Harmless As Quotes & Sayings

Bestiality is not my thing But it seems to be a harmless foible or idiosyncrasy of some people. So, as long as the animal doesn't mind (and the animal rarely does), I don't mind, and I don't see why anyone else should. — Frank Kameny

As soon as men who believe they are doing God's will get hold of power, whether household or village or in Jerusalem or Rome itself, the devil enters them. It isn't long before they start drawing up lists of punishments for all kinds of innocent activities, sentencing people to be flogged or stoned in the name of God for wearing this or eating that or believing the other. And the privileged ones will build great palaces and temples to strut around in, and levy taxes on the poor to pay for their luxuries...and put them poor harmless heretics they flush out to horrible public deaths, to terrify the rest into obedience. — Philip Pullman

We live under the New Testament principles of grace and mercy toward our enemies, but when it comes to sin, God wants us to be ruthless. The moment we believe in Jesus as our Savior, God initiates the process of making us holy through his Spirit. He expects us to participate in the lifelong process by battling any tendencies to follow our old nature when it fights against our desire to please God. Since there's no such thing as a harmless sin, any compromise is dangerous. God's battle plan is clear: wipe out any sinful desires, attitudes, and habits before they lead us into disaster. — Dianne Neal Matthews

The greatest intensification of the horrors of war is a direct result of the democratisation of the State. So long as the army was a professional unit, the specialist function of a limited number of men, war remained a relatively harmless contest for power. But once it became everyman's duty to defend his home (or his political "rights") warfare was free to range wherever that home might be, and to attack every form of life and property associated with that home. — Herbert Read

What began as an apparently harmless pastime has ended up as a frightening, overpowering addiction or obsession. — Billy Graham

His constant, despairing prayer was to be let alone. By the blue waters and rustling palms of his own mind he was happy and harmless as a Polynesian; only when the big ship dropped anchor beyond the coral reef, and the cutter beached in the lagoon, and, up the slope that had never known the print of a boot, there trod the grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary, and tourist - only then was it time to disinter the archaic weapons of the tribe and sound the drums in the hills; or, more easily, to turn from the sunlit door and lie alone in the darkness, where the impotent, painted deities paraded the walls in vain, and cough his heart out among the rum bottles. And — Evelyn Waugh

A trait no other nation seems to possess in quite the same degree as we do namely, a feeling of almost childish injury and resentment unless the world as a whole recognizes how innocent we are of anything but the most generous and harmless intentions — Eleanor Roosevelt

There is no remedy for this poison,' Sudhakar said. 'You must live with the consequences, as must I.'
'Then why did you let her have it?' Quill said savagely. 'You knew she was impulsive. You should have guessed she might take it herself!'
Sudhakar looked at him. 'Now, why would that occur to me? I saw a young woman consumed with anxiety for her husband, prepared to ruin her marriage in order to save him from further suffering. I saw nothing self-destructive about her.'
'She thought it was harmless,' Quill whispered harshly. 'She had no idea. You shouldn't have given it to her.'
'Do you think she is a child? She is a grown woman. Her rash actions are her own.'
It was only when Quill fixed him with a brutal gaze that he realized that Sudhakar was also suffering. — Eloisa James

The poets are a harmless little folk, with their dreams and raptures and heaven full of Greek gods that they carry about with them in their fantasy. But they become wicked as soon as they presume to hold their ideal up to reality and then flail the latter angrily, when they should have nothing at all to do with it. They would, nevertheless, remain harmless if they were only granted their free little place in reality un disturbed and not compelled through crowding and pressure to cast a backward glance at it, for it reaches beyond the clouds, and they themselves cannot survey it all and must cling to the stars as provisory border points, of which, however, who knows how many are yet today invisible, their light still in the process of journeying down to us. — Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann

How happy I am that my heart can feel the simple, harmless bliss of the person who brings to his table a cabbage he has grown himself, not just the cabbage alone but all the good days, the beautiful morning he planted it, the lovely evenings he watered it, and as he had his joy in its advancing growth, he enjoys it all again in the one moment. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation. — Raymond Carver

Many authors, as Hanck in particular had noted, were basically little people, spiritually shriveled, atrophied and care-worn personalities. Petty. Vulnerable and frightened. They needed help in their daily lives in order to seem bigger, or at least like everyone else. They sought compensation in poetry, resorted to words because words seemed harmless and free of prejudice; they didn't bite, they didn't provoke, they didn't infect. And besides, they didn't cost a thing. They were a suitable material for revenge-seeking cretins. — Klas Ostergren

