Quotes About Expression

This difficulty in identifying and expressing feelings is common, and in my experience, especially so among lawyers, engineers, police officers, corporate managers, and career military personnel—people whose professional codes discourage them from manifesting emotions.

MBR: I'm not able to get as much out of your appreciation as I would like.

But, if you want to feel better, I'd like you to clarify what you would like people to do to make life more wonderful for you.

MBR: Ah, so it's my saying those two things that you appreciate.

Hearing all three pieces of information—what I did, how she felt, and what needs of hers were fulfilled—I could then celebrate the appreciation with her. Had she initially expressed her appreciation in NVC, it might have sounded like this: "Marshall, when you said these two things (showing me her notes), I felt very hopeful and relieved, because I've been searching for a way to make a connection with my son, and these gave me the direction I was looking for.

Love is not denying ourselves and doing for others, but rather it is honestly expressing whatever our feelings and needs are and empathically receiving the other person's feelings and needs.

the dangers of a language that implies absence of choice

The use of the common expression "have to", as in "There are some things you have to do, whether you like it or not," illustrates how personal responsibility for our actions can be obscured in speech. The phrase "makes one feel", as in "You make me feel guilty," is another example of how language facilitates denial of personal responsibility for own feelings and thoughts.

I scream nonviolently by calling attention to my own desperate needs and pain in the moment.

Saying "thank you" in NVC: "This is what you did, this is what I feel; this is the need of mine that was met.

Conventional compliments often take the form of judgments, however positive, and are sometimes intended to manipulate the behaviour of others. NVC encourages the expression of appreciation solely for celebration.

Note the difference between the following expressions of disappointment: Example 1 A: "You disappointed me by not coming over last evening." B: "I was disappointed when you didn't come over, because I wanted to talk over some things that were bothering me." Speaker A attributes responsibility for his disappointment solely to another person's action. Speaker B traces his feeling of disappointment to his own unfulfilled desire.

If you keep your mouth shut, no one can ever know how you really feel.

If we always express our opinion, no matter how hurtful or noncontributory it may be, we are exercising our right to be "me.

Frances Hesselbine knows that listening is a two-part maneuver. There's the part where we actually listen. And there's the part where we speak. Speaking establishes how we are perceived as a listener. What we say is proof of how well we listen. They are two sides of the same coin.

At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer.

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.

Art is anything you can get away with.

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

Books that distribute things... with as daring a freedom as we use in dreams, put us on our feet again.

Artist in each of the arts seek after and care for nothing but love.

You said: There's a lot of places out there, friend, so you would go, smuggling a suitcase of words across every border carved by the heel of mapmakers or conquerors, because you had an all-night conversation with the world, hearing the beat of unsung poems in every voice, visiting the haunted rooms in every face. Drive, you said, because poets must bring the news to the next town: You got a song, man, sing it. You got a bell, man, ring it.

You know, talking to you is as satisfying as smashing my fingers with a hammer.