Hardened Heart Quotes & Sayings

I hardened my heart against all the Bennets. - Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy. — Mary Street

We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering, we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is we only become more fearful, more hardened and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us - a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears, and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet, when we don't close off, when we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings. — Pema Chodron

I ask that this one thing, your church would gaze on the, the beauty of the Lord, I ask that you would awaken the hardened lost. I ask you to fascinate your church with the revelation of the beauty of Jesus. Come and release lovesickness for Jesus. Come and unlock the fountains of the hearts, now, Lord, by the river of fire, by the Holy Spirit, by the spirit of revelation. Let us see what the Seraphim see. Let us be awestruck by the beauty of the God-man. In the name of Jesus we ask that. — Mike Bickle

I prayed for my heart to soften, to forgive her, and love her for what she did give me
life, great values, a lot of tennis lessons, and the best she could do. Unfortunately, the best she could do was terrible, thee the Minister of Silly Walks trying to raise an extremely sensitive young girl, and my heart remained hardened toward her. [p. 46] — Anne Lamott

If we are at all sensitive to the life around us, to one another's pains and joys,
to the beauty and fragility of the Earth, it is all about being broken open, allowing ourselves to
step out from out hardened veneers and expose our core, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable in our emotional response to the world. And how can we not respond? This is what I mean by being 'broken open.' To engage. To love. Any one of these actions of the heart will lead to a personal transformation that bears collective gifts. — Terry Tempest Williams

Destroyed. My polished armor. My stubborn resistance. My hardened heart. She's smashed through the first two and laid total claim on the third. And I don't feel like running. — Kristen Callihan

When God is here spoken of as hardening some of the children of men, it is not to be understood that God by any positive efficiency hardens any man's heart. There is no positive act in God, as though he put forth any power to harden the heart. To suppose any such thing would be to make God the immediate author of sin. God is said to harden men in two ways: by withholding the powerful influences of his Spirit, without which their hearts will remain hardened, and grow harder and harder; in this sense he hardens them, as he leaves them to hardness. And again, by ordering those things in his providence which, through the abuse of their corruption, become the occasion of their hardening. Thus God sends his word and ordinances to men which, by their abuse, prove an occasion of their hardening. — Jonathan Edwards

Don't be afraid to speak from personal experience; in many ways, those vulnerable moments will be the key that unlocks a hardened heart. — Luis Palau

Harden our hearts to the innocents in the womb, and we have hardened our hearts to the need for compassion, and mercy, and fellow-feeling, and charity, and decency in this world. — Alan Keyes

Do you remember in How the Grinch Stole Christmas! when the Grinch is alone on the mountain after plundering the Christmas of the Whos down below, and his heart swells to three times its normal size? That's the other thing that happens when you become a mom. You feel more deeply. You become capable of a raw, scary fullness of emotion that tenderizes the hardened muscle of the heart. And it endangers you. Because you feel for other people's suffering more than you used to, especially for the suffering of children, as if the love you bear for your child is so outsized that it can't be contained but splashes out into the world, your salty tears brimming the salty oceans. — Beth Ann Fennelly

but even with pure love, problems arose. The highest of the Angelos was a beautiful, gifted spirit called Lucifer. He led the choirs and symphonies for the Creator. Yet, one day, his heart hardened with jealousy of the Supreme Being, and he fell like lightning from Heaven. When he led a revolt against the Most High, God banished him from His presence. Angered, Lucifer was determined to overthrow El, the God of creation, and thus, the war began between good and evil. — Summer Lee

There is no knowledge for which so great a price is paid as a knowledge of the world; and no one ever became an adept in it except at the expense of a hardened or a wounded heart. — Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington

While sitting on the bank of a river one day, I picked up a solid round stone from the water and broke it open. It was perfectly dry in spite of the fact that it had been immersed in water for centuries. The same is true of many people in the Western world. For centuries they have been surrounded by Christianity; they live immersed in the waters of its benefits. And yet it has not penetrated their hearts; they do not love it. The fault is not in Christianity, but in men's hearts, which have been hardened by materialism and intellectualism. — Sadhu Sundar Singh

