Deaden Quotes & Sayings

The worst, most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument. — Salman Rushdie

Because of the way God has made us, it is impossible finally and completely to deaden the soul. The soul will resurrect, in spite of the cruelty used to destroy it. It will pop up and then be slain again, return and be shoved down through contempt. The power to destroy the soul is not in the hands of Satan, another human being, or even oneself. Nevertheless, when we manage to deaden our soul, even temporarily, we open the door to terrible consequences. — Dan B. Allender

Suffering can kill. Not always physically. But it can kill dreams and it can deaden hope and the will to live. — Mary Balogh

Our personal demons come in many guises. We experience them as shame, as jealousy, as abandonment, as rage. They are anything that makes us so uncomfortable that we continually run away. We do the big escape: we act out, say something, slam a door, hit someone, or throw a pot as a way of not facing what's happening in our hearts. Or we shove the feelings under and somehow deaden the pain. We can spend our whole lives escaping from the monsters of our minds. All over the world, people are so caught in running that they forget to take advantage of the beauty around them. We become so accustomed to speeding ahead that we rob ourselves of joy. — Pema Chodron

Most survivors grew up too fast. Their vulnerable child-selves got lost in the need to protect and deaden themselves. Reclaiming the inner child is part of the healing process. Often the inner child holds information and feelings for the adult. Some of these feelings are painful; others are actually fun. The child holds the playfulness and innocence the adult has had to bury. — Laura Davis

So, try to figure out a way to exit your role in the capitalist representation of the writer and his function in the literary community. The events you ritualistically attend and the collaborations you're expected to be part of, are they good for your soul? If they deaden you, exit. If you feel a weakening of the spirit, exit from anything they call literary community. You'll be better off alone. In other words you have to find yourself first. — Anis Shivani

To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others. — Max Lerner

The routine of custom tends to deaden even scientific inquiry; it stands in the way of discovery and of the active scientific worker. For discovery and inquiry are synonymous as an occupation. Science is a pursuit, not a coming into possession of the immutable; new theories as points of view are more prized than discoveries that quantitatively increase the store on hand. — John Dewey

What I believe ... about more sleep than is needful concerns the individual who goes far beyond the need, developing slothful and lazy habits, which deaden the senses and become a retarder of accomplishment. To overcome these things in life requires discipline and restraint. — Alvin R. Dyer

How sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defense to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that are not. — John Keats

Even Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead." Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gore is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar. (pg 465) — Herman Melville

It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, 'Being here is so much,' and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free. — John O'Donohue

Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden the drumming of the demon in their ears — Louis MacNeice

Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books ... I was learning that books and diagrams can be evil things if they deaden the mind of man and make him blind or cynical before subjection of any kind. — Agnes Smedley

The human race is a letdown, Ernest - a bad, bad letdown. And I'm disgusted with it. It thinks it's progressed, but it hasn't. It thinks it's risen above the primeval slime, but it hasn't. It's wallowing in it. It's still clinging to us, clinging to our hair and to our eyes and to our souls. We've invented a few things that make noises, but we haven't invented one big thing that creates quiet. Endless, peaceful quiet. Something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown, something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions. — Noel Coward

Even if your skin is perfect, even if it's glowing and beautiful, electric lights defeat you. They deaden the complexion, make it look drab. They rob you of color ... In the evening, you just can't play the natural kid bit, that fresh-scrubbed look. — Diane Von Furstenberg

Pharmaceutical and recreational drugs. Commonly prescribed antidepressants, muscle relaxants, pain killers and anti-anxiety and anti-inflammatory drugs can deaden the body's ability to communicate with itself. Recreational drugs such as alcohol and marijuana have a similar effect. In addition to medicinal effects, these drugs and others provide a chemical means to avoid and inhibit feelings, sensation — Jonathan Tripodi

How sad is it when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defense to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things which are not. — John Keats

The doctrine of a material hell in its effect was to chill and deaden the sympathies, predispose men to inflict suffering, and to retard the march of civilization. — William Edward Hartpole Lecky

In turning away from beauty, we turn away from all that is wholesome and true, and deliver ourselves into an exile where the vulgar and artificial dull and deaden the human spirit [] In contrast, the Beautiful offers us an invitation to order, coherence, and unity. When these needs are met, the soul feels at home in the world. — John O'Donohue

The work that most people do in the world tends to deaden them, deadens their mind, uses up their energy and they get a paycheck and old age and not much energy. You get the check and they get your energy. That energy is translated into corporate dollars. — Frederick Lenz

A forced equalization of wages that disregards the marginal contributions of different workers will deaden incentives and lead to a misallocation of resources and effort. — Raghuram G. Rajan

