Inflicts Upon Quotes & Sayings

Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being helpless prey to impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, drops him, promises and betrays, and -crowning injury- inflicts on him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself. — Paul Valery

The more she likes me, the more closed off she becomes. The more sarcasm she inflicts on me. Vulnerability makes her feel weak, — Colleen Hoover

The shy man does have some slight revenge upon society for the torture it inflicts upon him. He is able, to a certain extent, to communicate his misery. He frightens other people as much as they frighten him. He acts like a damper upon the whole room, and the most jovial spirits become, in his presence, depressed and nervous. — Jerome K. Jerome

Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact. — Emil Cioran

There is, however, possibly a serious side to the question, for some of the children, indeed all who have been missed at night, have been slightly torn or wounded in the throat. The wounds seem such as might be made by a rat or a small dog, and although of not much importance individually, would tend to show that whatever animal inflicts them has a system or method of its own. The police of the division have been instructed to keep a sharp lookout for straying children, especially when very young, in and around Hampstead Heath, and for any stray dog which may be about. — Bram Stoker

Man is a blind, witless, low brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon the earth. — Ian McHarg

If the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government. — Tommy Franks

But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of suffering : that is great, that belongs to greatness. — Friedrich Nietzsche

He who does reverence to his own sect, while disparaging the sects of others with intent to enhance the glory of his own sect, by such conduct inflicts the severest injury on his own sect. — Ashoka

The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine. — John Stuart Mill

Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts. If one can endure pain, one can live without suffering. If one can withstand pain, one can withstand anything. If one can learn to control pain, one can learn to control oneself. — James Frey

You do not have to be alone. The world never inflicts loneliness upon us. That is something we choose or reject by ourselves. — Darren Shan

No, instead it is the beastly Cecily Temple who answers me. Dead, dear Cecily, or as I affectionately refer to her in the privacy of my mind, She Who Inflicts Misery Simply by Breathing. — Libba Bray

How seriously would we take person who said, "I have faith in Adolf Hitler, or in John Dilinger. I can't explain why they did the things they did, but I can't believe they would have done them without a good reason." Yet people try to justify the deaths and tragedies God inflicts on innocent victims with almost these same words.
Furthermore, my religious commitment to the supreme value of an individual life makes it hard for me to accept an answer that is not scandalized by an innocent person's pain, that condones human pain because it supposedly contributes to an overall work of esthetic value. If a human artist or employer made children suffer so that something immensely impressive or valuable could come to pass, we would put him in prison. Why then should we excuse God for causing such undeserved pain, no matter how wonderful the ultimate result may be? — Harold S. Kushner

We must have faith during the period of our grief. We think that our afflictions will be greater than we can bear, but we do not know the strength of our own hearts, nor the power of God. He knows all. He knows every folding of the heart and also the extent of the sorrow that he inflicts. What we think will overwhelm us entirely only subdues and conquers our pride. Our renewed spirit rises from its subjugation with a celestial strength and consolation. — Francois Fenelon

It neither kills outright nor inflicts apparent physical harm, yet the extent of its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record - and its potential damage to the quality of human life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the 'Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.' Its more conventional name, of course, is dehumanization. — Ashley Montagu

Every unpleasant worldly experience in life exposes our sensitive nervous systems to painful phenomena. Despite all the beer commercial advertisement slogans urging us to live with gusto, life is unavoidably painful. Life is a battering ram that inflicts trauma upon human beings. People blunt the traumatic force of enduring a lifetime of pain, fearfulness, and unremitted anguish and boredom with religion, sex, booze, drugs, fantasy, and other indulgent acts and forms acts of escapism. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I was so much in the habit of having Albertine with me, and now I suddenly saw a new aspect of Habit. Hitherto I had regarded it chiefly as an annihilating force which suppresses the originality and even the awareness of one's perceptions; now I saw it as a dread deity, so riveted to one's being, its insignificant face so incrusted in one's heart, that if it detaches itself, if it turns away from one, this deity that one had barely distinguished inflicts on one sufferings more terrible than any other and is then as cruel as death itself. — Marcel Proust

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's. — Aldous Huxley

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself. — Emile M. Cioran

There are a great many ways in which, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. — Bertrand Russell

I'd believed mine was the greatest of all the arts, the noblest of all the lies, the creation of hope. I thought hope could overcome everything, but I was wrong. Hope cannot overcome truth. Hope and truth cannot co-exist. Truth destroys hope. The most savage cruelties man inflicts on man are committed in the pursuit of truth. My last lie had been the most honest, the most honorable of them all, for there is an art greater even than the creation of hope. The greatest art of all is the destruction of truth. — Karen Maitland

