Disfigure Quotes & Sayings

To you your father should be as a god;
One that composed your beauties, yea, and one
To whom you are but as a form in wax,
By him imprinted, and within his power
To leave the figure or disfigure it. — William Shakespeare

If men were to colonize the moon or Mars - even with abundant supplies of oxygen, water, and food, as well as adequate protection against heat, cold, and radiation - they would not long retain their humanness, because they would be deprived of those stimuli which only Earth can provide. Similarly, we shall progressively lose our humanness even on Earth if we continue to pour filth into the atmosphere; to befoul soil, lakes, and rivers; to disfigure landscapes with junkpiles; to destroy wild plants and animals that do not contribute to monetary values; and thus transform the globe into an environment alien to our evolutionary past. The quality of human life is inextricably interwoven with the kinds and variety of stimuli man receives from the Earth and the life it harbors, because human nature is shaped biologically and mentally by external nature. (Rene Dubos qtd. in Kaltreider) — Kurt Kaltreider

Let us touch each other
while we still have hands,
palms, forearms, elbows ...
Let us love each other for misery,
torture each other, torment,
disfigure, maim,
to remember better,
to part with less pain. — Vera Pavlova

Mint-street and Kent-street--those old plague-spots that disgrace and disfigure the fair face of the Borough of Southwark--teem with blackguardism and vice; but here, too, you find that the birds who here flock are strictly of a feather. Cow-cross, — Henry Mayhew

The family is threatened by growing efforts on the part of some to redefine the very institution of marriage, by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life ... These realities are increasingly under attack from powerful forces, which threaten to disfigure God's plan for creation. — Pope Francis

God does not exist, as neither does our hereafter, that second bogey being as easily disposed of as the first. Indeed, imagine yourself just dead - and suddenly wide awake in Paradise where, wreathed in smiles, your dear dead welcome you.
Now tell me, please, what guarantee do you possess that those beloved ghosts are genuine; that it is really your dear dead mother and not some petty demon mystifying you, masked as your mother and impersonating her with consummate art and naturalness? There is the rub, there is the horror; the more so as the acting will go on and on, endlessly; never, never, never, never, never will your soul in that other world be quite sure that the sweet gentle spirits crowding about it are not fiends in disguise, and forever, and forever, and forever shall your soul remain in doubt, expecting every moment some awful change, some diabolical sneer to disfigure the dear face bending over you. — Vladimir Nabokov

Because rage and violence are human emotions and drives and capacities that inhabit us all. SEE CARL JUNG. Or that hipster Joseph Campbell. Because we all take archetypal journeys in a million ways - literal, symbolic, you name it - that figure, disfigure, and refigure violence. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Sometimes we disfigure ourselves by what we think about ourselves rather than by what we do to ourselves. Some people have been disfigured emotionally because of what others did to them when they were children. Sometimes our memory banks become warehouses of beliefs and feelings that cripple our progress. — H. Norman Wright

Most human beings are, unfortunately, ugly enough without putting glasses upon them, and to disfigure any of the really beautiful faces that we have with such contrivances is surely as bad as putting an import tax upon art. As for putting glasses upon a child it is enough to make the angels weep. — William H. Bates

Old-fashioned, gentle Scottish physician, unmoved by the considerations of profit and personal gain that could so disfigure medicine. That doctors should consider themselves businessmen was, Isabel had always felt, a moral tragedy for medicine. — Alexander McCall Smith

Admittedly, Jesus' words to Pilate also remain perennially true: "My kingship is not of this world" (Jn 18:36). In the course of history, the mighty of this world have sometimes tried to align it with their own, and that is when it is put at risk: they seek to link their power with Jesus' power, and in the process they disfigure his kingdom and endanger it. — Pope Benedict XVI

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher? — P.G. Wodehouse

Youth is impulsive. When our young men grow angry at some real or imaginary wrong, and disfigure their faces with black paint, it denotes that their hearts are black, and that they are often cruel and relentless, and our old men and old women are unable to restrain them. Thus it has ever been. — Chief Seattle

As any action or posture, long continued, will distort and disfigure the limbs, so the mind likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual application to the same set of ideas. — Samuel Johnson

I should dread to disfigure the beautiful ideal of the memories of illustrious persons with incongruous features, and to sully the imaginative purity of classical works with gross and trivial recollections. — William Wordsworth

