is like love, it always finds a way.
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
Recently my fingers have developed a prejudice against comparatives. They all follow this pattern: a squirrel is smaller than a tree; a bird is more musical than a tree. Each of us is the strongest one in his or her own skin. Characteristics should take off their hats to one another, instead of spitting in each other's faces.
As it defines itself, every society defines other societies. That definition almost always takes the form of a condemnation: the 'other' is the barbarian.
What has validity is your living, not what happens tomorrow.
In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation; now it is my friend. What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?
I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that.
After all, if freedom of speech means anything, it means a willingness to stand and let people say things with which we disagree, and which do weary us considerably.
Frequently consider the connection of all things in the universe. .. We should not say 'I am an Athenian' or 'I am a Roman' but 'I am a citizen of the Universe.
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