Racism is not about hurtful words, bruised feelings, political correctness, or refusing to call short people 'vertically challenged.' Racism is about the power to treat entire groups of people as something less than human - for the benefit of that power. That's why a Native American sports mascot is far from harmless. — Dave Zirin

Thoughts are dangerous, he told himself, and thoughts against all science, all sanity, all civilized intelligence, are the most dangerous of all. He felt their presence here and there in his brain, like pockets of poison, harmless as long as you left them encysted and did not prick them. — Fritz Leiber

Nora cocked her head as she studied it. It was an interesting piece. Rather large as it lay nestled in the short, dark curls. It seemed oddly harmless lying there, and she had a sudden urge to reach out and touch it. — Kinley MacGregor

As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire. — Hilary Mantel

Spoke of the professional men and the artists as villeins. What else are they? One and all, the professors, the preachers, and the editors, hold their jobs by serving the Plutocracy, and their service consists of propagating only such ideas as are either harmless to or commendatory of the Plutocracy. Whenever they propagate ideas that menace the Plutocracy, they lose their jobs, in which case, if they have not provided for the rainy day, they descend into the proletariat and either perish or become working-class agitators. And don't forget that it is the press, the pulpit, and the university that mould public opinion, set the thought-pace of the nation. As for the artists, they merely pander to the little less than ignoble tastes of the Plutocracy. But — Jack London

To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

In themselves, harmless. As a group, incredibly dangerous. — Isaac Asimov

Words, when they've been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they've passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin strippd from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless. — Charles Frazier

AS I EXPECTED, I was treated by Scipio's conquerors as a harmless old fool with wisdom. The criminals called me "The Preacher" or "The Professor," just as they had on the other side.
I saw that many of them had tied ribbons around their upper arms as a sort of uniform. So when I came across a man who wasn't wearing a ribbon, I asked him jokingly, "Where's your uniform, Soldier?"
"Preacher," he said, referring to his skin, "I was born in a uniform. — Kurt Vonnegut

I remembered the verses and recited them slowly, with a pleasure that I had not felt before. I heard them as a soft whisper, harmless, without dark overtones:
Bareheaded and barefoot, Shahin the acrobat
stepped onto the tightrope, over which
the breeze alone passes without fear.
Shahin, the falcon, feared no danger,
asked for God's help and crossed over to the other bank.
And the little falcons, his apprentices,
passed over the chasm.
Above the water, on which the sun glistened,
they looked like pearls
strung on a thin thread.
The deep gorge beneath them,
the distant heavens above them.
And they on the unsteady tightrope,
on the dangerous path of life. — Mesa Selimovic

Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. The soldan of Egypt, or the emperor of Rome, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination. But he must at least have led his mamalukes, or praetorian bands, like men, by their opinion. — David Hume

Beggin' your pardon, miss, but I was told you be the one to help me cross on to the next world."
"Who told you this?"
His eyes widen. "A fearsome creature with a head full of snakes!"
"You musn't fear her," I say, taking the man's hand and leading his toward the river. "She's as tame as a pussycat. She'd probably lick your hand given the chance."
"Didn't seem harmless," he whispers, shuddering.
"Yes, well, things are not always as they appear, sir, and we must learn to judge for ourselves. — Libba Bray

Your uncle Howard is one of the most harmless of men - much nicer than most professional people. Of course he does dreadful things as a judge; but then if you take a man and pay him 5,000 pounds a year to be wicked, and praise him for it, and have policemen and courts and laws and juries to drive him into it so that he can't help doing it, what can you expect? — George Bernard Shaw

Contrary to her sister-in-law Janie's claims, Celia hadn't been in love with Kyle Gilchrist since her childhood - she'd simply loved to annoy him ... Armed with childish logic, Celia made it her mission to get under Kyle's skin as often as possible.
She'd drawn hearts emblazoned with her name on every one of his school notebooks.
He'd retaliated by stringing up her My Little Pony collection from a tree.
She'd pushed him into the stock tank.
He'd held her down and tickled her until she peed her pants.
She'd put a snapping turtle in his gym bag.
He'd tied her to the tire swing and spun her until she puked.
All harmless pranks that demanded retaliation. — Lorelei James