The eye being a tender part, and soonest hurt, how watchful is man by nature over that, that it take no hurt. So the heart, being a tender thing, let us preserve it by all watchfulness to keep blows from off it. It is a terrible thing to keep a wound of some great sin upon the conscience, for it makes a way for a new breach; because when the conscience once begins to be hardened with some great sin, then there is no stop, but we run on to commit sin with all greediness. 9. — Richard Sibbes

If I were your enemy, I'd use every opportunity to bring old wounds to mind, as well as the people, events, and circumstances that caused them. I'd try to ensure that your heart was hardened with anger and bitterness. Shackled through unforgiveness. — Priscilla Shirer

Lovesick, bitter and hardened heart. Aching, waiting for life to start — Bil Keane

I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I stopped being watchful and diligent. I rushed after my own lusts. I sinned against the light of the Word and the goodness of God. I have grieved the Spirit, and He is gone. I tempted the Devil, and he has come to me. I have provoked God to anger, and He has left me. I have so hardened my heart that I cannot repent.
Then — John Bunyan

As a child, he had hardened his heart and learned to take their punches. He had learned to spit back and take down anyone who cast a jaundiced eye or who made a comment about either him, his mother, or his sister.
He'd told himself that he didn't need anyone's love or caring. And so he had learned to live like a feral animal, always ready to strike out when someone tried to touch him. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

If the heart is hardened, the intellect is darkened. — Mark Hart

At birth, we are like cartilage - soft, flexible tissue. By the same natural process by which cartilage becomes hard bone, the soft, tender heart of an innocent child can become hardened by the circumstances into which she is born. — Iyanla Vanzant

The Beauty of It If all I have is Now, where will I look for Joy? Without hope for the future, without hope that things will change, with no hope of finding what's been lost, and no hope of restoring the past, with only the risk to crack open all that has hardened about me, what will I do with what I have? At first, this might seem scary or sad, but as a tired swimmer comes ashore surprised to find pearls washing through his legs, I lift my tired head again and again to find all I need is right where I am. But being human, I stray and dream of lives other than my own, and soon I am busy wanting something else, somewhere else, someone else; busy imagining something just out of reach to strive for. It leads me to say if you are unhappy or in pain, nothing will remove these surfaces. But acceptance and a strong heart will crack them like a shell, exposing a softness that has always been, exposing a soft thing waiting to take form. It glows. I think it is the one spirit we all share. — Mark Nepo

A gritty grain of truth lay at the heart of most legends, she had told me, and the slow accretion of fiction hardened in layers around it. — Caroline Llewellyn

Only unconditional grace can transform a hardened heart into a grateful heart. Only a free gift can demolish any notion of quid pro quo. Only an utterly merciful act of love can fashion a new creation capable of love. As theologian Karl Barth puts it, 'As the beloved of God, we have no alternative but to love him in return. — Mark Galli

Tragedy can break the heart but not the dam of the tearducts while schmaltz can dissolve the most hardened sophisticate. — Cornelia Otis Skinner

What if her heart had hardened so much that she closed herself off in order to survive? — Penelope Douglas

Do not say I use what is mine: you use what is alien to you; the indulgent, selfish use makes what is yours something alien; that is why I call it alien good, because you use it with a hardened heart and claim that it is right, that you alone live from what is yours. — John Chrysostom

His mouth hardened into a tight line for a moment. "I plead for nothing." His voice deepened. "I beg for nothing." He paused, searching her eyes. "You are my heart. I beg you to forgive me, beautiful. You come before everything to me. You even come before my own pride. I'm a Zorn warrior. I have fought many battles in war. I carry scars from lost lives I took in battle. I hunt and I do it well. I have never been captured and I have never been brought to my knees." He reached out to caress her cheek. "Then I look into your eyes and remember your laugh. I am there, beautiful. You have caught me and I am on my knees to you. — Laurann Dohner

Do you believe your heart to be, indeed, so hardened, that you can look without emotion on the suffering, to which you would condemn me? — Ann Radcliffe

Like hatred, guilt can't be locked in the silence of forgetting, without taking part of your soul with it. — Shannon L. Alder

Never have I heard anything so unnerving as a hardened warrior praying to a god known for his merciless heart. — Robin Hobb

If the heart becomes hardened, the eye becomes dry. — Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya

