Quotes About Harshness

Monkey John looked at the dead boy. By God, life is cheap up here on the goddamned Canadian River. Cheap, Blue Duck answered. And it might get cheaper.

Mean is not crazy, it is merely mean.

Frost in January minus 20 for a week. Dead birds frozen on the branch—they fall with the first thaw like ripe fruit—death-ripened. We shall all end like them—just a stain in the snow.

Nature had combined in him the features of a degenerate pope and the torpor of a crocodile, and to these had added a voice of unconscionable harshness.

Hatred and anger are the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind. There is, in the very feeling of those passions, something harsh, jarring, and convulsive, something that tears and distracts the breast, and is altogether destructive of that composure and tranquillity of mind which is so necessary to happiness, and which is best promoted by the contrary passions of gratitude and love.

People are not born with hearts of stone; there's a reason they harden. Sometimes they make poor choices, and sometimes they lack discipline. As a result of these choices, people carry around blame or anger with themselves, which looks like harshness on the outside. Sometimes we simply don't know any better.

Truthfulness so often goes with ruthlessness.

There is no beauty, if it doesn't show some of the terribleness of life.

Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?

Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel? She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.

Suddenly he longed for her return. She was his familiar, and by the same token his harshest critic. But even that harshness would be welcome on a day like today, when old associations were being stripped from him.

I'm honestly offended whenever someone says I'm being harsh.

Every one must understand that, whatever be the evil of slavery, it is not increased by its diffusion. Every one familiar with it knows that it is in proportion to its sparseness that it becomes less objectionable. Wherever there is an immediate connexion between the master and slave, whatever there is of harshness in the system is diminished.

Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.

He became known for breaking in wild horses for local farmers, a sight that drew admiring spectators to the village square. He tamed even the most refractory horses through a fine sensitivity to their nature rather than by his physical prowess. "If people knew how much more they could get out of a horse by gentleness than by harshness," Grant once observed, "they would save a great deal of trouble both to the horse and the man.

She typically erred on the side of severity.

Perhaps the bazaar looks disorganized to you, but it works for us. Perhaps Islam looks fanatical to you, but it provides us with the means to survive the harshness of this life and prepare us for a better life hereafter.

I was born on a storm-swept rock and hate the soft growth of sun-baked lands where there is no frost in men's bones.

The modern clercs have created in so-called cultivated society a positive romanticism of harshness. The have also created a romanticism of contempt.

Intolerance, discourtesy and harshness..... are taboo in all good society and are surely contrary to the spirit of democracy.

Hemos removido la tierra de una forma tan violenta que hemos vuelto a despertar la crueldad de los niños

And she began to weep, dropping her head onto her forearms and rocking backwards and forwards in that curious motion that is perhaps a subconscious attempt to mimic the movement that brings comfort to a tiny baby. That we should in moments of sorrow seek to return to a time when the harshness of the world could be forfended by the simple reassurances of our parents; that we should do that …

I always know what to expect of the things of Mother Earth. Sometimes they are cruel, but it is hard, clean cruelty. They don't torture you with their own weakness.

Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest.