Top 100 Alice Miller Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Disrespect is the weapon of the weak.”

— Alice Miller

2. “Emotional access to the truth is the indispensable precondition of healing.”

— Alice Miller

3. “Genuine forgiveness does not deny anger but faces it head-on.”

— Alice Miller

Featured in: Anger Quotes

4. “An unacknowledged trauma is like a wound that never heals over and may start to bleed again at any time.”

— Alice Miller

5. “Empathy grows as we learn.”

— Alice Miller

6. “The more we idealize the past and refuse to acknowledge our childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation.”

— Alice Miller

7. “For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.”

— Alice Miller

8. “If a mother respects both herself and her child from his very first day onward, she will never need to teach him respect for others.”

— Alice Miller

9. “What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.”

— Alice Miller

10. “The reason why parents mistreat their children has less to do with character and temperament than with the fact that they were mistreated themselves and were not permitted to defend themselves.”

— Alice Miller

11. “All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection.”

— Alice Miller

12. “Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated. We can only repress them, delude ourselves, and deceive our bodies. The body sticks to the facts.”

— Alice Miller

13. “Wherever I look, I see signs of the commandment to honor one’s parents and nowhere of a commandment that calls for the respect of a child.”

— Alice Miller

14. “Every child has a legitimate narcissistic need to be noticed, understood, taken seriously, and respected by his mother. In the first weeks and months of life he needs to have the mother at his disposal, must be able to use her and to be mirrored by her.”

— Alice Miller

15. “Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one’s own despised and unwanted feelings.”

— Alice Miller

16. “The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden; what is forbidden is to write about it.”

— Alice Miller

17. “Courage can be just as infectious as fear.”

— Alice Miller

18. “The true opposite of depression is not gaiety or absence of pain, but vitality: the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.”

— Alice Miller

19. “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.”

— Alice Miller

20. “Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn.”

— Alice Miller

21. “We produce destructive people by the way we are treating them in childhood.”

— Alice Miller

22. “In order to become whole we must try, in a long process, to discover our own personal truth, a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. If we choose instead to content ourselves with intellectual “wisdom,” we will remain in the sphere of illusion and self-deception.”

— Alice Miller

23. “The child has a primary need to be regarded and respected as the person he really is at any given time, and as the center – the central actor – in his own activity.”

— Alice Miller

24. “We can never do the right thing as long as we are out to please someone else.”

— Alice Miller

25. “Those children who are beaten will in turn give beatings, those who are intimidated will be intimidating, those who are humiliated will impose humiliation, and those whose souls are murdered will murder.”

— Alice Miller

26. “Society chooses to disregard the mistreatment of children, judging it to be altogether normal because it is so commonplace.”

— Alice Miller

27. “To forget and to repress would be a good solution if there were no more to it than that. But repressed pain blocks emotional life and leads to physical symptoms. And the worst thing is that although the feelings of the abused child have been silenced at the point of origin, that is, in the presence of those who caused the pain, they find their voice when the battered child has children of his own.”

— Alice Miller

28. “Child abuse is still sanctioned – indeed, held in high regard – in our society as long as it is defined as child-rearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order to escape the emotions from how they were treated by their own parents.”

— Alice Miller

29. “Oppression and the forcing of submission do not begin in the office, factory, or political party; they begin in the very first weeks of an infant’s life. Afterward they are repressed and are then, because of their very nature, inaccessible to argument. Nothing changes in the character of submission or dependency, when it is only their object that is changed.”

— Alice Miller

30. “The aim of therapy is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront his own history, and to grieve over it.”

— Alice Miller

31. “Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.”

— Alice Miller

32. “That probably greatest of narcissistic wounds – not to have been loved just as one truly was – cannot heal without the work of mourning.”

— Alice Miller

33. “The grandiose person is never really free; first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.”

— Alice Miller

34. “The free expression of resentment against one’s parents represents a great opportunity. It provides access to one’s true self, reactivates numbed feelings, opens the way for mourning and – with luck – reconciliation.”

— Alice Miller

35. “It is precisely because a child’s feelings are so strong that they cannot be repressed without serious consequences. The stronger a prisoner is, the thicker the prison walls have to be, which impede or completely prevent later emotional growth.”

— Alice Miller

36. “If we do not work on all three levels – body, feeling, mind – the symptoms of our distress will keep returning, as the body goes on repeating the story stored in its cells until it is finally listened to and understood.”

— Alice Miller

37. “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 Miller

38. “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.”

— Alice Miller

39. “It is possible to resolve childhood repression safely and without confusion – something that has always been disputed by the most respected schools of thought.”

— Alice Miller

40. “One can only remember what has been consciously experienced.”

— Alice Miller

41. “Child abuse damages a person for life and that damage is in no way diminished by the ignorance of the perpetrator. It is only with the uncovering of the complete truth as it affects all those involved that a genuinely viable solution can be found to the dangers of child abuse.”

— Alice Miller

42. “Regression to the stage of early infancy is not a suitable method in and of itself. Such a regression can only be effective if it happens in the natural course of therapy and if the client is able to maintain adult consciousness at the same time.”

— Alice Miller

43. “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 Miller

44. “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 Miller

45. “One of the best ways of keeping your temper in an argument, as most of us know only too well, is not to listen to anything the other person has to say.”

— Alice Miller

46. “A human being born into a cold, indifferent world will regard his situation as the only possible one.”

— Alice Miller

47. “It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person.”

— Alice Miller

48. “Both the depressive and the grandiose person completely deny their childhood reality by living as though the availability of the parents could still be salvaged: the grandiose person through the illusion of achievement, and the depressive through his constant fear of losing “love.” Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact.”

— Alice Miller

49. “Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves to obscure or deny real facts of our life history.”

— Alice Miller

50. “There are people who have benefited from therapy without being confronted with the past at all.”

— Alice Miller