Alice Miller Quotes

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

Do we mean love, when we say love?

Emotion is messy, contradictory... and true.

What good were real feelings anyway?

If I have got a feeling or emotion, I just express it as it comes. I am not good at filtering!

It is harder to hide the feelings we have than to feign the ones we do not have.

Genuine feelings are never the product of conscious effort. They are quite simply there, and they are there for a very good reason, even if that reason is not always apparent.

But, especially in love, only counterfeit emotions exist nowadays. We have all been taught to mistrust everybody emotionally, from parents downwards, or upwards. Don’t trust anybody with your real emotions: if you’ve got any: that is the slogan of today. Trust them with your money, even, but never with your feelings. They are bound to trample on them.

The most important thing is to be true to yourself, however you feel, and not try to feel or behave differently because you think you should, or someone has told you how you must feel. But do think about it. Unexamined feelings lead to all kinds of trouble.

The feelings I don't have I don't have. The feelings I don't have, I won't say I have. The felings you say you have, you don't have. The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have.

Avoid that romantic trap: saying more than you feel, forcing yourself to feel more than you've said!

How far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?

I can't cry on demand. I need to feel what I'm feeling. I can't just say, 'Give me a moment' and then cry.

Strong emotions are present in all people. Without feeling, we would not be human. It's unnatural for man to hide what he's feeling, though if taught to do so, he can learn. Love teaches a man to show what he is feeling. Love never presupposes that it can be discerned or felt without expression.

Instead of trying to manufacture feelings, use the way you already feel. Or at least add that in.

Personally, I didn't think there was anything wrong with sadness. Just the opposite – hypocrisy made people happy and truth made them sad.

I couldn't possibly have played someone with feelings towards a woman unless I had those feelings myself.

You decide whether you look at your reality or live pretending these feelings don't exist.

There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.

But it seems to me that a man cannot and ought not to say that he loves, he said. Why not? I asked. Because it will always be a lie. As though it were a strange sort of discovery that someone is in love! Just as if, as soon as he said that, something went snap-bang - he loves. Just as if, when he utters that word, something extraordinary is bound to happen, with signs and portents, and all the cannons firing at once. It seems to me, he went on, that people who solemnly utter those words, 'I love you,' either deceive themselves, or what's still worse, deceive others.

Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

I told him the truth, that I loved him and didn't regret anything about our lives together. But do we ever 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God' as my father used to say, to those we love? Or even to ourselves? Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?

Many times people come to me to be reassured. They ask, they say, 'I'm feeling very happy and blissful. What do you say?' What is the need to say anything? The very need shows that the happiness is unreal and imaginary.

Having an authentic emotional response is always a positive thing.

I never utter my real feelings about anything. My lighter, superficial side will always be too quick for the deeper side of me, and that's why it always wins.