Hardness Quotes - page 2
Just as divorce according to the Saviour's word was not permitted from the beginning, but on account of the hardness of our heart was a concession of Moses to the human race, so too the eating of flesh was unknown until the deluge. But after the deluge, like the quails given in the desert to the murmuring people, the poison of flesh-meat was offered to our teeth. ... At the beginning of the human race we neither ate flesh, nor gave bills of divorce, nor suffered circumcision for a sign. Thus we reached the deluge. But after the deluge, together with the giving of the law which no one could fulfil, flesh was given for food, and divorce was allowed to hard-hearted men, and the knife of circumcision was applied, as though the hand of God had fashioned us with something superfluous. But once Christ has come in the end of time, and Omega passed into Alpha and turned the end into the beginning, we are no longer allowed divorce, nor are we circumcised, nor do we eat flesh.
Jerome
Many young women of twenty-six in these days could face such an ordeal, I suppose. I have observed a sort of imitative hardness about the products of the higher education of women today which would carry them through anything, perhaps. I am not prepared to say it is a bad thing in the conditions of feminine life prevailing at present. Mabel, however, is not like that. She is as unlike that as she is unlike the simpering misses that used to surround me as a child. She has plenty of brains; she is full of character; her mind and her tastes are cultivated; but it is all mixed up' - Mr Cupples waved his hands in a vague gesture - 'with ideals of refinement and reservation and womanly mystery. I fear she is not a child of the age.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley
If we look at the parpens piled up on the building site or at the block of bronze, nothing about them manifests that they are suited to being a house or a statue. ... Aristotle speaks of the materials considered as such in terms of "the buildable" (I, 201a 16, b Bf), coining an adjective whose suffix expresses capacity (what he calls dunamis). This capacity, as we have seen, cannot be grasped after the manner of that with which perception provides us (color, hardness, etc.); it requires a gaze capable of probing more deeply, of proceeding from the real to the possible-as when Michelangelo "sees" a David in the formless block abandoned by other sculptors.
Rémi Brague
Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.
Buckminster Fuller
As I was turning, he caught me by the hand, and with tears in his eyes said, "Come again to my house; for if thou and I were but an hour of a day together, we should be nearer one to the other"; adding that he wished me no more ill than he did to his own soul. I told him if he did he wronged his own soul; and admonished him to hearken to God's voice, that he might stand in his counsel, and obey it; and if he did so, that would keep him from hardness of heart; but if he did not hear God's voice, his heart would be hardened. He said it was true.
George Fox
During the 20th century, we came to understand that the essence of all substances - their colour, texture, hardness and so forth - is set by their structure, on scales far smaller even than a microscope can see. Everything on Earth is made of atoms, which are, especially in living things, combined together in intricate molecular assemblages.
Martin Rees
The standard Christian conscience does not permit the believer to look upon the self and find beauty, goodness, natural kindness, strength. Self-knowledge is tainted with self-hatred. The rules of the game of the Christian conscience are such that, when I look within, I must take the blame for all evil, all hardness of the heart that I find, but give God all the credit for any evidence of love. ... It is not surprising that the practice of meditation ... has remained under a cloud in the West, and that we have, consequently, created a culture of extroverts.
Sam Keen
Those with hard temperaments like to win through struggle; they don't like to be defeated. Inferior hard temperaments are explosive and rash, fierce and violent. Soft temperaments are placid and earnest. Inferior soft temperaments are weak-willed and do not seek a thorough understanding of the skills. Tai chi chuan stresses that hardness and softness complement each other. Training teaches one to be hard, but not excessively so, soft, yet not weak. This is to truly absorb the teachings.Those with soft temperaments easily improve. Those with inferior hard temperaments always mistake slowness and lack of force for sluggishness and weakness. Actually, slowness and forcelessness are fundamental aspects of training. Just as steel is produced by applying heat to iron, tempering it, skills of tai chi chuan are refined gradually over a long time.
Wu Kung-tsao
The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.
Willa Cather
A lot of bodybuilding fans were expecting this to be Iris Kyle's year. After being ignored and overlook for several years - in part due to the infamous "guidelines" she had won the heavyweight Ms. Olympia last fall in Las Vegas and in the opinion of many (but, of course, not the the opinion of all) should have taken the overall. In addition, nobody could remember Iris coming into a contest in the past few years in anything but her best shape. So it seemed unlikely she would "beat herself" in the contest. Many were expecting yet another showdown between Iris and Vicky Gates. Certainly, if Vicky could bring up her legs a bit more and achieve the kind of hardness and definition Iris has become famous for, it might be quite a battle.
Iris Kyle
The long migrations meet across you and it is nothing to you, you have forgotten us, mother.
You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb and lay in the sun's eye on the tideline. It was long and long ago; we have grown proud since then and you have grown bitter; life retains
Your mobile soft unquiet strength; and envies hardness, the insolent quietness of stone.
Robinson Jeffers
