Heartlessness Quotes & Sayings

It's not what's going to happen, but who's coming. — Bill Vaughan

By this curious turn of disposition I have gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness; how undeserved, I alone can appreciate. — Emily Bronte

I loathe the urchin's cruelty to the cat, but I will not loathe the urchin. I loathe Hitler's mass-torturing, but not Hitler; and the money-man's heartlessness, but not the man. I love the swallow's flight, and I love the swallow; the urchin's gleam of tenderness, and the urchin. — Olaf Stapledon

When we begin to take responsibility for our multi-bio-dimensional inner nature ... when we begin to see AND understand both the angel and the devil within us, and endless other tendencies and qualities, from sexual capacity to artistic and intellectual potential, from sadism to masochism, from gentleness and tenderness to roughness and brutality, from heart to heartlessness, from selflessness to selfishness, from kindness to hatred - only then do we begin to manifest our human fullness. It is ONLY at that point, fully human, that we are capable of becoming something more ... as in metamorphosis ... something born within from the opposites. — Christopher Zzenn Loren

Earlier in this century, philanthropy often flowed from the wills of dead industrialists. In recent decades, it's as likely to have come from a very alive business leader, entertainer, artist or sports star. The most effective of these patrons begin the process of giving by asking what they care about passionately. — Michael Milken

I'm not saying that suffering is our fault. I believe we suffer because sin has taken hold of the world. And with sin comes selfishness and heartlessness and wickedness. But I also think there will be a day of reckoning, Nick, when God lays out all we've done and judges our actions. That's not as popular to talk about anymore, I suppose. We all like to hear about a God who loves and forgives rewards. But He isn't holy and just if He doesn't deal with all those wrongs. I would never want to stand before God without having done everything in my power to extend His mercy to the people around me whenever I could. — Janette Oke

But how can we venture to reprove or praise the universe! Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful nor noble, and has no desire to become any of these; it is by no means striving to imitate mankind! It is quite impervious to all our aesthetic and moral judgments! It has likewise no impulse to self-preservation or impulses of any kind; neither does it know any laws. Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can't make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless."
"Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them."
"I say it's perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances. — Oscar Wilde

I tell you, the one thing I hate is an absolutist. I hate absolutist ideologies, I hate absolutist aesthetics, I hate absolutist theologies, they're the burden and bane of this world. — Tobias Wolff

I don't think I am heartless. Do you?'
'You have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight to be entitled to give yourself that name, Dorian,' answered Lord Henry with his sweet melancholy smile. — Oscar Wilde

She knew as well as anyone that the world could be a place of trial and sorrow, that there was injustice and suffering and heartlessness - there was enough of all that to fill the great Kalahari twice over, but what good did it do to ponder that and that alone? None, she thought. — Alexander McCall Smith

I'm a paranoid person. And I think - I'm the kind of person that can come up with lots of negative scenarios. But I remembered thinking that seemed like - that was a stretch even for me. — Conan O'Brien

MnY reason of b"kup, but it hurts moRe when you don"t know evN a single-1. — Sumit D Choudhary C2

He took the Captain as he was, and was fond of him, with his cheery heartlessness, his incapacity to think beyond a couple of thoughts, for which his skull was far too roomy, his insignificant love affairs and childish infatuations, and the pointless and unconnected remarks that came out of his mouth, seemingly at random. He was a mediocre officer, who didn't care about his comrades, his men, his career. — Joseph Roth

We call the beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good and the heartlessness of the true. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Any fool with ambition and heartlessness can be a ruler. — Tomichan Matheikal

RAW is very forgiving. I was photographing a farm woman in Ecuador cooking over a small fire and my fill flash didn't go off a few times. I was about to delete the RAW files but decided to play with the curves first because I like the composition. It turned out that the image, although underexposed by two stops, was better than the fill-flashed images because the fire was the only source of illumination and it looked more real. — Peter Menzel

For a second, Americans could still feel like big swinging dicks. Solidarity, baby. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us - grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. If the goal is having some space in which to live one's own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another. * * * P — Susan Sontag

Lately it's started to seem to me that here in America our fetishization of self-reliance has taken a wrong turn and has helped enable us to jettison compassion as a national value while still maintaining a vision of ourselves as essentially well-meaning. It hasn't taken a whole lot of common sense, given the evidence of the last few years, to puzzle out the heartlessness of unregulated capitalism, and yet our political class has embraced even more fervently the notion of every man for himself, even given the ever-growing numbers such a philosophy leaves behind. — Jim Shepard

It amazes me how as beings in an unpredictable world, how we glorify our brothers falling. — Xela Ffonrims

He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart. — Thomas Harris

...hers was the heartlessness of poverty, which, it seemed to me, is different from the heartlessness of wealth.
p 290 — Frank Huyler

In every lifetime there is a moment. A moment so clear, so profoundly unique; that it stands out against billions of other moments. When you find a moment such as this one, you pay extra close attention to it. It will usually contain something that defines you in the future. (The Children of Ankh) — Kim Cormack

Persecution produced its natural effect on them. It found them a sect; it made them a faction. — Thomas Babington Macaulay

That's what Ender has to understand. There really is evil in the world, and wickedness, and every brand of stupidity. There's meanness and heartlessness and ... I don't even know which of them is me. - Hyrum Graff — Orson Scott Card

Fashionable women regard themselves, and are regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure; and the vacuity of mind, the heartlessness, the frivolity which is the necessary result of this false and debasing estimate of women, can only be fully understood by those who have mingled in the folly and wickedness of fashionable life. — Sarah Moore Grimke

We disliked the rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see. — Ben Okri

The witnesses of Hester Prynne's disgrace had not yet passed beyond their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but had none of the heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present. — Nathaniel Hawthorne