She looked up at him, wondering when it was that this man, her brother, had become so wise. If he'd yelled one more word, spent one more minute speaking to her in that mocking voice, she would have broke. She would have broke, or she would have hardened, but either way, something between them would have been ruined.
But here he was, Anthony of all people, who was arrogant and proud and every inch the arch nobleman he'd been born to be, kneeling at her side, placing his hand on hers, and speaking with a kindness that nearly broke her heart. — Julia Quinn

There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow. Frodo was neither very fat nor very timid; indeed, though he did not know it, Bilbo (and Gandalf) had thought him the best hobbit in the Shire. He thought he had come to the end of his adventure, and a terrible end, but the thought hardened him. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Her bright green eyes pop against the smudged black mascara. There's so much pain hidden inside those liquid pools, and I want to unravel her.
I'd like to soften up her edges till they're so blurry I'm the only thing she can focus on, the only thing she can see. I need to light a fire where her heart has been left cold and hardened, rearranging her broken pieces around mine in a way I can make them fit together. I want to crawl inside of her so deep she can't use me like she's used to and then get rid of me and forget we happened. — Tammy Faith

My heart is hardened against My heart Expectation is a crime that has robbed me many a time It is better to have nothing To turn and have nothing — Pam Rehm

A steampunk nation
Baby pollution rises up then the loving comes arraigning 'cause
Our art's official and only partially artificial
And our heart's in the middle of sharp hardened shards of metal but
There's not where it settles
Because it's beating to the steaming of God's hottest pot or kettle
And now we face it, this creation we made to
To save our craving for a synthetic rebelnation it's
Our safeway they make into a pathetic revelation
In our steampunk nation
Our steampunk nation — Criss Jami

The Sunlight on the Garden

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden. — Louis MacNeice

What Gosta,' he said to himself, 'can you no longer endure? You have been hardened in poverty all of your life; you have heard every tree in the forest, every tuft in the meadows preach to you of sacrifice and patience. You, brought up in a country where the winter is severe, and the summer joy is very short, have you forgotten the art of bearing your trials?
'Oh Gosta, a man must bear all that life gives him with a courageous heart and a smile on his lips, else he is no man. Sorrow as much as you will. If you love your beloved, let your conscience burn and chafe within you, but show yourself a man and a Varmlander. Let your glances beam with joy, and meet your friends with a gay word on your lips! Life and nature are hard. They bring forth courage and joy as a counterweight against their own hardness, or no one could endure them ... — Selma Lagerlof

No attempt should be made to "reconcile" Yahweh's hardening of Pharaoh's heart (plagues 6,8,9,10) with statements in the other plagues that Pharaoh hardened his own heart.
The tension cannot be resolved in a facile manner by suggesting, for example, that Pharaoh has already demonstrated his recalcitrance, so Yahweh merely helps the process along, or that he is doing what Pharaoh would have done on his own anyway. Rather, 9:12 is a striking reminder of what God has been trying to teach Moses and Israel since the beginning of the Exodus episode: He is in complete control. However Pharaoh might have reacted is given the chance is not brought into the discussion. He is not even given that chance. Yahweh hardens his heart. It is best to allow the tension of the text to remain. — Peter Enns

Induratize (v.) To harden the heart. Among the inevitabilities of old age are that the heart is hardened twice; first figuratively, through experience and loss, and then literally, in the form of atherosclerosis. — Ammon Shea

Travis, I love you with all of my being, but I love Cassie, too. And right now she needs me more than you do. Forgive me. Meri She loved him. The wonder of the statement seeped into him, but the joy that should have accompanied the knowledge faded beneath his growing frustration and fear. How could she possibly think that anyone needed her more than he did? She was his heart, his very life. If anything happened to her . . . Travis tore the top page from the tablet and hardened his jaw. He'd just have to make sure nothing did happen. After all, if a wife was going to tell her husband she loved him, she ought to do it in person. And he aimed to see that she did precisely that. Right after he kissed the living fire out of her and showed her exactly how much he truly needed her. — Karen Witemeyer

You have hardened your heart against your "American cousin." It was courageous in the memoir to state so clearly how you had to harden your heart against so much, to survive. Americans believe that suffering makes saints of us, which is a joke. Still I realize you have no time for me in your life now. There is no "purpose" to me. Even — Joyce Carol Oates

