Dulls Quotes & Sayings

Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I have my misgivings about 3-D. I don't like the lack of blacks and whites, how it dulls the image, how the color gets corrupted. I don't necessarily like the experience of having heavy glasses in front of me. — Alfonso Cuaron

It is infinitely better that the profane and loose be unmasked than to be muffled up under the veil and hood of traditional hypocrisy, which turns and dulls the very edge of all conscience either toward God or man. — Roger Williams

Fear causes people to draw back from situations. It brings on mediocrity, it dulls creativity, it sets one up to be a loser in life. — Fran Tarkenton

Death augments distance and dulls the memory. Death reconciles. — Leonid Andreyev

Prayer sometimes dulls the hunger of the pauper, like a mother's finger thrust into the mouth of her starving baby. — I.L. Peretz

All children paint like geniuses. What do we do to them that so quickly dulls this ability? — Pablo Picasso

Absences can also make one forget. Absence dulls the memory and banishes those who are precious from the mind. — F. Sionil Jose

A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It soothes the fever, occasionally high, of the brain at work, and produces in the mind a soft, fresh vapor that corrects the all too angular contours of pure thought, fills up the gaps and intervals here and there, binds them together, and dulls the sharp corners of ideas. But too much reverie submerges and drowns. Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie it's pleasure. To replace thought with reverie is to confound poison with nourishment. — Victor Hugo

Extraverts, in other words, often stumble over themselves. They can talk too much and listen too little, which dulls their understanding of others' perspectives. They can fail to strike the proper balance between asserting and holding back, which can be read as pushy and drive people away.* — Daniel H. Pink

Or maybe forgiveness is just the continual pushing aside of bitter memories, until time dulls the hurt and the anger, and the wrong is forgotten. — Veronica Roth

Yes: there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new
Hedonism that was to recreate life and to save it from that harsh
uncomely puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious
revival. It was to have its service of the intellect, certainly,
yet it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve
the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim,
indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of
experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. Of the asceticism
that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls
them, it was to know nothing. But it was to teach man to
concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a
moment. — Oscar Wilde

Fire
Fire In The Heavens

Fire in the heavens, and fire along the hills,
and fire made solid in the flinty stone,
thick-mass'd or scatter'd pebble, fire that fills
the breathless hour that lives in fire alone.

This valley, long ago the patient bed
of floods that carv'd its antient amplitude,
in stillness of the Egyptian crypt outspread,
endures to drown in noon-day's tyrant mood.

Behind the veil of burning silence bound,
vast life's innumerous busy littleness
is hush'd in vague-conjectured blur of sound
that dulls the brain with slumbrous weight, unless

some dazzling puncture let the stridence throng
in the cicada's torture-point of song. — Christopher John Brennan

Love sharpens intelligence, fear dulls it. Who wants you to be intelligent? Not those who are in power. How can they want you to be intelligent? - because if you are intelligent you will start seeing the whole strategy, their games. They want you to be stupid and mediocre. They certainly want you to be efficient as far as work is concerned, but not intelligent; hence humanity lives at the lowest, at the minimum of its potential. — Osho

You don't forget. You don't 'get over it'. You just find a way to stuff the pain in a pocket somewhere inside. But every once in a while, something - some stupid, insignificant little thing - triggers it.
The worst pain you have ever felt. And you have to start all over. Feel the same jerking agony that only comes when you realize, when you remember that you'll never see his face again, that you'll never be able to share that stupid thing that reminded you of him in the first place.
The pain never goes away. It only dulls, waiting for another trigger. — Julie Hockley

TV pollutes our minds and dulls our senses. It is a babysitter that molests children. And yet those who are on the television scream "first amendment" and "freedom of speech". How is corporate control freedom of speech? And what rights did our forefathers grant corporations, anyway? — James Rozoff

A diet of violence or pornography dulls the senses, and future exposures need to be rougher and more extreme. Soon the person is desensitized and is unable to react in a sensitive, caring, responsible manner, especially to those in his own home and family. Good people can become infested with this material and it can have terrifying, destructive consequences. — Marvin J. Ashton