Our merciful Father has no pleasure in the sufferings of His children; He chastens them in love; He never inflicts a stroke He could safely spare; He inflicts it to purify as well as to punish, to caution as well as to cure, to improve as well as to chastise. — Hannah More

The thoroughly guilty man has an advantage over all of us; he cannot be found more guilty of anything, since he has already found himself guilty of everything. This may sound like an absurdity - causing oneself extreme pain in order not to feel any number of little pains of lesser guilts and shames, but it has its own logic. A man more easily adapts to what he inflicts upon himself; as to his own judgement, he is already committed to it and willing to live with it. — Robert C. Solomon

Calumny is a monstrous vice: for, where parties indulge in it, there are always two that are actively engaged in doing wrong, and one who is subject to injury. The calumniator inflicts wrong by slandering the absent; he who gives credit to the calumny before he has investigated the truth is equally implicated. The person traduced is doubly injured
first by him who propagates, and secondly by him who credits the calumny. — Herodotus

What I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading. — Roland Barthes

Religion indeed enlightens, terrifies, subdues; it gives faith, it inflicts remorse, it inspires resolutions, it draws tears, it inflames devotion, but only for the occasion. — John Henry Newman

Some say that the weeping willows once stood upright and strong, but that the broken hearts of lovers so touched the heart of the trees that they bent in grief and were never able to straighten themselves again, weeping the tears of each lover. Others say that they weep for the pain that mankind inflicts upon the earth and that they will right themselves, once again, when a new era of peace and kindness becomes a reality. — Ella Emerson

Because we don't see the evil destroyed now and thus experience the suffering that evil inevitably inflicts, we are tempted to doubt God's existence and goodness. — William A. Dembski

An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself. — Irwin Shaw

All the punishment in the world will not reform a man, unless he knows that he who inflicts it upon him does it for the sake of reformation, and really and truly loves him, and has his good at heart. Punishment inflicted for gratifying the appetite makes man afraid but debases him. — Robert Green Ingersoll

I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't ... The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further. — Mark Twain

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity. — Gail Caldwell

Tears are copiously showered over frailties the discoverer takes a malicious delight in circulating; and thus, all granite on one side of the heart, and all milk on the other, the unsexed scandal-monger hies from house to house, pouring balm from its weeping eyes on the wounds it inflicts with its stabbing tongue. — Edwin Percy Whipple

My impression is that life - a big word, I know - inflicts themes on a writer through certain experiences that impress themselves on his consciousness or subconscious and later compel him to shake himself free by turning them into stories. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

The sufferings that fate inflicts on us should be borne with patience, what enemies inflict with manly courage. — Thucydides

As a free-speech advocate, I believe that adults should have access to any material they want. As a parent, and a community member, I think people should be able to protect their homes from imagery - much of it violent - that is, I feel, a form of child abuse when adult society inflicts it upon children. — Naomi Wolf

The tattoo artist inflicts pain and I take it. With each breath I count to one again. Each inhale, each exhale, time passes in the smallest of pieces, and pieces still smaller than those.
This is how you count a life. This is how you go through it. Each second of hurt is a second that's already passed, one you never have to go through again. I have counted in pieces that small, when walking from the bed to the fridge seemed an insurmountable goal. I have counted my breaths, my steps, my eye-blinks, my hiccups, the tiny pulse in my thumb. And when I started getting tattooed, two of the things I used to need were gone: to write on myself, and to find irrelevant things to count. A second of intense pain is the most profound thing you can live through. And another, and another, and another, and then you know what it is to feel, and to struggle through that feeling one small agonizing increment at a time, and if you know that, you know what it is to live with mental illness. — Stacy Pershall

So, you see, in essence, cruelty is a cycle. A person inflicts it and it spreads. It simply breeds more and more of itself in a loop. — L. H. Cosway

Love's wounds can be healed only by the one who inflicts them. — Publilius Syrus

You try to steer a course in American society that's not self-destructive. But America is a country that inflicts injury. It does not like to see anything that comes in response, and accuses one of anger as if it were an unnatural response. — Randall Robinson

[ ... ] I stated to them among other things that no country inflicts death so readily upon the inhabitants of other countries, frightens so many people so far away, as America. — Mohsin Hamid

The corporations are worried about their reputational damage and a lot of the social media inflicts that, but it's hard to measure it. — Ralph Nader

Sometimes his expired faith in rational logic revives itself long enough to believe in points ... but in the end he always ends up feeling like an asshole for thinking any of the pain he either inflicts or endures has meaning beyond the senseless fact of its existence. — Anthony Marra

What inflicts the mind, inflicts the body. What inflicts the soul inflicts the body. Physical wounds heal much quicker but spiritual, emotional and spiritual wounds takes much longer of healing. — Ann Marie Aguilar

