Severest Quotes & Sayings

Decency and tolerance, to be of any value, must be capable of withstanding the severest strain. — Mahatma Gandhi

I will not doubt, though sorrows fall like rain, And troubles swarm like bees about a hive; I shall believe the heights for which I strive Are only reached by anguish and by pain; And though I groan and tremble with my crosses, I yet shall see, through my severest losses, The greater gain. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

My definition of democracy is -
A form and a method of Government whereby revolutionary changes in the social life are brought about without bloodshed.
That is the real test. It is perhaps the severest test. But when you are judging the quality of the material you must put it to the severest test. — B.R. Ambedkar

If you're not your own severest critic, you are your own worst enemy. — Jay Maisel

And moody madness laughing wild Amid severest woe. — Thomas Gray

The force we use on ourselves, to prevent ourselves from loving, is often more cruel than the severest treatment at the hands of one loved. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

We cannot fully understand now, but when we stand upon the heights of glory, we shall look back with joy on the things we have suffered, for we shall know then that our severest trials were a part of the "all things" which worked together for eternal good — John Albert Broadus

At times of the severest depression, humor is what binds people together. — Robert Carlyle

Sin is dark and loves the dark, still hides from itself in gloom, and in the darkest hell is still itself the darkest hell and the severest woe. — Robert Pollok

Of course! When it's a question of anything stupid and pathetic and devoid of humor or wit,
you're the man, you tragedian. Well, I am not. I don't care a fig for all your romantics of
atonement. You wanted to be executed and to have your head chopped off, you lunatic! For this
imbecile ideal you would suffer death ten times over. You are willing to die, you coward, but not
to live. The devil, but you shall live! It would serve you right if you were condemned to the
severest of penalties. — Hermann Hesse

When I left Springfield [to become President] I asked the people to pray for me. I was not a Christian. When I buried my son, the severest trial of my life, I was not a Christian. But when I went to Gettysburg and saw the graves of thousands of our soldiers, I then and there consecrated myself to Christ. — Abraham Lincoln

The fact that we are now crusaders needn't blind us to the fact that for a very long time we have been, as Badger would say, echidnas. I can think of a hundred ways already in which the war has "brought us to our senses." But it oughtn't to need a war to make a nation paint its kerbstones white, carry rear-lamps on its bicycles, and give all its slum children a holiday in the country. And it oughtn't to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our legs, and get up early enough to see the sun rise. However, it has needed one: which is about the severest criticism our civilization could have. — Jan Struther

He is always the severest censor of the merit of others who has the least worth of his own. — Elias Lyman Magoon

He drew from under the table a sheet of strangely scented yellow-Chinese paper, the brushes, and slab of India ink. In cleanest, severest outline he had traced the Great Wheel with its six spokes, whose centre is the conjoined Hog, Snake, and Dove (Ignorance, Anger, and Lust), and whose compartments are all the heavens and hells, and all the chances of human life. — Rudyard Kipling

Criticism does not disturb me, for I am my own severest critic. Always in my playing I strive to surpass myself, and it is this constant struggle that makes music fascinating to me. — Jascha Heifetz

And only the very courageous will be able to keep alive the spirit of individualism and dissent which gave birth to this nation, nourished it as an infant, and carried it through its severest tests upon the attainment of its maturity. — John F. Kennedy

Friendship is held to be the severest test of character. It is easy, we think, to be loyal to a family and clan, whose blood is in your own veins. — Charles Eastman

A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet. — Phyllis McGinley

The severest test of character is not so much the ability to keep a secret as it is, when the secret is finally out, to refrain from disclosing that you knew it all along. — Sydney J. Harris

Unity to be real must survive the severest strain without breaking. — Mahatma Gandhi

These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live. If this man's acts and words do not create a revival, it will be the severest possible satire on the acts and words that do. It is the best news that America has ever heard ... How many a man who was lately contemplating suicide has now something to live for! — Henry David Thoreau

What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties! — Henry David Thoreau

A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends. At some table a document is signed by some persons whom none of us knows, and then for years together that very crime on which formerly the world's condemnation and severest penalty fall, becomes our highest aim. But who can draw such a distinction when he looks at these quiet men with their childlike faces and apostles' beards. Any noncommissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, than they are to us. And yet we would shoot at them again and they at us if they were free. — Erich Maria Remarque