Be ye therefore as wise as the serpents and as harmless as the doves. — Paulo Coelho

We've come to understand that all land not explicitly designated for public use is privately owned, regardless of whether it's put to use or not. The next time you pass by a property that's only minimally used but nonetheless owned, consider how harmless it seems. You might even think that the private ownership may have preserved a little piece of nature from human contact... However, this perspective only arises because of the scarcity we have collectively created; such a situation would not occur if we only used as much land as we actually needed. If our exclusive use of land came with an ongoing responsibility to our local community, nature would no longer be exploited: Most people would tend to use no more land than absolutely necessary, — Martin Adams

Some of my cousins who had the great advantage of University education used to tease me with arguments to prove that nothing has any existence except what we think of it. The whole creation is but a dream; all phenomena are imaginary. You create your own universe as you go along. The stronger your imagination, the more variegated your universe. When you leave off dreaming, the universe ceases to exist. These amusing mental acrobatics are all right to play with. They are perfectly harmless and perfectly useless. I warn my younger readers only to treat them as a game. The metaphysicians will have the last word and defy you to disprove their absurd propositions. — Winston S. Churchill

We have begun to slam doors, and to throw things. I throw my purse, an ashtray, a package of chocolate chips, which breaks on impact. We are picking up chocolate chips for days. Jon throws a glass of milk, the milk, not the glass: he knows his own strength, as I do not. He throws a box of Cheerios, unopened.
The things I throw miss, although they are worse things. The things he throws hit, but are harmless.
I begin to see how the line is crossed, between histrionics and murder. — Margaret Atwood

As long as amoxicillin is given to our children who have pneumococci in their noses and throats, whether harmless or not, antibiotic resistance is inevitable. — Martin J. Blaser

If now, after the collapse, should any of these lackeys of Adolf Hitler have the insolence to claim they were merely harmless onlookers, let them feel the scourge of avenging mankind ... Whoever cries about having lost the Nazi system or wants to resurrect National Socialism is to be treated as a lunatic. — Friedrich Kellner

O Love, O great god Love, what have I done,
That thou shouldst hunger so after my death?
My heart is harmless as my life's first day:
Seek out some false fair woman, and plague her
Till her tears even as my tears fill her bed. — Algernon Charles Swinburne

And as Lindbergh's election couldn't have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as "History," harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic. — Philip Roth

Matthew had called her harmless. Harmless. And being with him made Frankie feel squashed into a box - a box where she was expected to be sweet and sensitive (but not oversensitive); a box for young and pretty girls who were not as bright or as powerful as their boyfriends. A box for people who were not forces to be reckoned with.
Frankie wanted to be a force. — E. Lockhart

I had great femme mentors, I had good role models of gentle men, I found ways to be a butch that did not require being an ass in public, ways of masculinity that were not misogyny - which is what I see more often than I used to these days, this way of butches distancing themselves from any and all things feminine by embodying the worst excesses of men, from relatively harmless ones like spitting on the street and wearing too much cheap cologne to behaving as though women were an entirely separate species of second-class citizen, the objects of jokes and derision. — S. Bear Bergman

Wear a gun to someone else's house, you're saying, 'I'll defend this home as if it were my own.' When your guests see you carry a weapon, you're telling them, 'I'll defend you as if you were my own family.' And anyone who objects levels the deadliest insult possible: 'I don't trust you unless you're rendered harmless'! — L. Neil Smith

The air of caricature never fails to show itself in the products of reason applied relentlessly and without correction. The observation of clinical facts would seem to be a pursuit of the physician as harmless as it is indispensable. [But] it seemed irresistibly rational to certain minds that diseases should be as fully classifiable as are beetles and butterflies. This doctrine ... bore perhaps its richest fruit in the hands of Boissier de Sauvauges. In his Nosologia Methodica published in 1768 ... this Linnaeus of the bedside grouped diseases into ten classes, 295 genera, and 2400 species. — Wilfred Trotter

The profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelop of the storm, and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion. — Herman Melville

...there is always a temptation to think that industrialism is harmless so long as it is clean and orderly. — George Orwell