John's heart was hardened against the Lord. His father was God's minister, the ambassador of the King of Heaven, and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father. — James Baldwin

From the beginning, she had sat looking at him fixedly. As he now leaned back in his chair, and bent his deep-set eyes upon her in his turn, perhaps he might have seen one wavering moment in her, when she was impelled to throw herself upon his breast, and give him the pent-up confidences of her heart. But, to see it, he must have overleaped at a bound the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting, between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck. The barriers were too many and too high for such a leap. With his unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot away into the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost opportunities that are drowned there. — Charles Dickens

Yet he never gave up. Bitterness never staked its claim. Anger never metastasized into hatred. His heart never hardened; his resolve never vanished. He not only survived; he thrived. — Max Lucado

Better a broken heart than a hardened one. — Dalia Mogahed

Something changed in my heart. The hardened frost-glittering surface melted just a little to allow my feelings for Callan to blaze bright. I wouldn't be fighting for revenge or ruthless justice. This time, I'd be fighting for love and connection. — Jade Hart

Both Christian and Adrian had worried there would be some piece of Strigoi left in him, but their fears had been about violence and bloodshed. No one would have guessed this: that living as a Strigoi had hardened his heart, killing any chance of him loving anyone.
Killing any chance of him loving me.
And I was pretty sure that if that was the case, then part of me would die too. — Richelle Mead

People get their hearts broken over and over and over again. But they keep on beating. They keep going. And each time they get stronger. Not a heart made of armor, not a hardened shell. They get stronger because it's like any muscle. You keep using it and it will grow, and if shit gets rough it will bounce right back. The heart is nothing if not resilient. — Karina Halle

Warmth stole into Murdoch's voice at the memory, and Farah's heart clenched at the picture of her Dougan not yet a man, and yet not a boy, regaling a room full of hardened prisoners about the graveyard capers and bog adventures of a ten-year-old girl in the Scottish Highlands. "He described ye so many times, I feel as though any of us would have recognized ye had we seen ye on the streets. He told us of yer kindness, yer innocence, yer gentle ways and boundless curiosity. Ye became something of a patron saint to us all. Our daughter. Our sister. Our... Fairy. Without even knowing it, ye gave us- him- a little bit of sunshine and hope in a world of shadow and pain. — Kerrigan Byrne

Loving a holy God is beyond our moral power. The only kind of God we can love by our sinful nature is an unholy god, an idol made by our own hands. Unless we are born of the Spirit of God, unless God sheds His holy love in our hearts, unless He stoops in His grace to change our hearts, we will not love Him ... To love a holy God requires grace, grace strong enough to pierce our hardened hearts and awaken our moribund souls. — R.C. Sproul

before Reese could hit play, a knock came at the door. Reese looked over, ready to yell at whoever was at the door, but tat didn't happen. Instead, her heart kicked into gear and her nipples hardened as one hell of a gorgeous man came through the door with a careless grin on his face. She had no clue who the guy was, but she wanted to know him naked. — Toni Aleo

Each time a man leaves a woman, he takes a piece of her heart with him when he goes. The next man comes along, and takes another piece, this time a big one. And then, she meets another. And he takes a piece. One day we look up and we've got this shriveled little sliver of a heart left, and that's all we've got to offer. After that, the men we meet call us bitches and cunts, and man haters. They think we're hardened, but we're not. It's just that we're heartless. And we're heartless because of you. — Scott Hildreth

She had been defeated by herself alone, and the sadness of it left a dark shadow in her heart. It further sapped her confidence and left her ever more withdrawn, ever more capable of suppressing her feelings. Like her roughened hands, her sensitivity was slowly being hardened, and she drew relief from the numbness creeping through her. — Yo Yo

Commercialism is the blemish on the fair face of American life. Fighting against the terrible conditions of the explorer and pioneer, our forefathers had little time to think of beauty. Hearts and heads became as hardened to the more gracious things of life as did their bodies against physical hardship. Little by little, as nature yielded before the dynamite of their wills, life began to express itself in the same hard terms, and the great commerce of a New World bent everything to its indomitable will. — Alice Foote MacDougall