Like many of my fellow preachers I acknowledge that my best and severest critic is my wife. — D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

I don't have any fear of death. I do, however, have an inordinate fear of becoming dependent on other people. To me, that's the severest test, not death. — Huston Smith

It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship. — Henry Ward Beecher

For if the will has nothing to employ it and love has no present object with which to busy itself, the soul finds itself without either support or occupation, its solitude and aridity cause it great distress and its thoughts involve it in the severest conflict. — Teresa Of Avila

Music the fiercest grief can charm,
And fate's severest rage disarm. Music can soften pain to ease,
And make despair and madness please;
Our joys below it can improve,
And antedate the bliss above. — Alexander Pope

The severest prosecutions have never been followed by revelations changing a divine law, obedience to which brought imprisonment or martyrdom. Though I go to prison, God will not change his law of celestial marriage. — Lorenzo Snow

The severest justice may not always be the best policy — Abraham Lincoln

The severest self-denials and the most lavish gifts are of no value in God's esteem unless they are prompted by love. — Arthur W. Pink

The means by which I preserve my own health are, temperance, early rising, and spunging the body every morning with cold water, a practice I have pursued for thirty years ; and though I go from this heated theatre into the squares of the Hospital, in the severest winter nights, with merely silk stockings on my legs, yet I scarcely ever have a cold ... — Astley Cooper

We often pity the poor, because they have no leisure to mourn their departed relatives, and necessity obliges them to labor through their severest afflictions: but is not active employment the best remedy for overwhelming sorrow
the surest antidote for despair? It may be a rough comforter: it may seem hard to be harassed with the cares of life when we have no relish for its enjoyments; to be goaded to labor when the heart is ready to break, and the vexed spirit implores for rest only to weep in silence: but is not labor better than the rest we covet? and are not those petty, tormenting cares less hurtful than a continual brooding over the great affliction that oppresses us? Besides, we cannot have cares, and anxieties, and toil, without hope
if it be but the hope of fulfilling our joyless task, accomplishing some needful project, or escaping some further annoyance. — Anne Bronte

But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire ... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire. — Henry David Thoreau

The more ignorant the authority, the more dogmatic it is. In the fields where no real knowledge is even possible, the authorities are the fiercest and most assured and punish non-belief with the severest of penalties. — Abraham Myerson

Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the severest correction. — Henry David Thoreau

The most easily deteriorated of all the moral qualities is the quality called 'conscience.' In one state of a man's mind, his conscience is the severest judge that can pass sentence on him. In another state, he and his conscience are on the best possible terms with each other in the comfortable capacity of accomplices. — Wilkie Collins

Virgil and Horace [were] the severest writers of the severest age. — John Dryden

It's probably hard for anyone looking at my landscapes today to realize that I was once regarded as a rebel, a dangerous influence; that I've been told I was on the verge of insanity, that my painting was nothing but meaningless daubs. Lawren Harris, the man most responsible for drawing the Group of Seven together, was accused of something perilously close to treason - his paintings, said his severest critics, were discouraging immigration. — A. Y. Jackson

Heaven often smites in mercy, even when the blow is severest. — Joanna Baillie

The severest charge that can be brought against the Christian education of the Negro in the South during the last thirty years is the reckless way in which sap-headed young fellows, without ability, and, in some cases, without character, have been urged and pushed into the ministry. — W.E.B. Du Bois

The severest trial of oppression is the constant outrage which one suffers at the thought of the oppressor. What Jesus discovered was how to avoid the inner devastations. His technique was to practice the opposite emotion ... [a man] may not get his freedom or possessions back, but he's less miserable. It's a difficult lesson. — B.F. Skinner

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

Gone, at least for the moment, was his view of the Holy One as a man swatting flies or trapping rats in the stable or flying into a temper as savage as any Assyrian king's. Gone too was the notion of the Holy One keeping score so exactingly that not even the angels could escape the severest penalties. In place of all this, at least for as long as it took him to go back into the house, he thought about how the Holy One, blessed be he, wishes the world and its creatures nothing but well. He thought also how, though never condoning the shadows that dwell in the human heart, he is forever dispatching angels of light to deal with them mercifully. — Frederick Buechner