I received her sewing kit and pins and brooches; a blank diary purchased especially for me; "Advice to a Young Married Woman", by a minister, which she asked me not to read till I was older----; "Exemplary Letters for Sundry Occasions"; "The Whole Duty of Woman"; and some volumes of Walter Scott's novels, which I might enjoy when my reading had improved. With a glance at Rev. Fowler, whose advice she had sought in this matter, she said that, for a sensible girl such as she knew me to be, novels by respectable authors could provide harmless amusement, but I must remember not to neglect my duties for them, not to demand that my life be a romance, or over strain myself with too much reading. — Phillip Margulies

I see you have the advantage of me,' he said. 'Very well. I'll make it as brief as I can. I'll tell you the plain facts and I only hope you won't draw the wrong conclusions from them. George Rattery had been making advances to my wife for some time. She was amused, intrigued, gratified by it - any woman might be, you know; George was a handsome brute, in his way. She may even have carried on a harmless flirtation with him. I did not remonstrate with her: if one is afraid to trust one's own wife, one has no right to be married at all. That's my view, at any rate. — Nicholas Blake

Why could Tolkien not be more like Sir Thomas Malory, asked [Edwin] Muir, in the third Observer review of those cited above, and give us heroes and heroines like Lancelot and Guinevere, who ' knew temptation, were sometimes unfaithful to their vows,' were engagingly marked by adulterous passion? But T.H. White had already considered that paradigm, was indeed rewriting it at the same time as Tolkien in The Once and Future King; and he had seen the core of Malory's work not in romantic vice but in the human urge to murder. In White the poisonous adder that provokes the last disastrous battle is no adder but a harmless grass-snake, and the flash of the sword which brings on the two armies is not natural self-defense but natural blood-lust, creating a continuum from cruelty to animals to world wars and holocausts. Malory has to be rewritten to encompass a new view of evil. — Tom Shippey

This "enlightened civilization" held some firm views about their neighbors. On February 22, 1899, the New York Times ran an article headlined "Americanizing Puerto Rico," describing Puerto Ricans as "uneducated, simple-minded and harmless people who are only interested in wine, women, music and dancing. — Nelson A. Denis

I watched him playing with the long blades of grass, weaving them into patterns as he hummed an unfamiliar song, a waltz.
"What are you doing?" I asked him.
"I'm letting you get used to the idea of me," he said idly. "I'm pretending to be harmless. Is it working?"
"Until you smile," ( ... ) — Delilah S. Dawson

I wept heartily over this poor little deceased soul. It was the first sentient being I had ever killed. I was now a killer. I was now as guilty as Cain. I was sixteen years old, a harmless boy, bookish and religious, and now I had blood on my hands. It's a terrible burden to carry. All sentient life is sacred. — Yann Martel

I think you are a very good tiger," said Dorothy, patting the huge head of the beast. "In that you are mistaken," was the reply. "I am a good beast, perhaps, but a disgracefully bad tiger. For it is the nature of tigers to be cruel and ferocious, and in refusing to eat harmless living creatures I am acting as no good tiger has ever before acted. That is why I left the forest and joined my friend the Cowardly Lion. — L. Frank Baum

Who are you?"
"I am Death," said the creature. "I thought that was obvious."
"But you're so small!"
"Only because you are small. You are young and far from your Death, September, so I seem as anything would seem if you saw it from a long way off-very small, very harmless. But I am always closer than I appear. As you grow, I shall grow with you, until at the end, I shall loom huge and dark over your bed, and you will shut your eyes so as not to see me. — Catherynne M Valente

Another school of opinion followed Mr. Fearenside, and either accepted the piebald view or some modification of it; as, for instance, Silas Durgan, who was heard to assert that "if he chooses to show enself at fairs he'd make his fortune in no time," and being a bit of a theologian, compared the stranger to the man with the one talent. Yet another view explained the entire matter by regarding the stranger as a harmless lunatic. That had the advantage of accounting for everything straight away. Between — H.G.Wells

It is important to remember that a thought is harmless unless we believe them and act on them. As the subject, since thoughts are an object of your awareness, you have the power to challenge every thought. You can decide if you want to make that thought real. — Elizabeth Thornton

Early in life she had discovered the important truth that nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion; and by a series of reckless escapades, half of them quite harmless, she had acquired all the privileges of a personality. — Oscar Wilde