Fear for your life sharpens your edge. Dread dulls it, think of the creep instead, stopping him. — Dean Koontz

There is nothing that dulls a personality so much as a negative outlook. — Gordon B. Hinckley

I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

You picked the seats you did for a reason, right? Familiarity. Too bad the best sleuths avoid familiarity. It dulls the investigative instinct. — Becca Fitzpatrick

You know what they say. Family. Can't live with them. Can't kill them, if only because it dulls the ax blade. — Nick Wilgus

Complacency is a blight that saps energy, dulls attitudes, and causes a a drain in the brain. The first symptom is satisfaction with things as they are. The second is rejection of things it as they might be. "Good enough" becomes days today's watchword and tomorrow standard. — Alex And Brett Harris

Success achieved by the most contemptible means cannot but destroy the soul ... It helps to cover up the inner corruption and gradually dulls one's scruples, so that those who begin with some high ambition cannot, even if they would, create anything out of themselves. — Emma Goldman

Maybe forgiveness is just the continual pushing aside of bitter memories, until time dulls the hurt and anger, and the wrong is forgotten. — Veronica Roth

Familiarity so dulls the edge of perception as to make us least acquainted with things forming part of our daily life. — Julia Ward Howe

Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity — Booker T. Washington

The dust comes secretly day after day, Lies on my ledge and dulls my shining things. But O this dust I shall drive away Is flowers and kings, Is Solomon's temple, poets, Nineveh. — Viola Meynell

War," Pax said, "either dulls the mind to despair or sharpens it toward intuitive truths. — Dean Koontz

The things you do not have to say make you rich. Saying the things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing the things you do not have to hear dulls your hearing. And the things you know before you hear them; these are you and the reason you are in the world. — William Stafford

Fear is one of the greatest problems in life. A mind that is caught in fear lives in confusion, in conflict, and therefore must be violent, distorted and aggressive. It dare not move away from its own patterns of thinking, and this breeds hypocrisy. Until we are free from fear, climb the highest mountain, invent every kind of God, we will always remain in darkness. Living in such a corrupt, stupid society as we do, with the competitive education we receive which engenders fear, we are all burdened with fears of some kind, and fear is a dreadful thing which warps, twists and dulls our days. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction. — Timothy Snyder

If you want people to perform better, you reward them, right? Bonuses, commissions, their own reality show. Incentivize them ... But that's not happening here. You've got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity. — Daniel H. Pink

I hide myself to avoid others; but the lust for life reasserts itself, through the boredom or in the inflection of distress. It's an escape, a tuneless melody, a painless lament. Broken line of a poem missing its author, writing of a deconstructed life, scar of a wound still open, the pain of living without love or being loved tarnishes desire, dulls the look, weakens the heart. — Anne De Gandt

Power always acts destructively, for its possessors are ever striving to lace all phenomena of social life into a corset of their laws to give them a definite shape. Its mental expression is dead dogma; its physical manifestation of life, brute force. This lack of intelligence in its endeavours leaves its imprint likewise on the persons of its representatives, gradually making them mentally inferior and brutal, even though they were originally excellently endowed. Nothing dulls the mind and soul of man as does the eternal monotony of routine, and power is essentially routine. — Rudolf Rocker

Beauty may fade, intellect dulls, but your spirit, that will live on forever, — Shannon Stoker

It is passivity that dulls feeling. — Susan Sontag

Heartache often drives us to consume things we wouldn't otherwise, such as an entire pint of Caramel Pecan Perfection high-fat ice cream, covered in ganache, the crack cocaine of frozed dairy. Twelve hundred calories per pint, six hundred and eighty of which are fat calories, but is only dulls the pain for the moment, there's that carb fog while you're standing at the sink shoving it in your face, and then it's over and you feel ... used. Like a cheap pickup the Dove people seduced and abandoned in your kitchen, leaving you with sticky hands and an empty cup and a still-broken heart, except now you're mad at Dove, too. — Jennifer Crusie

