Hardened Quotes - Page 3

• If we are at all sensitive to the life around us, to one another's pains and joys,
  to the beauty and fragility of the Earth, it is all about being broken open, allowing ourselves to
  step out from out hardened veneers and expose our core, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable in our emotional response to the world. And how can we not respond? This is what I mean by being 'broken open.' To engage. To love. Any one of these actions of the heart will lead to a personal transformation that bears collective gifts.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Pain, Mean, Heart

  Penguin Random House interview, www.penguinrandomhouse.com.

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• Only unconditional grace can transform a hardened heart into a grateful heart. Only a free gift can demolish any notion of quid pro quo. Only an utterly merciful act of love can fashion a new creation capable of love. As theologian Karl Barth puts it, 'As the beloved of God, we have no alternative but to love him in return.

  Mark Galli

  Fashion, Grateful, Heart

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• Healing is embracing what is most feared; healing is opening what has been closed, softening what has hardened into obstruction, healing is learning to trust life.

  Jeanne Achterberg

  Healing, Health, Learning To Trust

  Jeanne Achterberg (1991). “Woman as Healer”, p.257, Shambhala Publications

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• The devil comes in many guises-anger in the form of justice-passion in the form of duty. When it first comes, the man knows and then he forgets. Just as your pleaders' conscience; at first they know it is all Badmashi (roguery), then it is duty to their clients; at last they get hardened.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Anger, Passion, Men

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.2607, Manonmani Publishers

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• We must refuse to lean upon the broken staff of human wisdom & cling to the gospel alone as the power of God to save a hardened humanity.

  Paul Washer

  Broken, Humanity, Staff

  Twitter post from Jul 06, 2013

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• When you stand and overcome a significant setback, you'll find an increasing inner confidence and self-assurance that has been created by conquering defeat. Absorbing and overcoming this kind of punishment engenders a sober, steely toughness that results in a hardened sense of independence and a personal belief that you can take on anything, survive and win.

  Bill Walsh

  Winning, Self, Punishment

  Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison, Craig Walsh (2009). “The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership”, p.32, Penguin

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• Steel can be tempered and hardened, and so can men. In this world of struggle, which was not designed for softies, a man must be harder than what hits him. Yes, he must be diamond-hard. Then he'll not be "fed up" with his little personal troubles.

  Herbert Newton Casson

  Struggle, Men, Steel

  "The Forbes scrapbook of Thoughts on the business of life". Forbes magazine, p. 236, 1950.

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• Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life.

  Loren Eiseley

  Beach, Stars, Real

  Loren Eiseley (2016). “The Firmament of Time: A Library of America eBook Classic”, p.39, Library of America

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• The strongest iron, hardened in the fire, most often ends in scraps and shatterings.

  Sophocles

  Strength, Fire, Iron

  Sophocles (2013). “Sophocles I: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus”, p.38, University of Chicago Press

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• O what hardness of heart mayst thou see in every corner whither thou goest, and where thou preachest, most part being as unconcerned as the very stones of the wall; and say what thou wilt, either by setting before them alluring promises or dreadful threatenings, yet people are hardened against both, none relenting for what they have done, or concerned about it.

  Thomas Boston

  Wall, Heart, People

  Thomas Boston (1791). “The Distinguishing Characters of True Believers: In Relation To, I. God in Christ, ... XI. Their Entering Into Rest in Christ. ... To which is Prefixed, a Soliloquy on the Art of Man-fishing. Now First Published from the Manuscripts of the Late Reverend and Learned Mr Thomas Boston, ...”, p.44

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• Let all the 'free-will' in the world do all it can with all its strength; it will never give rise to a single instance of ability to avoid being hardened if God does not give the Spirit, or of meriting mercy if it is left to its own strength.

  Martin Luther

  Giving, Doe, World

  J. I. Packer, Martin Luther, O. R. Johnston (1990). “Bondage of the Will, The”, Revell

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• I loved a woman whose beauty Like the moon moved all the humming heavens to music till the stars with their tiny teeth burst into song and I fell on the ground before her while the sky hardened and she laughed and turned me down softly, I was so young.

  Peter Meinke

  Song, Stars, Moon

  Peter Meinke (1991). “Liquid paper: new and selected poems”, Univ of Pittsburgh Pr

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• We live in a world populated by structures - a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history

  Manuel De Landa

  World, Mixtures, Construction

  Manuel De Landa (1997). “A thousand years of nonlinear history”, Zone Books (NY)

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• Churchgoers all across the nation say the Holy Spirit has entered them. They claim that God has given them a supernatural ability to follow Christ, put their sin to death, and serve the church. Christians talk about being born again say that they they were dead but now have come to life. We have become hardened to those words, but they are powerful words that have significant meaning. Yet when those outside the church see no difference in our lives, they begin to question our integrity, out sanity, or even worse, our God. And can you blame them?

  Francis Chan

  Christian, Powerful, Integrity

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• It was Carrot who'd suggested to the Patrician that hardened criminals should be given the chance to 'serve the community' by redecorating the homes of the elderly, lending a new terror to old age and, given Ankh-Morpork's crime rate, leading to at least one old lady having her front room wallpapered so many times in six months that now she could only get in sideways.

  Terry Pratchett

  Home, Elderly, Community

  Terry Pratchett (2008). “Feet Of Clay: (Discworld Novel 19)”, p.60, Random House

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• Let us say boldly, that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Men, White Man, Years

  Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King (Jr.) (1989). “The trumpet of conscience”, HarperCollins

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• Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the asronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Sleep, Clay, Musician

  "'Terre des Hommes' ('Wind, Sand and Stars')". Book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, translated by Lewis Galantière. Chapter I: "The Craft", 1939.

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• Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?

  Andrew Sean Greer

  Doe, Pearls, Form

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• I've seen men who thought they were brave turn out to be shameful cowards. Other people, who thought they were capable of the utmost self-sacrifice, proved to be hardened egotists. And the opposite, too - cowards doing things which needed toughness and unusual courage..... What does it all boil down to in the end? One must judge a man by what he does, and not by what he thinks he would do. Until a man faces the test, he can deceive himself endlessly.

  Jerzy Andrzejewski

  Sacrifice, Men, Thinking

  Jerzy Andrzejewski, David J. Welsh (1991). “Ashes and Diamonds”, p.81, Northwestern University Press

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• Our conceptions of morality, as all our other ideas, pass through a course of development; the difficulty comes in adjusting our conduct, which has become hardened into customs and habits, to these changing moral conceptions. When this adjustment is not made, we suffer from the strain and indecision of believing one hypothesis and acting upon another.

  Jane Addams

  Believe, Ideas, Suffering

  Jane Addams (2016). “Democracy and Social Ethics”, p.15, Youcanprint

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• I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Real, Heart, Punishment

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2012). “The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky”, p.13, Modern Library

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• The Marquis believed himself to be hardened against flattery. He thought that he had experienced every variety, but he discovered that he was mistaken: the blatantly worshipful look in the eyes of a twelve-year-old, anxiously raised to his, was new to him, and it pierced his defences.

  Georgette Heyer

  Eye, Years, Twelve

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• Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Art, Clever, Mean

  "Letters to a Young Poet". Book by Rainer Maria Rilke. Letter Three (April 23, 1903), 1929.

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• Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.

  Randall Jarrell

  Real, Criticism, Prison

  "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "Contemporary Poetry Criticism" (p. 62), 1980.

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• Will you come with me to the mountains? It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?

  C. S. Lewis

  Hurt, Reality, Feet

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