The strictest law sometimes becomes the severest injustice. — Benjamin Franklin

Silence is sometimes the severest criticism. — Charles Buxton

Mr Darcy is my severest critic. — Elizabeth Bennett

[I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies. — Edward Abbey

No iconoclast can possibly escape the severest criticism. — Clarence Darrow

O neglectful Nature, wherefore art thou thus partial, becoming to some of thy children a tender and benignant mother, to others a most cruel and ruthless stepmother? I see thy children given into slavery to others without ever receiving any benefit, and in lieu of any reward for the services they have done for them they are repaid by the severest punishments. — Leonardo Da Vinci

The lesson was not lost on Kartane. To be Ringed was the severest form of control. If Daemon couldn't stand the pain, how could he? It became very important not to give Dorothea a reason to Ring him. That night, after Daemon had been allowed to rest a little, he was ordered to serve the witch he'd earlier refused. That night was the first time Daemon went cold. — Anne Bishop

In practice we always base our preparations against an enemy on the assumption that his plans are good; indeed, it is right to rest our hopes not on a belief in his blunders, but on the soundness of our provisions. Nor ought we to believe that there is much difference between man and man, but to think that the superiority lies with him who is reared in the severest school. — Thucydides

Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world. — Marisha Pessl

I'm my own severest critic, and I realize when I make mistakes. — Luis Suarez

If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to neurotic illness. — Sigmund Freud

He seemed to be buffeted from both sides, challenged by his dreams, which revolted at the compromises of reality, and assaulted by reality which denounced the emptiness of all dreams.
He seemed to spend himself in that struggle - the severest that a man can face; and he seemed to win by a constant renewal of effort in which he refused to sink either into placid acceptance of the world, or into self-contained satisfaction with his vision. — Walter Lippmann

When you lose your parents as a child, you are indoctrinated into a club, you re taken into life's severest confidence. You are undeceived. — Hilary Thayer Hamann

There is a river in the ocean. In the severest droughts it never fails, and in the mightiest floods it never overflows. Its banks and its bottom are of cold water, while its current is of warm. The Gulf of Mexico is its fountain, and its mouth is in the Arctic Sea. It is the Gulf Stream. — Matthew Fontaine Maury

In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on the part of the spectators, as befitted a people among whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

When Death, or adverse Fortune's ruthless gale,
Tears our best hopes away, the wounded Heart
Exhausted, leans on all that can impart
The charm of Sympathy; her mutual wail
How soothing! never can her warm tears fail
To balm our bleeding grief's severest smart;
Nor wholly vain feign'd Pity's solemn art,
Tho' we should penetrate her sable veil.
Concern, e'en known to be assum'd, our pains
Respecting, kinder welcome far acquires
Than cold Neglect, or Mirth that Grief profanes.
Thus each faint Glow-worm of the Night conspires,
Gleaming along the moss'd and darken'd lanes,
To cheer the Gloom with her unreal fires. — Anna Seward

Success is the product of the severest kind of mental and physical application, — Thomas A. Edison

We become aware, however, that all customs, even the hardest, grow pleasanter and milder with time, and that the severest way of life may become a habit and therefore a pleasure. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Those who do the least themselves are always the severest critics upon the noble achievements of others. — Elias Lyman Magoon

But I had not quite fixed whether to make him [Don Juan] end in Hell-or in an unhappy marriage,-not knowing which would be the severest. — Lord Byron

The Rationalist case needs no straining of evidence and always gains by the severest self-criticism. — Joseph McCabe

The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition. — William Hazlitt

It may seem somewhat ironic that the Catholic Church finds itself advocating the same position against abortion as its severest Christian critics, the Protestant fundamentalists. In fact, it is no more surprising than finding the so-called pro-life movement keeping company with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao, all of whom at one time or another banned abortions. What they have in common is their belief, rooted in misogyny, that the woman's right to choose - a fundamental aspect of her autonomy - must be crushed in order to achieve what they have deemed a 'higher' religious, moral or social goal. — Jack Holland

We should remember that one man is much the same as another, and that he is best who is trained in the severest school. — Thucydides

Persecution has come upon us, right honorable brethren, and persecution in the severest form. Shepherds are persecuted that their flocks may be scattered. And the worst of all is that those who are being treated ill cannot accept their sufferings in proof of their testimony, nor can the people reverence the athletes as in the army of martyrs, because the name of Christians is applied to the persecutors. The one charge which is now sure to secure severe punishment is the careful keeping of the traditions of the Fathers. — Saint Basil

The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities. — David Whyte