Sterner Quotes & Sayings

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error. — Friedrich Schiller

[Book's subtitle:] Designed as a beacon of light to guide women to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but which may be read by members of the sterner sect, without injury to themselves or the book. — Marietta Holley

We think too many thoughts at once, most of them the same thoughts we had yesterday and the day before. We are impatient with life, and anxious. — Thomas M. Sterner

You would be miserable if you had to go through life with a human doormat with 'Welcome' written on him. You want some one made of sterner stuff. You want, as it were, a sparring-partner, some one with whom you can quarrel happily with the certain knowledge that he will not curl up in a ball for you to kick, but will be there with the return wallop. — P.G. Wodehouse

It was his optimism that Freud bequeathed to America and it was the optimism of our youthfulness, our freedom from the sterner, sadder tradition of Europe which enabled us to seize his gift. — Karl A. Menninger

Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names - Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The cellar was straight off the set of a horror film. The floor was packed dirt and littered with the droppings of mice and rats. The worn stone walls were damp with a slick layer of mold. Even the air was heavy and filled with a dark sense of menace. It combined to create an atmosphere that would send most people fleeing in terror. But Edra was made of sterner stuff. — Alexandra Ivy

Did she have to be so downright fetching in her refusal?
Taking Annie back, he struck a sterner pose in order to keep all comers at bay. — Laura Frantz

Progress is a natural result of staying focused on the process of doing anything. — Thomas M. Sterner

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do. — Wendell Berry

I gave, at first, attention close;
Then interest warm ensued;
From interest, as improvement rose,
Succeeded gratitude.

'Obedience was no effort soon,
And labour was no pain;
If tired, a word, a glance alone
Would give me strength again.

'From others of the studious band
Ere long he singled me,
But only by more close demand
And sterner urgency.

'The task he from another took,
From me he did reject;
He would no slight omission brook
And suffer no defect.

'If my companions went astray,
He scarce their wanderings blamed.
If I but faltered in the way
His anger fiercely flamed. — Charlotte Bronte

I should not, if I were you, wish to be, because 'sterner stuff' is usually forged by hardship. — Julie Anne Long

Could words and symbols wield such power? Could mere scribblings on parchment unmake a person's moral fiber? Weren't we made of sterner stuff? — Karen Marie Moning

The borderlands of madness used to have much sterner signage around them than they do now. — Rachel Hartman

Our cause is a common one. It is war between poverty and wealth ... This moneyed power is fast eating up the substance of the people. We have made war upon it, and we mean to win it. If we can, we will win through the ballot box; if not, then we shall resort to sterner means. — William H. Sylvis

Never worry. Be ever cheerful. Always laugh and smile. You can use the following powerful autosuggestion: "Mr. Worry, goodbye to you. I am a different person now. I am made of sterner stuff." Worry will now be afraid to show his face to you. You can then remove the worries of many of your friends. — Sivananda

Everything in life worth achieving requires practice. In fact, life itself is nothing more than one long practice session, an endless effort of refining our motions. When the proper mechanics of practice are understood, the task of learning something new becomes a stress-free experience of joy and calmness, a process which settles all areas in your life and promotes proper perspective on all of life's difficulties. — Thomas M. Sterner

I have even seen the writings suggesting that I am playing a deep game, that I am using the present turmoil to foist my fads on India, and am making religious experiments at India's expense. I can only answer that Satyagraha is made of sterner stuff. There is nothing reserved and nothing secret in it. — Mahatma Gandhi

So few people are really aware of their thoughts. Their minds run all over the place without their permission, and they go along for the ride unknowingly and without making a choice. — Thomas M. Sterner

There is an immense trout in Loch Awe in Scotland, which is so voracious, and swallows his own species with such avidity, that he has obtained the name 'Salmo Ferox'. I pull about this unnatural monster till he is tired, land him, and administer the coup de grace. Is this cruel? Cruelty should be made of sterner stuff. — Arnold Gingrich

