Hardness Quotes

Every man of action has a strong dose of egoism, pride, hardness, and cunning. But all those things will be regarded as high qualities if he can make them the means to achieve great ends. (Giorgos Seferis)
There is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head. View quote
Theodore Roosevelt
When men do wrong, it is out of hardness; when women do wrong, it is out of weakness. View quote
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
America could carry on a two years' war by the confiscation of the property of disaffected persons, and be made happy by their expulsion. Say not that this is revenge, call it rather the soft resentment of a suffering people, who, having no object in view but the good of all, have staked their own all upon a seemingly doubtful event. Yet it is folly to argue against determined hardness; eloquence may strike the ear, and the language of sorrow draw forth the tear of compassion, but nothing can reach the heart that is steeled with prejudice. View quote
Thomas Paine
The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation. View quote
C. S. Lewis
The hardness of a diamond is part of its usefulness, but its true value is in the light that shines through it. View quote
B.K.S. Iyengar
Jazz vision is the fusion of music and art a real paradox of same-yet different. Here we play in exchanges, like the hardness of the key of c# major and from the softness of Db major - capturing, reflecting and improvising. View quote
Barbara Januszkiewicz
The thing which grieves and oppresses my heart with respect to poor Scotland, is the hardness of heart manifest in the levity and cruelty with which they speak of others. View quote
Edward Irving
Asian people have a unique way about them and a different sense of beauty. It's exotic to me. I like they way Asians project their feelings. There's a hardness to the culture, but at the same time there's a delicateness. View quote
Paz Vega
In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness. View quote
Tennessee Williams
One should feel in the right arm the vibration of the bow hair on the strings. [...] The moment tension or hardness enters into the hand then of course the vibrations will not be felt- they cannot penetrate. (Yehudi Menuhin)
Hardness shatters; strength endures. View quote
Robert Jordan
...that very loyalty to the past with its dream of beauty and with its real hardness and hardships. These things save us from what is the greatest peril of our age, the peril of materialism.... The struggle against materialism in the hearts of our people is one of the greatest struggles of this age. View quote
Stanley Baldwin
The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal. View quote
Pope Paul VI
Men have looked upon the desert as barren land, the free holding of whoever chose; but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was its acknowledged owner and would quickly assert the right of his family or clan to it, against aggression. Even the wells and trees had their masters, who allowed men to make firewood of the one and drink of the other freely, as much as was required for their need, but who would instantly check anyone trying to turn the property to account and to exploit it or its products among others for private benefit. The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more. Logical outcomes were the reduction of this licence to privilege by the men of the desert, and their hardness to strangers unprovided with introduction or guarantee, since the common security lay in the common responsibility of kinsmen. View quote
T. E. Lawrence
Some employees in slaughterhouses, she notes, rapidly develop a protective hardness and start killing animals in a purely mechanical way: "The person doing the killing approaches his job as if he was stapling boxes moving along a conveyor belt. He has no emotions about his act.” Others, she reveals, "start to enjoy killing and... torment the animals on purpose.” Speaking of these attitudes turned Temple's mind to a parallel: "I find a very high correlation,” she said, "between the way animals are treated and the handicapped.... Georgia is a snake pit-they treat [handicapped people] worse than animals.... Capital-punishment states are the worst animal states and the worst for the handicapped.” All this makes Temple passionately angry, and passionately concerned for humane reform: she wants to reform the treatment of the handicapped, especially the autistic, as she wants to reform the treatment of cattle in the meat industry. View quote
Oliver Sacks
There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now. View quote
Douglas Coupland
Ah, my friends, we must look out and around to see what God is like. It is when we persist in turning our eyes inward, and prying curiously over our own imperfections, that we learn to make God after our own image, and fancy that our own darkness and hardness of heart are the patterns of His light and love. View quote
Charles Kingsley
To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again! View quote
Virginia Woolf
A hardness such as this is taught by rough experience and despair alone. View quote
Anne Brontë
You can never enter the kingdom of God with hardness against any one, for God is love, and if you love God you will love one another. (Ann Lee)
The part which is nearest to the earth... is without knots and is "clear." But the upper part, on account of the great heat in it throws up branches into the air through the knots and this... is called "knotwood" because of its hardness and knottiness. The lowest part, after the tree is cut down and the sapwood of the same thrown away, is split up into four pieces and prepared for joiner's work, and so is called clearstock. View quote
Vitruvius
Christ's voice sounds now for each of us in loving invitation; and dead in sin and hardness of heart though we be, we can listen and live. Christ Himself, my brother, sows the seed now. Do you take care that it falls not on, but in, your souls. View quote
Alexander Maclaren
Why do we call ourselves 'Imagists'. Well why not? Well I think it is a very good and descriptive title and it serves to enunciate some of the principles we mos firmly believe in... Direct treatment of the subject... as few adjectives as possible... a hardness, as of cut stone... individuality of rhythm... View quote
Richard Aldington
He had detected a certain sensitivity, a capacity for imagination, in the the girl in New York. But the years and the roads, the bars and the cars and the beds and the bottles - they all have flinty edges, and they are the cruel upholstery in the dark tunnel down which the soul rolls and tumbles until no more abrasion is possible, until the ultimate hardness is achieved. So here she sat, having achieved the bland defensive heartiness of a ten-dollar whore. View quote
John D. MacDonald