The contemptuous way in which you spoke of gluttony as a means of catching souls, in your last letter, only shows your ignorance. One of the great achievements of the last hundred years has been to deaden the human conscience on that subject, so that by now you will hardly find a sermon preached or a conscience troubled about it in the whole length and breadth of Europe. This has largely been effected by concentrating all our efforts on gluttony of Delicacy, not gluttony of Excess. Your patient's mother, as I learn from the dossier and you might have learned from Glubose, is a good example. — C.S. Lewis

A new generation of Christians is being called to help build a world in which God's gift of life is welcomed, respected and cherished-not rejected, feared as a threat and destroyed. A new age in which love is not greedy or self-seeking, but pure, faithful and genuinely free, open to others, respectful of their dignity, seeking their good, radiating joy and beauty - a new age in which hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption that deaden our souls and poison our relationships. — Pope Benedict XVI

If ignorance about the nature of pain is widespread, ignorance about the way pain-killing drugs is even more so. What is not generally understood is that many of the vaunted pain-killing drugs conceal the pain without correcting the underlying condition. They deaden the mechanism in the body that alerts the brain to the fact that something may be wrong. The body can pay a high price for suppression of pain without regard to its basic cause. — Norman Cousins

People say what distinguishes us from the animals is that we think. Well, then why the hell don't we extend some compassion to those under tremendous duress? There's this whole idea that you work really hard so you can deaden your soul to the universe and enjoy yourself only in ways the Sierra Club will let you. But what about enjoying yourself by getting into the whole melee of poverty and racism and violence and murder and drug addiction? Get in there, roll up your sleeves, and do something! Nobody does it. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

One who has a deaden conscience can never live within the confinements of the law. — Drexel Deal

A constant flow of thoughts expressed by other people can stop and deaden your own thought and your own initiative ... . That is why constant learning softens your brain ... . Stopping the creation of your own thoughts to give room for the thoughts from other books reminds me of Shakespeare's remark about his contemporaries who sold their land in order to see other countries. — Arthur Schopenhauer

IX. The heart asks pleasure first, And then, excuse from pain; And then, those little anodynes That deaden suffering; And then, to go to sleep; And then, if it should be The will of its Inquisitor, The liberty to die. — Emily Dickinson

I, a pilgrim of eternity, stand before Thee, O eternal One. Let me not seek to deaden or destroy the desire for Thee that disturbs my heart. Let me rather yield myself to its constraint and go where it leads me. Make me wise to see all things today under the form of eternity, and make me brave to face all the changes in my life which such a vision may entail: through the grace of Christ my Saviour. Amen — John Baillie

Satan wants us to focus on the problem, not the Provider. He constantly points to what seems to be rather than to what God has promised to do. If we stop spending time with the Lord in prayer, the concerns of the physical world snatch our attention and dominate us, while the spiritual senses deaden and the promises fade.
I am absolutely convinced that the number one reason that Christians today don't pray more is because we do not grasp the connection between prayer and the promises of God. We are trying as individuals and churches to pray 'because we're supposed to' without a living faith in the promises of God concerning prayer. No faith life of any significance can be maintained by this 'ought-to' approach. There must be faith in God at the bottom.
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When real faith in God arises, a certainty comes that when we call, he will answer ... that when we ask, we will receive ... that when we knock, the door will be opened ... — Jim Cymbala

But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad's coffin between heaven and earth, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all peoples and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit? — Stefan Zweig

That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction. — D.H. Lawrence

Audacious persons hope to make themselves eternally famous by setting fire to one of the wonders of the world and of the ages. The art of reproving scandal is to take no notice of it, to combat it damages our own case; even if credited it causes discredit, and is a source of satisfaction to our opponent, for this shadow of a stain dulls the lustre of our fame even if it cannot altogether deaden it. — Baltasar Gracian

Tobacco and drink deaden the pangs of hunger, and make one forget the miserable home, the desolate future. They — Elizabeth Gaskell

How, for example, after liberating themselves from servitude to the religion of God, the creator of the world and of Adam, which alone could hold them within duty and, therefore, within society, did the impious life of those first men from whom the gentile nations arose bring them to disperse in a ferine wandering through the great forest of the earth, grown dense through saturation by the waters of the Flood? And how, constrained to seek food and water and, even more, to save themselves from the wild animals in which the great forest must unfortunately have abounded, with men frequently abandoning their women and mothers their children, and with no way of reuniting, did their descendants gradually come to forget the language of Adam and, without language or any thought other than that of satisfying their hunger, thirst and the foment of their lust, deaden all sense of humanity? — Giambattista Vico

Substantial things deaden a man without suffering; love awakens him with enlivening pains. — Kahlil Gibran