For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first. — Alan Lightman

Sensuality not only debases both body and mind, but dulls the keen edge of pleasure. — Henry Fielding

It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it. — Will Self

No one expected to be safe until this century, if you read a little history. Think of the thousands of years before- years with no law, when the sword ruled. No widespread system of justice; no immunizations against disease. The local lord free to kill the husbands, husbands free to rape and kill their wives. Childbirth often fatal. No antibiotics. It's only here and now that women are raised believing they'll be safe. And it serves us false. It's not true. It dulls our sense of fear, which saves our lives. — Charlaine Harris

You learn more about life and people in two hours of war than in four decades of peace. War is dirty, sure, war is senseless, but come on! Civilian life is also senseless, in its sameness and it's reasonableness and because it dulls the instincts. The truth that no one dares speak aloud is that war is a pleasure, The greatest pleasure there is, otherwise it would stop immediately. Once you've tasted it, it's like heroin: you want more. (...) The taste for war, real war, is as natural to man as taste for peace, it's idiotic to want to eliminate it by repeating virtuously that peace is good and war is evil. In fact it's like men and women, yin and yang: you need both. — Emmanuel Carrere

People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens - because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration. — Susan Sontag

The tolerance of wrong dulls our sense of its injustice. Men may become accustomed to theft, murder, even to slavery - that sum of all villainies - so they see no injustice in it, yet that which is unjust is unjust still. — Henry George

Adrenaline dulls reason; panic kills it. — Ted Dekker

If you aren't creeped out by the No Birth Control Left Behind rhetoric of the White House and Planned Parenthood, you aren't listening closely enough. The anesthetic of progressive benevolence always dulls the senses. Wake up. — Michelle Malkin

I may distance myself from God from time to time, wandering off in the ignorance of my self-absorbed preoccupations and attitudes
But God is never far off. Never distant.
Never remote.
He is close enough to hear the raw, unbridled "fuck" in my silent prayer of anguish.
Close enough to feel the groaning angst and tension in my gut that oft threatens to rend me to pieces.
Close enough to hear my heart slam itself in abandon against the walls of this temple of skin in holy desperation; clutching at the veil that dulls and distorts my vision.
Close enough to catch me as I stumble in my blind and weary state yet again and again and again.
Yes, He is close. She is never far off. God is my faithful friend and traveling companion, though I see Him not yet with these orbs of flesh. — Mac MacKenzie

I watch her with loving sadness as she dulls her shine to please others. Will this butterfly ever soar? Will she continue to pretend she can't fly? Her greatest life awaits this decision. — Steve Maraboli

There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways. — Richard Dawkins

We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is corruption. There isn't as much light as there once was. In the grave we lapse back into undifferentiated sameness — Gregory Maguire

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

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction. — Ezra Pound

Life inside the Beltway bubble dulls your thinking. — Mark McKinnon

Neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. — William Shakespeare

Water drinkers perceive nothing but the crude and material appearance of things, while intoxication, on the contrary, dulls the eyes of the body and brightens those of the soul. — Gerard De Nerval

One of the effects of being crazily, obsessively in love is that it dulls your senses, your capacity for perception, till you no longer notice what is happening around you. — Maria Duenas

Whoever said it got easier with time was wrong, death never got easier. The pain dulls around your heart, numbing the spot the deceased inhabited in your chest-- but it was never easier. Loss was still loss-- a physical pain, a hurt that reaches deep inside you and smothers your soul, forever indenting their memory. No, death was still death, loss was still loss, and pain was still pain. Time didn't change that. — Kelsie Leverich

When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, it loses its social perspective ... There is something about a war like this that makes people insensitive. It dulls the conscience. It strengthens the forces of reaction, and it brings into being bitterness and hatred and violence. — Martin Luther King Jr.