How long in that same fit I lay, I have not to declare; But ere my living life returned, I heard and in my soul discerned Two VOICES in the air. "Is it he?" quoth one, "Is this the man? By him who died on cross, With his cruel bow he laid full low, The harmless Albatross. "The spirit who bideth by himself In the land of mist and snow, He loved the bird that loved the man Who shot him with his bow." The other was a softer voice, As soft as honey-dew: Quoth he, "The man hath penance done, And penance more will do. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn't, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story. — Philip Pullman

It shows the truth - that the real meaning of a word is only as powerful or harmless as the emotion behind it. — Sarah Silverman

Foolish people are never harmless. Stupidity accounts for as many crimes as anger and greed. — Louise Penny

What I ask of you is reasonable and moderate; I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself; the gratification is small, but it is all that I can receive, and it shall content me. it is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another. Our lives will not be happy, but they will be harmless, and free from the misery I now feel. Oh! my creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you of one benefit! — Mary Shelley

May the state fence in the harmless mentally ill solely to save its citizens from exposure to those whose ways are different? One might as well ask if the state, to avoid public unease, could incarcerate all who are physically unattractive or socially eccentric. — Potter Stewart

The hippocampus is the structure where memory is supposedly controlled. It is the most plastic part of the brain; it is also the part that is assumed to absorb all the damage from repeated insults like the chronic stress we experience daily from small doses of negative feelings - as opposed to the invigorating "good stress" of the tiger popping up occasionally in your living room. You can rationalize all you want; the hippocampus takes the insult of chronic stress seriously, incurring irreversible atrophy. Contrary to popular belief, these small, seemingly harmless stressors do not strengthen you; they can amputate part of your self. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You remind me of the Siberian hunting spider, which adopts a highly convincing limp in three of its eight legs in order to attract its main prey, the so-called Samaritan squirrel, which takes pity on the spider, and then the spider jumps on it and injects the paralyzing venom, while the squirrel remains bafflingly philosophical about the whole thing. Not to be confused with the Ukrainian hunting spider, which actually has got a limp and is, as such, completely harmless, and a little bit bitter about the whole thing. — Bill Bailey

America is harmless as an enemy but treacherous as a friend. — Bernard Lewis

How fair is it to judge a person based on his sexual preferences, or their 'otherness'? As long as a person is not 'harmful' for others or not violating the rights of others, I think we need not be bothered about their personal lives, whom they love or whom they marry. It is a personal choice. I think the most important thing about a person is his or her 'humanity', kindness, selflessness not their 'sex life' (only as long as he or she is not violating the rights of others or causing harm to others).
It is entirely a disgrace on humanity to 'discriminate' a person solely based on their 'otherness'.
I am surprised to see how the society stands against or make fun out of 'gay' people, who are totally harmless, ignoring the 'human' in them, but feel 'OK' with 'rapists', 'sex maniacs', 'prostitution' and 'sexual violence against women and children' occurring in Sri Lanka every day. — Ama H. Vanniarachchy

As St. Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary, He told us to be not only "as harmless as doves," but also "as wise as serpents." He wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head. — C.S. Lewis

In America, it's where you end up that matters, not how you get there. As long as you get there, no one asks questions. You don't ask. You never ask. And if someone does ask how you got there? It's usually a harmless person who never got anything, never got out, died paying rent as he waited for God to deliver him. — Ernesto Quinonez

Monotonous and thankless as her job can be sometimes, she cheers at the thought of her coworkers - a dozen of them crammed into their little offices in the basement - all cleverly disguised as harmless geeks, all capable of saving the world if called upon. — Alexis M. Smith

No one, even as a joke, could call a member of the all-Union Communist Party a Neo-Hegelian, a Neo-Kantian, a Subjectivist, an Agnostic, or, God forbid, a Revisionist. But "epicurean" sounded so harmless it could not possibly imply that one was not an orthodox Marxist. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I always shoot at privates. It was they who did the shooting and killing, and if I could kill a wound a private, why, my chances were so much the better. I always looked upon officers as harmless personages. — Sam Watkins

The trouble with this kind of Hegelian prose is that the reader is at first amused by what seem to be harmless metaphors, and soon the metaphors are being used as if they were observable historical tendencies and aesthetic phenomenon, and next the metaphor becomes a stick to castigate those who have other tastes, and other metaphors. — Pauline Kael

