Quotes About Hardness

Softness triumphs over hardness, gentleness over strength. The flexible is superior over the immovable. This is the principle of controlling things by going along with them, of mastery through adaptation. LAO-TZU

The most phlegmatic dispositions often contain the most inflammable spirits, as fire is struck from the hardest flints.

The tone in which those words were spoken might have melted a stone. But, oh dear, what is the hardness of stone? Nothing, compared to the hardness of the unregenerate human heart!

In his case, what had been hardness became cruelty, while a tendency to bluff became plain dishonesty. He often lied without hesitation and assumed that others lied to him.

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.

For now, I had to be hard and white. In the frosty days, in the winter, the ground is white, then the sun rises,, and the frosts melt...

And yet I am troubled; it would take so little to make the record stop: a broken spring, the whim of Cousin Adolphe. How strange it is, how moving, that this hardness should be so fragile. Nothing can interrupt it yet all can break it.

Because it is the hardness of the floor, and the abrupt halt in momentum, and the unyielding nature of the surface, that causes a thing to crack. Even if it is not that thing's fault. And then we talk about this thing being broken, or it needing to be fixed, and not what part of the floor has played in the matter. Never the part about the floor being a constant threat. Even if it is a nice floor. Even if everybody wants one just like it.

My heart is turned to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand.

A lawyer art thou? Draw not nigh! Go, carry to some fitter place The keenness of that practised eye, The hardness of that sallow face.

Adherence to established values, an affinity to creativity. Perseverance and innovation. The dualities of a hardness like stone and the pliancy of the wind-bent bamboo, these twin qualities flux and twine through the persona of the master and give him the presence and personality by which we know him.

No, my heart is turn'd to stone: I strike it, and it hurts my hand.

Throw my heart Against the flint and hardness of my fault: Which, being dried with grief, will break to powder, And finish all foul thoughts.

Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!

This, then, was what a glimpse of truth might be like; hard as stone, beautiful as stars, satisfying as bread.

A heart of stone can still be broken.

That was what he'd seen in this girl, a beauty that allowed him to perceive the waste and blight infecting the word...it was as if she'd experienced life's hardness and cruelties, yet had remained somehow untarnished by them. How was it possible?

rills ran deeper—so that if you could compare them to ice cream, it was more to the sort so hard that you couldn't ram a spoon into the carton.

That's the worst of sorrow . . . it's always a vicious circle. It makes one tense and hard and disagreeable, and this means that one repels and antagonises people, and then they dislike and avoid one--and that means more isolation and still more sorrow.

That's the worst of sorrow," I decided, with less surprise than I had accepted the same conclusion after Roland's death. "It's always a vicious circle. It makes one tense and hard and disagreeable, and this means that one repels and antagonises people, and then they dislike and avoid one--and that means more isolation and still more sorrow.

Their eyes were dark and hard and glowing, with no fear in them, no kindness and no guilt.

Dicen que la Luna es dura. No; la gente es dura. Siempre es la gente.

My heart has become as hard as a city street, the horses trample upon it, it sings like iron, all day long and all night long they beat, they ring like the hooves of time.

If only my heart were stone.