The final disease that nature inflicts on us will determine the atmosphere in which we take our leave of life, but our own choices should be allowed, insofar as possible, to be the decisive factor in the manner of our going. — Sherwin B. Nuland

Rowing, particularly sculling, inflicts on the individual in every race a level of pain associated with few other sports. There was certainly pain in football during a head-on collision, pain in other sports on the occasion of a serious injury. That was more the threat of pain; in rowing there was the absolute guarantee of it every time. — David Halberstam

Humanity cannot afford to acknowledge all of the blood that it spills and the destruction it inflicts on the world in its effort to perpetuate itself. Desacralization is a process that allows us to sever any relationship we might feel to other living things. By draining the aliveness out of things, we can pretend that our control and manipulation are of little consequence. Man the trapper becomes man the taxidermist, disemboweling nature of its spontaneity and movement, and stuffing it with a leaden inanimateness. — Jeremy Rifkin

No other creature on the face of this planet inflicts more suffering than humans. — Mischa Temaul

Whatever humanity inflicts on itself, nature can always go one better. — Justin Richards

Only the one that hurts you can make you feel better. Only the one that inflicts pain can take it away — Madonna Ciccone

Death is to be feared because of the pain and loss it inflicts through love, and for no other reason. — K.J. Parker

Do not give much of your fears to the knife that cuts to bring out blood. Instead, fear the unseen knife that cuts deeper than the knife you see! The unseen knife that inflicts pain in the heart and leaves its indelible footprints on our minds! The unseen knife that is sharper enough to either unite or make all things fall apart. Fear this knife: words! It can make or mar you greatly or badly! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

God is not interested in what you think you should be or feel. He is not interested in the narrative you construct for yourself, or that others construct for you. Rather, He is interested in you, the you who suffers, the you who inflicts suffering on others, the you who hides, the you who has bad days (and good ones). And He meets you where you are. — Tullian Tchividjian

The pain caused by this wound which He inflicts on me and the sweetness which accompanies it are so intense that I cannot even begin to describe it. However ... this pain and this
sweetness are completely spiritual, although it is also true that they are shared by the body to a high degree. — Pio Of Pietrelcina

I know that God is putting me through the fire of afflictions. I've accepted the blows that life has dealt me, and sometimes I feel as cold and indifferent as the water that inflicts such pain on the steel. But my one prayer is this: 'Please, God, my Mother, don't give up until I've taken on the shape that you wish for me. Do this by whatever means you think best, for as long as you like but never ever throw me on the scrap heap of souls. — Paulo Coelho

Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it. — Mark Twain

The idolatry of food cuts across class lines. This can be seen in the public's toleration of a level of cruelty in meat production that it would tolerate nowhere else. If someone inflicts pain on an animal for visual, aural, or sexual gratification, we consider him a monster, and the law makes at least a token effort at punishment. If someone's goal is to put the "product" in his mouth? ... — Brian Reynolds Myers

The way I see it, the blue is the stuff you can't control, life's major heartbreak and struggles, that feeling of devastation so massive and brutal it inflicts permanent damage on the heart and spirit that can never be undone and will always be there, spewing somewhere in a corner of your mind like deep scars you'll have with you you're whole life.
The green you also can't control. But that's the part that reminds you life is worth living. It's not the here-and-there type of good stuff that happens every day either. The green is the stuff that comes in huge doses that slap you in the face when you least expect it and brings a light to all that you are through growth, bravery, and goodness, and love. It's the stuff that picks you up when you're at the bottom and makes you keep on going even when you're sure you can't. That's the green. — Love Maia

Ashoka supplemented this general moral and political principle by a dialectical argument based on enlightened self-interest: 'For he who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own sect, in reality inflicts, by such conduct, the severest injury on his own sect. — Amartya Sen

Be grateful for every scar life inflicts on you. Where we're unhurt is where we are false. Where we are wounded and healed is where our real self gets to show itself. That's where you get to show who you really are — Sara Gran

Dads. It's time to show our sons how to properly treat a woman. It's time to show our daughters how a girl should expect be treated. It's time to show forgiveness and compassion. It's time to show our children empathy. It's time to break social norms and teach a healthier way of life! It's time to teach good gender roles and to ditch the unnecessary ones. Does it really matter if your son likes the color pink? Is it going to hurt anybody? Do you not see the damage it inflicts to tell a boy that there is something wrong with him because he likes a certain color? Do we not see the damage we do in labeling our girls "tom boys" or our boys "feminine" just because they have their own likes and opinions on things? Things that really don't matter? — Dan Pearce

You cannot control the depth of a wound another inflicts upon you. — Lang Leav

If someone does me injury I must desire that this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love for him who inflicts it, in order that he may not really have done evil. — Simone Weil