Sasha,' Kessligh said around his mouthful, 'if you'd seen as many people killed as I have, all because one of them believes this thing and the other believes this other thing, you wouldn't think it was all so harmless. Tales and legends are fun, but beliefs, Sasha. Beliefs are dangerous. Be careful what you believe in, for beliefs are far more dangerous then swords. — Joel Shepherd

...in a universe where both information and misinformation are constantly suspect, reviewed and drifing as they must be (constantly) by and between the two, a moment when either information or misinformation turns out to be harmless must bloom, when surrounded by the workings of desire and terror, into the offered sign of all about it, making and marking all about it innocent by contamination. — Samuel R. Delany

The so-called poet with his vague dreams and ideals is indeed no better than a harmless lunatic; the true poet is the worker, who grips life's throat and wrings out its secret, who selects austerely and composes concisely, whose work is as true and clean as razor-steel, albeit its sweep is vaster and swifter than the sun's! — Aleister Crowley

We live in a world where it is completely the norm to worry about what we put in our bodies but worry very little about what we throw in our minds. We think a hamburger is bad but a celebrity gossip magazine is completely harmless. As children you never hear "don't put that garbage in your mind," but for our body counterpart it is common thread. There is something very wrong with this scenario. — Evan Sutter

There is only one really safe, mild, harmless beverage and you can drink as much of that as you like without running the slightest risk, and what you say when you want it is, Garcon! Un Pernod! — Aleister Crowley

And you, you worthless - ' he broke out as I entered, turning to his daughter-in-law, and employing an epithet as harmless as duck, or sheep, but generally represented by a dash - . — Emily Bronte

The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man. — Pat Conroy

As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us. — Jeanette Winterson

Bonnie who had never hurt a - a harmless thing for malice. Bonnie who was like a kitten making airy pounces at no prey at all. Bonnie with her hair that was called something strawberry but that looked simply as if it was on fire. Bonnie of the translucent skin with the delicate violet fjords and estuaries of veins all over her throat and inner arms. Bonnie who had lately taken to looking at him sideways with her large childlike eyes big and brown under lashes like stars ... — L.J.Smith

For what can more partake of the mysterious than an antipathy spontaneous and profound such as is evoked in certain exceptional mortals by the mere aspect of some other mortal, however harmless he may be, if not called forth by this very harmlessness itself? — Herman Melville

There's an old Cheyenne saying about how, when a man is as wise as a serpent, he can afford to be as harmless as a dove. — Larissa Ione

There is no such thing as a harmless addition to the gospel. — Erwin W. Lutzer

Unsettled by the sudden appearance of Captain Quire within her court, Gloriana resolved to forego all frivolous entertainments and shun the more unnecessary pleasures. Yet, the queen reasoned, this surely did not apply to healthful exercise, such as riding in the royal park. Nor could she refuse to spend the remainder of the afternoon in quiet seclusion, lying face down upon a cushioned bench in her private dressing room while gentle Lady Mary rubbed all the soreness from her muscles. Such occupations were safe, and harmless. It was only afterwards, when she was sleeping deeply, that Captain Quire came to her in a dream. — Michael Moorcock

The drums staggered toward the distant street. Moving away from us, the dancers romped and rolled on the rhythm, their swaying heads like a field of wildflowers weaving back and forth on waves of wind. As the music dwindled to an echo in our minds, the day-to-day and minute-to-minute of slum life slowly reclaimed the lanes. We gave ourselves to our routines, our needs, and our harmless, hopeful scheming. And for a while, a little while, ours was a better world because the hearts and smiles that ruled it were almost as pure and clean as the flower petals fluttering from our hair, and clinging to our faces like still, white tears. — Gregory David Roberts

Be as wise as a fox. Be as harmless as a dove. — Matshona Dhliwayo

New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions. — Mark Twain

Maybe like the bat in the birdcage, Gavriel had been waiting for dark, waiting to get out of the chains, drink Aidan's blood, and escape. But when she showed up, he figured he could use them for a ride through daylight, so long as he seemed harmless enough to need saving. A chill crept up her spine. — Holly Black

An Athenian citizen does not neglect his state because he takes care of his own household; even those of us who are engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We do not regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs as harmless. We do not say that such a man 'minds his own business'. Rather we say he has no business here at all. — Pericles

