Softness Hardness Quotes & Sayings

In the dull twilight of the winter afternoon she came to the end of a long road which had begun the night Atlanta fell. She had set her feet upon that road a spoiled, selfish and untried girl, full of youth, warm of emotion, easily bewildered by life. Now, at the end of the road, there was nothing left of that girl. Hunger and hard labor, fear and constant strain, the terrors of war and the terrors of Reconstruction had taken away all warmth and youth and softness. About the core of her being, a shell of hardness had formed and, little by little, layer by layer, the shell had thickened during the endless months. — Margaret Mitchell

I don't think of myself as a hard man, but other people may think otherwise. You know you have obligations to do the best you can for people, for your job, for your shareholders ... it all has to be balanced between the hardness and the softness. — Frank Lowy

There was nothing else in the entire universe, nothing but the two of them together. Her curves, his angles. Her light, his darkness. Her softness, his exquisitely aching hardness.
Male. Female. — Thea Harrison

It seemed strange that with so much softness in her actual construction Mamma gave such a feeling of hardness. When — Madeleine L'Engle

In social life we hardly stop to consider how much of that daring spirit which gives mastery comes from hardness of heart rather than from high purpose, or true courage. The man who succumbs to his wife, the mother who succumbs to her daughter, the master who succumbs to his servant, is as often brought to servility by a continual aversion to the giving of pain, by a softness which causes the fretfulness of others to be an agony to himself, - as by any actual fear which the firmness of the imperious one may have produced. There is an inner softness, a thinness of the mind's skin, an incapability of seeing or even thinking of the troubles of others with equanimity, which produces a feeling akin to fear; but which is compatible not only with courage, but with absolute firmness of purpose, when the demand for firmness arises so strongly as to assert itself. — Anthony Trollope

I do not like hardness of heart, but neither do I like softness of head. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Don't forget how to be gentle," she warned. "Don't let the hardness of the world steal the softness of your heart. — Laurie Halse Anderson

The perfidious, savage, disdainful, stupid, slothful, inhospitable, stupid English. — Julius Caesar Scaliger

Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart. — R. Buckminster Fuller

There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents. This is what has been called the "dialect of moss on stone - an interface of immensity and minute ness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy, yin and yan. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

Tell me the word that will win you, and I will speak it. I will speak the stars of heaven into a crown for your head; I will speak the flowers of the field into a cloak; I will speak the racing stream into a melody for your ears and the voices of a thousand larks to sing it; I will speak the softness of night for your bed and the warmth of summer for your coverlet; I will speak the brightness of flame to light your way and the luster of gold to shine in your smile; I will speak until the hardness in you melts away and your heart is free ... — Stephen R. Lawhead

Justice must be blind to the hardness or softness of a man's hands, as well as to the leanness or fatness of his pocketbook — B.C. Forbes

Hardness of heart is a dreadful quality, but it is doubtful whether in the long run it works more damage than softness of head. — Theodore Roosevelt

softness overcomes hardness. — Mark Kurlansky

The impermanent, which is the body, is given too much importance. The permanent, which is the Atman, is completely forgotten. This should change. — Mata Amritanandamayi

Jazz vision is the fusion of music and art a real paradox of same-yet different. Here we play in exchanges, like the hardness of the key of c# major and from the softness of Db major - capturing, reflecting and improvising. — Barbara Januszkiewicz

Before the discovery of these [underwater] vents, all life on Earth, the key to life on Earth, was believed to be the sun and photosynthesis. But down there, there is no sun, there is no photosynthesis; it's chemosynthetic environment down there driving it, and it's all so ephemeral. — Mike DeGruy

Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists. — Carlos Fuentes

We should realize that if something untrue or immoral is stated in great art, it can be far more devastating than if it is expressed in poor art. The greater the artistic expression, the more important it is to consciously bring it and it's worldview under the judgment of Christ and the Bible. The common reaction among many however, is just the opposite. Ordinarily, many seem to feel that the greater the art, the less we ought to be critical of its worldview. This we must reverse. — Francis A. Schaeffer

Adventure novels tend to be larger than life. They involve lots of wham-bam and don't usually require a lot of extra thinking on the reader's part the way a mystery or thriller might. — Emlyn Chand

I am not sinuous or suave; I sit among you abrading your softness with my hardness, quenching the silver-grey flickering moth-wing quiver of words with the green spurt of my clear eyes. — Virginia Woolf

I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations -- with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country -- contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness -- hating the night when I couldn't sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It's just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends. — Tahir Shah

The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread. — Steven Wright

Speak, Madame; speak, queen," said Buckingham. "The softness of your voice covers the hardness of your words. You speak of sacrilege, but the sacrilege is in the separation of hearts that God has formed for each other! — Alexandre Dumas

I don't really get nervous for auditions, because I just see them as mini acting classes. There's no need to have an attachment to the outcome because it's out of your hands after that. — Isabel Lucas

I loved photography but was frustrated by the limitations of cameras. When trying to take a picture of a friend's young, active daughter using my DSLR, it was impossible to capture the fleeting moments. — Ren Ng

Only hardness or only softness creates an inability to deal effectively with the fluctuations of life. — Seikichi Toguchi

Throughout these centuries, those who should, by their birth, training, and position, have been the conscience of the world, accepted the delusion and promoted it. Such men not only appealed to the emotions of religion, but perverted the entire structure of logic and reason. Everything was sacrificed to a preconceived prejudice. The logic of the Demonologists, all highly educated men, leaders in their own disciplines, is the most terrifying feature of witchcraft. Because of their turning rational thinking on its head--far more than the most foul act of a torturer or witch judge--the centuries of the witchcraft mania may be called the centuries of uncivilization. — Rossell Hope Robbins

Every cell singing, begging for a rush of sensation only the press of male hardness against female softness could give. — Gena Showalter

I often daydream about the future, thinking of the world in 100, 200 years, imagining what it looks like, feels like. I hope that my books are like ghosts that will inhabit this future. — Robert Greene

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head. — Theodore Roosevelt

He felt his body divide itself into a hotness and a coldness, a softness and a hardness, a trembling and a hot trembling, the two halves grinding one upon the other — Ray Bradbury

Love softens the hardest edges of life's tumult. — Bryant McGill

Water is the softest thing, yet it can penetrate mountains and earth. This shows clearly the principle of
softness overcoming hardness. — Lao-Tzu

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation. — C.S. Lewis

I wrote 'Snowy' as a result of spending a week on a narrow boat with daily classes of children, helping them to write about canal life, the work of barges, the simple pleasure of watching the water creatures. There was no doubt that the star of their week was Snowy, the working barge horse who pulled us daily along the towpath. — Berlie Doherty