While these thoughts crossed his mind, Margaret clung to the doorpost to steady herself: but a film came over her eyes - he was only just in time to catch her. 'Mother - mother!' cried he; 'Come down - they are gone, and Miss Hale is hurt!' He bore her into the dining-room, and laid her on the sofa there; laid her down softly, and looking on her pure white face, the sense of what she was to him came upon him so keenly that he spoke it out in his pain:
'Oh, my Margaret - my Margaret! no one can tell what you are to me! Dead - cold as you lie there, you are the only woman I ever loved! Oh, Margaret - Margaret!' Inarticulately as he spoke, kneeling by her, and rather moaning than saying the words, he started up, ashamed of himself, as his mother came in. She saw nothing, but her son a little paler, a little sterner than usual. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Habits are learned. Choose them wisely. — Thomas M. Sterner

HIs great talent in life was to be a Good Bloke. He could walk into a room and sit down and everybody would be happy to have him, even if all he ever did was smile, for they imagined behind the mustache, behind the smile it hid, something sterner, more critical and yet, also, tolerant, so that when he smiled they felt themselves approved of and they vied with each other to like him best. — Peter Carey

I thought all was lost. But I should have known better. My sweet, brave, bluestocking. You are made of sterner stuff than that. And I should have trusted you to save yourself. — Manda Collins

The feeling "I'll be happy when X happens" will never bring you anything but discontentment. — Thomas M. Sterner

There is no greater valor nor no sterner fight. He who would be what he ought to be must stop being what he is. — Meister Eckhart

Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee,
While the world's tide is bearing me along;
Sterner desires and darker hopes beset me,
Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong. — Emily Bronte

When, instead, your goal is to focus on the process and stay in the present, then there are no mistakes and no judging. You are just learning and doing. You are executing the activity, observing the outcome, and adjusting yourself and your practice energy to produce the desired result. There are no bad emotions, because you are not judging anything. — Thomas M. Sterner

Ambition should be made from sterner stuff. — William Shakespeare

Truth has her sterner responsibilities sooner or later in store for those who have known anything about her. — Henry Parry Liddon

Hige sceal pe heardra, heorte pe cenre,
mod sceal pe mare pe ure maegen lytlao.
( Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as
our strength lessens. ) — J.R.R. Tolkien

The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana in their jeans simply makes no sense - the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy. — William F. Buckley Jr.

Leaders are for calling people to their better angels, for helping guide them to a kind of sterner, more mature sense of what we need to do. To me, Reagan's brand of leadership was what I call 'a liturgy of absolution.' He absolved Americans almost in a priestly role to contend with sin. Who wouldn't want that? — Rick Perlstein

If you are not in control of your thoughts then you are not in control of yourself. Without self-control, you have no real power, regardless of whatever else you accomplish. If you are not aware of the thoughts that you are thinking in each moment, then you are the rider with no reins, with no power over where you are going. You cannot control what you are not aware of. Awareness must come first. — Thomas M. Sterner

Women have done strange things; they are a far greater puzzle to the student of human nature than the sterner, less complex sex has ever been. — Emmuska Orczy

The kind of happy I was that day at the Vet when "Hawk" Dawson actually doffed his red "C" cap to me, and everyone cheered and practically convulsed into tears - you can't patent that. It was one shining moment of glory that was instantly gone. Whereas life, real life, is different and can't even be appraised as simply "happy", but only in terms of "Yes, I'll take it all, thanks" or "No, I believe I won't." Happy, as my poor father used to say, is a lot of hooey. Happy is a circus clown, a sitcom, a greeting card. Life, though, life's about something sterner. But also something better. A lot better. Believe me. — Richard Ford