- pity is a confoundedly two-edged business. Anyone who doesn't know how to deal with it should keep his hands, and, above all, his heart, off it. It is only at first that pity, like morphia, is a solace to the invalid, a remedy, a drug, but unless you know the correct dosage and when to stop, it becomes a virulent poison. The first few injections do good, they soothe, they deaden the pain. But the devil of it is that the organism, the body, just like the soul, has an uncanny capacity for adaptation. Just as the nervous system cries out for more and more morphia, so do the emotions cry out for more and more pity, in the end more than one can give. Inevitably there comes a moment when one has to say 'No', and then one must not mind the other person's hating one more for this ultimate refusal than if one had never helped him at all. — Stefan Zweig

The internet. Can we trust in that? Of course not. Give it six months and we'll probably discover Google's sewn together by orphans in sweatshops. Or that Wi-Fi does something horrible to your brain, like eating your fondest memories and replacing them with drawings of cross-eyed bats and a strong smell of puke. There's surely a great dystopian sci-fi novel yet to be written about a world in which it's suddenly discovered that wireless broadband signals deaden the human brain, slowly robbing us of all emotion, until after 10 years of exposure we're all either rutting in stairwells or listlessly reversing our cars over our own offspring with nary the merest glimmer of sympathy or pain on our faces. It'll be set in Basingstoke and called, Cuh, Typical. — Charlie Brooker

Falling in love often is crucial. You just have to let it nourish you without giving in to it. Why turn it off entirely? Why deaden any part of yourself? Won't death do that for you, and soon enough? — Elisa Albert

Yes, the rich. And that's their misfortune. You see, if you keep adding copper bit by bit to a child's food, you prevent the growth of its bones, and he'll be a dwarf; and if from his youth up you poison a man with gold, you deaden his soul. Once, — Maxim Gorky

Closure is just as delusive-it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief. — Stephen Grosz

The fever of war that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden nerve, and destroy brain, had yet to develop. — H.G.Wells

To be cynical is to be distant. While offering a false intimacy of being "in the know," cynicism actually destroys intimacy. It leads to a creeping bitterness that can deaden and even destroy the spirit ...
A praying life is just the opposite. It engaged evil. It doesn't take no for an answer. The psalmist was in God's face, hoping, dreaming, asking. Prayer is feisty. Cynicism, on the other hand, merely critiques. It is passive, cocooning itself from the passions of the great cosmic battle we are engaged in. It is without hope. — Paul E. Miller

You would like to cure yourself of unbelief and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness. — Blaise Pascal

Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. — Herman Melville

Often enough it is little that can be done in an old country, where life is ruled by fixed and imperious traditions; while much may be done where all is yet fluid, and where, if religion is sometimes unprotected and unrecognised, she is not embarrassed by influences which deaden or cramp her best energies at home. — Henry Parry Liddon

Time has laid his hand
Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it,
But as a harper lays his open palm
Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

About the only other thing I'd want would be a wider neck. My fingers are so fat that sometimes I deaden the string next to the one I'm fretting. — Terry Kath

Some people say they will follow their conscience..many of us have dead consciences. Your conscience is no longer a safe guide. You've harden it, you've deaden it. — Billy Graham

Mathematics, natural science, laws, arts, even morality, etc. do not completely fill the soul; there is always a space left over reserved for pure and speculative reason, the emptiness of which prompts us to seek in vagaries, buffooneries, and mysticism for what seems to be employment and entertainment, but what actually is mere pastime undertaken in order to deaden the troublesome voice of reason, which, in accordance with its nature, requires something that can satisfy it and does not merely subserve other ends or the interests of our inclinations. — Immanuel Kant

Time's agency becomes most vicious when it is routinized for the practical effect of control. The routinizaton of time is a transformation cultivated by prison authorities and designed to make every day like every other. In this experience, paradoxically, time acts even to deaden one's sense of time. All the more true is this among the 80,000, likely more,[52] who are serving time in solitary confinement. Lisa — Mark Lewis Taylor

Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs ... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real ... 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it. — Susan Sontag

You know what I remember most vividly from that hospital? There were creases in the pillowcase.
"I was in pain when they brought me in. They'd bandaged me up before transporting me, but they hand't had anything to deaden that kind of pain. So I wasn't clear in my head. I don't remember who was holding the stretcher, anything like that.
"But when they lifted me up, and I looked at the cot I'd be transferred to, even as they tipped me onto it, I noticed the creases in the pillowcase, and it was everything I could do not to cry. You get used to things being dusty and gritty and oily, you really do, but then, when there's something clean, something that's been folded carefully, and unfolded carefully and it's there for your head, it's like your heart, it's like I don't know, I can't describe it. — Alison Jean Lester