The only possible recourse a baby has when his screams are ignored is to repress his distress, which is tantamount to mutilating his soul, for the result is an interference with his ability to feel, to be aware, and to remember.
Alice MillerRead
If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Criticizing friends can be challenging; ensure your intentions are pure and not enjoyable.
This quote by Alice Miller suggests that while it may be necessary to offer criticism to friends, it is vital to evaluate our motivations. If expressing criticism comes from a place of pain for ourselves and concern for our friends, it is justified. However, if we find joy or satisfaction in criticizing them, it indicates a need to refrain from speaking, as it could harm the relationship.
Themes
CriticismFriendshipIntentionCommunicationSincerity
In practice
Example use cases
In a team meeting, this quote can encourage constructive feedback among colleagues.
More from Alice Miller
All quotes βThe truth about childhood, as many of us have had to endure it, is inconceivable, scandalous, painful. Not uncommonly, it is monstrous. Invariably, it is repressed. To be confronted with this truth all at once and to try to integrate it into our consciousness, however ardently we may wish it, is clearly impossible.
Alice MillerRead
We don't yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respect them and take them seriously as people.
Alice MillerRead
I have never known a patient to portray his parents more negatively than he actually experienced them in childhood but always more positively--because idealization of his parents was essential for his survival.
Alice MillerRead
It is not true that evil, destructiveness , and perversion inevitably form part of human existence, no matter how often this is maintained. But it is true that we are daily producing more evil and, with it, an ocean of suffering for millions that is absolutely avoidable. When one day the ignorance arising from childhood repression is eliminated and humanity has awakened, an end can be put to this production of evil.
Alice MillerRead
Genuine forgiveness does not deny anger but faces it head-on.
Alice MillerRead
Similar quotes
I never met a man that I didn't like.
Will RogersRead
Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
Doris LessingRead
Is it not hard that even those who are with us should be against us - that a man's enemies, in some degree, should be those of the same household of faith? Yet so it is.
John WesleyRead
Put together all the existing families and you have society. It is as simple as that. Whatever kind of training took place in the individual family will be reflected in the kind of society that these families create.
Virginia SatirRead
When you connect to someone on a human level, and you get to know about them, you can begin to love the things that make them different. That's when fear dissipates, and that's when we can live the life that we're all supposed to be living.
Ruth NeggaRead
Two aged men, that had been foes for life, Met by a grave, and wept - and in those tears They washed away the memory of their strife; Then wept again the loss of all those years.
Jean PaulRead