The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie.
It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for
heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not
the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality we
drink in every night. — John Piper

Fatigue dulls the pain, but awakes enticing thoughts of death. So! that is the way in which you are tempted to overcome your loneliness
by making the ultimate escape from life.
No! It may be that death is to be your ultimate gift to life: it must not be an act of treachery against it. — Dag Hammarskjold

Loss is a knife, constantly cutting, but over time the blade dulls, and the cuts aren't as sharp. It's always there in the drawer, but you realize it doesn't cut as deeply anymore. — Shane Barr

Tokenism does not change stereotypes of social systems but works to preserve them, since it dulls the revolutionary impulse. — Mary Daly

A gnarled old branch dulls the blade that severs a sapling. — Robert Jordan

Confessions of an Anglo-Welshman For my own country's part Her lore and language I should have by heart. 'Twas she who raised me, Built me bone by bone Out of the teeming earth, the dreaming stone. Even at my christening it was she decreed Uprooted I should bleed. And yet for another's sake No wound deletes, No patriotism dulls The true and the beautiful Bequeathed to me by Blake, Shelley and Shakespeare and the ravished Keats. 1943 — R.S. Thomas

Be game
take a chance
don't hide behind veils and veils of discretion ... Go forward with what you have to say, expressing things as you see them. You are new evidence, fresh and young. Your work, the spirit of youth, you are the progress of human evolution. If age dulls you it will be time enough then to be ponderous and heavy
or quit. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to be young, to continue growing
not to settle and accept. — Robert Henri

No one needs to be around someone who dulls the shine on a brand new penny. — Cathy Burnham Martin

Wishes are an anesthetic to
be used by the unambitious, a
narcotic that dulls their awareness of
their own desperate condition — Jim Rohn

Any man who stands for progress has to criticize, disbelieve and challenge every item of the old faith. Item by item he has to reason out every nook and corner of the prevailing faith. If after considerable reasoning one is led to believe in any theory or philosophy, his faith is welcomed. His reasoning can be mistaken, wrong, misled and sometimes fallacious. But he is liable to correction because reason is the guiding star of his life. But mere faith and blind faith is dangerous: it dulls the brain, and makes a man reactionary. — Bhagat Singh

Beer dulls a memory, brand sets it burning, but wine is the best for a sore heart's yearning. — Patrick Rothfuss

Anger dulls the sharpness of mind, hardens the softness of feelings, and replaces the sweetness of the world with bitterness. — Debasish Mridha

Laughter dulls the sharpest pain and flattens out the greatest stress. To share it is to give a gift of health. — Barbara Johnson

The only way I can describe the visions I witnessed with even faint approximation is in terms of other scenes which might arouse similar impressions of tortuous chaos: perhaps a festival of colors twisting in blackness, a tentacled abyss that alternately seems to glisten moistly as with some horrendous dew, then suddenly dulls into an arid glow, like bone-colored stars shining over an extra-terrestrial desert. — Thomas Ligotti

When you're working with wood, every stroke of the tool dulls the edge just a little. Once, in my last year at the violin-making school, I had been passing through the workshop when I overheard one of the younger students ask the instructor how it was that his tools stayed sharp so much longer than ours. "I use them less," he said, looking out the window, which was where he addressed his replies to obvious questions. It took him two cuts to get where we took fifty. Art didn't need to cut a hundred times to get where he wanted to be. He lived the life he wanted to live the first time around. — James N McKean

Whenever our right becomes the guiding factor of our lives, it dulls our spiritual insight. — Oswald Chambers

Human memory awakens and extinguishes at will. It dulls and sharpens actions, enlarges and shrinks those who perform them. It humbles and exalts as it desires. When summoned, it slips away, and when it returns, it will do so at the time and place that suits it. It recognizes no chief, no overseer, no classifier, no ruler. Stories mix and mingle, facts sprout new shoots. The situations and words and scents-oh, the scents!-encrusted there are stored in the most disorganized and wonderful manner, not chronologically, not according to size or importance or even the alphabet. — Meir Shalev

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers. — Billy Collins

Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-
great-children's will be. But we learn to live with that love. — Jonathan Safran Foer

You can climb too high for your own good. Linger too long at high altitudes and your hearing dulls and your eyesight dims. — Max Lucado