The Tower of Babel" ...
The undersigned citizens, being artists, painters, sculptors, architects, and others devoted to and desirous preserving the amenities of Paris, wish to protest, in the name of our national good taste, against such an erection in the very heart of our city, as the monstrous and useless Eiffel Tower, already christened ... " The Tower of Babel" ...
How much longer is the City of Paris to be a play-ground for these barbarous and sordid imaginations which disfigure and dishonor her? For the Eiffel Tower, which even commercially minded America rejected, is a public dishonor to our city. All our historic buildings, our monuments of rare and appealing beauty, are dwarfed and humiliated by this monstrous apotheosis of the factory chimney whose odious shadow will lie over the city ...
Plea to the Exposition Director in opposition to the Eiffel Tower, signed by artists and writers and published in Le Temps, 1887 — Carol McCleary

You are persecuted and despised. It were better that a person should be the oppressed than that he should be the oppressor; and fitter that he should be a victim to the frailty of human instincts than that he should be powerful and crush the flowers of life and disfigure the beauties of feeling with his desire. — Khalil Gibran

It has been said that Shakespeare, the great delineator of human character, has failed in distinguishing his principal women - and that such as he meant to be amiable are all equally gentle and good. How difficult then it is for a novelist to give to one of his heroines any very marked feature which shall not disfigure her! Too much reason and self-command destroy the interest we take in her distresses. It has been observed, that Clarissa is so equal to every trial as to diminish our pity. Other virtues than gentleness, pity, filial obedience, or faithful attachment, hardly belong to the sex. — Charlotte Turner Smith

A warning: If you rip, tear, shred, bend, fold, deface, disfigure, smear, smudge, throw, drop, or in any other manner damage, mistreat, or show lack of respect towards this book, the consequences will be as awful as it is within my power to make them. - Irma Pince, Hogwarts Librarian — Rowling J K

Steal! to be sure they may; and, egad, serve your best thoughts as gypsies do stolen children,-disfigure them to make 'em pass for their own. — Richard Brinsley Sheridan

If you rip, tear, shred, bend, fold, deface, disfigure, smear, smudge, throw, drop, or in any other manner damage, mistreat, or show lack of respect towards this book, the consequences will be as awful as it is within my power to make them. — J.K. Rowling

But where the ideas of morality and decency alter from one age to another, and where vicious manners are described, without being marked with the proper character of blame and disapprobation, this must be allowed to disfigure the poem, and to be a real deformity. I cannot, nor is it proper I should, enter into such sentiments; and however I may excuse the poet, on account of the manners of age, I can never relish the composition. — David Hume

Why don't they cut their own children's ears into points to make them look sharp? Why don't they cut off their noses to make them look plucky? One would be just as sensible as the other. What right have they to torment and disfigure God's creatures? — Anna Sewell

Not every illness can be overcome. But many people allow illness to disfigure their lives more than it should. They cave in needlessly. They ignore and weaken whatever powers they have for standing erect. There is always a margin within which life can be lived with meaning and even with a certain measure of joy, despite illness. — Norman Cousins

It's far more difficult to disfigure a great work of art than to create one. — Marcel Proust

My parents always taught me never to take anything for granted because it can be taken away from you like that, especially when it comes to looks. I could get into a car crash tomorrow and disfigure my face. So I have to stay grounded. — Lance Gross

He had thought at first that they were all of common stature and costume, with the evident exception of the hairy Gogol. But as he looked at the others, he began to see in each of them exactly what he had seen in the man by the river, a demoniac detail somewhere. That lop-sided laugh, which would suddenly disfigure the fine face of his original guide, was typical of all these types. Each man had something about him, perceived perhaps at the tenth or twentieth glance, which was not normal, and which seemed hardly human. The only metaphor he could think of was this, that they all looked as men of fashion and presence would look, with the additional twist given in a false and curved mirror. — G.K. Chesterton

If it is perfectly acceptable for a widow to disfigure herself or commit suicide to save face for her husband's family, why should a mother not be moved to extreme action by the loss of a child or children? We are their caretakers. We love them. We nurse them when they are sick ... But no woman should live longer than her children. It is against the law of nature. If she does, why wouldn't she wish to leap from a cliff, hang from a branch, or swallow lye? — Lisa See

The wounds of the past and the scars of the present don't disfigure me in your eyes - because you know the price I pay for loving you ... — John Geddes

Those who sit in the darkness of passions and whose minds are blinded by ignorance, or, rather, those who have not acquired the 'mind of Christ' (I Cor. 2:16), think that he who has the mind of Christ is foolish, and that he who has it not is sensible. Of these the prophet David rightly states, 'The ignorant and foolish perish together' (Ps. 49:11). Therefore such men twist the whole of Scripture according to their own desires (cf. II Pet. 3:3, 16) and corrupt themselves in their own passions. But it is not divine Scripture that suffers from this, but those who disfigure it! — Symeon The New Theologian

Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history. — Edward W. Said