It was too late to pray, though. The sky was clear. The helicopters were gone. Too late for so many things. My fists hit the floor. My head hit the floor. My heart broke, hardened, and I lost my faith. That's when the killing thoughts came. When it felt right to punish everyone who let this happen. I could start with Angel's dad - but where would it stop? — Tucker Elliot

Peasants are a rude lot, and hard: life has hardened their hearts, but they are thick and awkward only in appearance; you have to know them. No one is more sensitive to what gives man the right to call himself a man: good-heartedness, bravery and virile brotherhood. — Jacques Roumain

Be merciful until you can't be.
Until you feel your heart begin to harden into a bullet.
Then use that bullet. — Clementine Von Radics

Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger
reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous
thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind
amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its
forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life. — Loren Eiseley

He wondered, as her blades crackled in the too quiet room, and waves of electricity spiraled around them, if he'd made a mistake. He hadn't seen her in years, but he'd heard the rumors. He hadn't truly known if she could wield those weapons with the glory and grace that drew blood and split bones.
But now, as Androma hissed, "I'm going to kill you," and her words sent a slice of fear charging through Dex's heart, he knew.
Gone was the girl he'd once known, that shivering thing he;d found bruised and broken in the wilderness of Adhira.
In her place stood the warrior he'd trained and hardened and turned into something devilishly delicious.
He reached for his gun as the Bloody Baroness attacked. — Sasha Alsberg

12. Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from e the living God. 13But f exhort one another every day, as long as it is called "today," that none of you may be hardened by g the deceitfulness of sin. 14. For we have come to share in Christ, h if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. 15. As it is said, b "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion. — Anonymous

O what hardness of heart mayst thou see in every corner whither thou goest, and where thou preachest, most part being as unconcerned as the very stones of the wall; and say what thou wilt, either by setting before them alluring promises or dreadful threatenings, yet people are hardened against both, none relenting for what they have done, or concerned about it. — Thomas Boston

Ross stared a moment at the piece of flotsam he had brought home and hoped to salvage. She was standing there in her ragged shirt and three-quarter-length breeches, her matted hair over her face and the dirty half-starved puppy at her feet. She stood with one toe turned in and both hands loosely behind her back, staring across at the library. He hardened his heart. Tomorrow would not do. — Winston Graham

When you are wronged and your heart and feelings are hardened, do not be distressed, for this has happened providentially; but be glad and reject the thoughts that arise within you, knowing that if they are destroyed at the stage when they are only provocations, their evil consequences will be cut off, whereas if the thoughts persist the evil may be expected to develop. — St. Mark The Ascetic

I'm not heartless - my heart is just hardened, while the rest of me is hollow. — J.M. Darhower

Raindrops fall from clouds of gray.
The fragile flowers grow.
Teardrops seem all I can say.
They speak of endless woe.
Your fingers wipe my grief away.
A seed of love you sow.
A hardened heart reverts to clay.
You mold my love just so. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Revival, as contrasted with a Holy Ghost atmosphere is a clean- cut breakthrough of the Spirit, a sweep of Holy Ghost power, bending the hearts of hardened sinners as the wheat before the wind, breaking up the fountains of the great deep, sweeping the whole range of the emotions, as the master hand moves across the harp strings, from the tears and cries of the penitent to the holy laughter and triumphant joy of the cleansed. — Norman Grubb

In the months before the repatriation her heart had hardened around her sister's absence, letting her love Natasha in memory as she could never love her in reality. — Anthony Marra

Souls do not break neither do hearts. Ravaged by time, they continue living within us and it is our choice whether to remove the walls of self preservation that we build as protection or to hide behind them and remain hardened within our comfort zone.
Life is precious, giving it your all is preferable to withering and dying even before you fall off this mortal coil. — Virginia Alison

Love is the weapon which Omnipotence reserved to conquer rebel man when all the rest had failed. Reason he parries; fear he answers blow for blow; future interest he meets with present pleasure; but love, that sun against whose melting beams the winter cannot stand
that soft subliming slumber which wrestles down the giant, there is not one human being in a million, nor a thousand men in all earth's huge quintillion, whose clay heart is hardened against love. — Martin Farquhar Tupper