The fisherman has a harmless, preoccupied look; he is a kind of vagrant, that nothing fears. He blends himself with the trees and the shadows. All his approaches are gentle and indirect. He times himself to the meandering, soliloquizing stream; he addresses himself to it as a lover to his mistress; he woos it and stays with it till he knows its hidden secrets. Where it deepens his purpose deepens; where it is shallow he is indifferent. He knows how to interpret its every glance and dimple; its beauty haunts him for days. — John Burroughs

Other people's weakness can destroy you just as much as their strength can. Weak people are not harmless. Their weakness can be their strength. — Philip Roth

A full-dressed ecclesiastic is a sort of go-cart of divinity; an ethical automaton. A clerical prig is, in general, a very dangerous as well as contemptible character. The utmost that those who thus habitually confound their opinions and sentiments with the outside coverings of their bodies can aspire to, is a negative and neutral character, like wax-work figures, where the dress is done as much to the life as the man, and where both are respectable pieces of pasteboard, or harmless compositions of fleecy hosiery. — William Hazlitt

On present-day Earth we have the most Christ-like nation in human history, a civilization built on loving kindness and demilitarization. They are being wiped off the face of their homeland. Well, at least the Chinese government isn't blaming Christ or Buddha for their actions against Tibet! But many savage pillagers throughout the past two thousand years have, and the Romans of a thousand years ago fall into that category. Within five hundred years they erased nearly all the nature-based, matriarchal tribes in what we now know as Europe. The invaders falsified history in order to justify their greed. Harmless facts and beautiful rituals were twisted to appear Satanic. Love of the environment and its animals and plants, love of healing modalities that modern day health professionals are now searching frantically to recover, were spin-doctored into demented superstition and turned outlaw. — Doug "Ten" Rose

Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction. — Jaron Lanier

The God Wars had not been a pleasant time for Craftsmen and Craftswomen around the world. One day, you're a simple thaumaturge, idly meddling in matters man was not meant to comprehend. The next, a collection of beings as old as humanity, with legions of followers, declare war on your "kind", and neighbours who once thought you a harmless eccentric with a fondness for mystic sigils and foul unguents see you as an affront to Creation. — Max Gladstone

Clever deceivers rarely tell outright falsehoods. It's too risky. The art of deception is closely related to the magician's craft: it involves knowing how to draw attention to a harmless place, to deflect it away from the action. Deeply entrenched patterns of perceptual, emotional, and cognitive dispositions serve as instruments of deception. A skilled deceiver is an illusionist who knows how to manipulate the normal patterns of what is salient to their audience. He places salient markers - something red, something anomalous, something desirable - in the visual field, to draw attention just where he wants it. — Clancy Martin

No one is sane, straight along, year in and year out, and we all know it. Our insanities are of varying sorts, and express themselves in varying forms-fortunately harmless forms as a rule. — Mark Twain

Books are never harmless ... they either strengthen us or they weaken us in our faith. Some of them do this even as they entertain us, others as they teach us. In an invisible way their teaching penetrates into our hearts and souls, to continue its work inside, and we inhale the spirit of these books as healing or poisonous vapors. They can bring the greatest benefits and the greatest ruin, for from their ideas that they spread come the deeds of the future. — Peter Prange

Harmless as a setting dove," he agreed. "I'm too hungry to be a threat to anything but breakfast. Let a stray bannock come within reach, though, and I'll no answer for the consequences. — Diana Gabaldon

What is a totem? It is as a rule an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. In the first place, the totem is the common ancestor of the clan; at the same time it is their guardian spirit and helper, which sends them oracles and, if dangerous to others, recognizes and spares its own children. — Sigmund Freud

There is no such thing as a harmless truth. — Gregory Nunn

Simply put, dramatic irony is when a person makes a harmless remark, and someone else who hears it knows something that makes the remark have a different, and usually unpleasant, meaning. For instance, if you were in a restaurant and said out loud, "I can't wait to eat the veal marsala I ordered," and there were people around who knew that the veal marsala was poisoned and that you would die as soon as you took a bite, your situation would be one of dramatic irony. — Lemony Snicket

It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates 'value' and becomes, ipso-facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power. — Robert Hughes

Try driving the streets of Los Angeles without seeing a billboard depicting a film with a lead actor holding a gun. It's almost as if guns are harmless props used to bring out the cheekbones and jawline of the screen star. — Henry Rollins