QuoteProject
If you wish me to weep, you yourself must first feel grief.
Horace
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

To cause someone to empathize with your sorrow, you must first be vulnerable with your own feelings.

This quote by Horace emphasizes the importance of mutual emotional experience in relationships. It suggests that genuine empathy and understanding can only occur when both parties are open about their feelings, particularly regarding sorrow. It highlights that one cannot expect another to share in their grief unless they have first experienced or expressed their own emotions authentically.

Themes

GriefEmpathyRelationshipsFeelingsUnderstanding

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion about emotional support, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of sharing feelings.

More from Horace

Only a stomach that rarely feels hungry scorns common things.
HoraceRead
Now is the time for drinking; now the time to beat the earth with unfettered foot.
HoraceRead
Carpe diem! Rejoice while you are alive; enjoy the day; live life to the fullest; make the most of what you have. It is later than you think.
HoraceRead
It is of no consequence of what parents a man is born, as long as he be a man of merit.
HoraceRead
It is not the rich man you should properly call happy, _x000D_ but him who knows how to use with wisdom the blessings of the gods, _x000D_ to endure hard poverty, and who fears dishonor worse than death, _x000D_ and is not afraid to die for cherished friends or fatherland.
HoraceRead
Few cross the river of time and are able to reach non-being. Most of them run up and down only on this side of the river. But those who when they know the law follow the path of the law, they shall reach the other shore and go beyond the realm of death.
HoraceRead

Similar quotes

Like officer Dave.He's never said much about his life, but I can tell he's scarred. And he knows I'm scarred too. The wounded always recognize the wounded. We can smell each other.
Sherman AlexieRead
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
Oscar WildeRead
Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.
Jonathan SacksRead
For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
George OrwellRead
A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.
Percy Bysshe ShelleyRead
All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares.
Toni MorrisonRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.