Gains for all our losses
There are gains for all our losses
There are balms for all our pains
But when youth the dream departs
It takes some thing from our hearts
And never comes again
We are stronger and are better
Under manhood's sterner reign
Still we feel that some thing sweet
Followed youth with flying feet
And will never come again.
Some thing beautiful has vanished
And we sigh for it in vain
We behold it every where
On the earth and in the air
But it never comes again. — R.H. Stoddard

then flats of marigolds and petunias. Made of sterner stuff, I figured, their sort might survive my regime of horticultural neglect. — Kathy Reichs

Habits and practice are very interrelated. What we practice will become a habit. — Thomas M. Sterner

Socialist writers are made of sterner stuff than those who only let their characters steeplechase through trouble in order to comeout first in the happy ending of moral uplift. — Christina Stead

When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept: Ambition should be made of sterner stuff: Yet Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man. — William Shakespeare

Do not think that heroes cannot be broken! We are only more difficult to break, Hermione." The old wizard's eyes had grown sterner than she had ever seen. "When you have been exhausted for many hours, when pain and death is not a passing fear but a certainty, then it is harder to be a hero. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all. — Elizabeth Bowen

Ideology is the sterner face of myth and we're a myth-making people. — Diana Trilling

We can learn so much from nature by simply observing how it works through a flower. The flower knows it is part of nature' we have forgotten that. — Thomas Sterner

Sadly but, perhaps, not altogether unexpectedly this society has had very limited success in achieving what is supposed to be the justification for its existence
the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest possible number of people. In so far as its citizens are saved from the major anxieties and responsibilities which normally surround the business of being a man, they transfer what appears to be an unvarying human capacity for worry to the most trivial things, making mountains out of molehills on a vast scale; and they have 'nervous breakdowns' over problems which men and women living under sterner conditions would hardly find time to notice. — Charles Le Gai Eaton

Unlike music or poetry or painting, food rouses no response in passionate and emotional youth. Only when the surge of the blood is quieted does gastronomy come into its own with philosophy and theology and the sterner delights of the mind. — Dorothy L. Sayers

The problem with patience and discipline is that it requires both of them to develop each of them. — Thomas M. Sterner

From the third case, she took yet more books, but these were the traveling books that she had brought for her new ward: they were at once sterner and more reassuring that the others. She cared for for these, too- they were books after all, and she would sooner have her own spine broken than manhandle a book - but not with the same devotion, and they were placed in a neat pile on the floor. — Wesley Stace

The sterner self of the Populace likes bawling, hustling, and smashing; the lighter self, beer. — Matthew Arnold

Though sages may pour out their wisdom's treasure, there is no sterner moralist then Pleasure. — George Gordon Byron

Dieting was cruel; it was an abuse of human rights. Yes, that's what it was, and she should not allow herself to be manipulated in this way. She stopped herself. Thinking like that was nothing more than coming up with excuses for breaking the diet. Mma Ramotswe was made of sterner stuff than that, and so she persisted. — Alexander McCall Smith

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff. — William Shakespeare

In the same way, we have to inform the multitude that restoration comes at a price. Suppose we give them an intimation of the cost through a series of questions. Are you ready, we must ask them, to grant that the law of reward is inflexible and that one cannot, by cunning or through complaints, obtain more than he puts in? Are you prepared to see that comfort may be a seduction and that the fetish of material prosperity will have to be pushed aside in favor of some sterner ideal? Do you see the necessity of accepting duties before you begin to talk of freedoms? — Richard Weaver

Do not let us speak of darker days, let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days: these are great days-the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race. — Winston Churchill

The sterner the discipline, the greater the devotion. — Pete Carril

What a fool you must be, said my head to my heart, or my sterner to my softer self. — Anne Bronte

Good God enlighten us! Which of these two belongs to the sterner sex - the man who sits in Whitehall all his life on a comfortable salary, or the woman who has to keep her teeth bared lest she has her meatless bone of 17s. 4d. a week snatched away from her and who has to produce the next generation on her off-days? — Rebecca West

He waved at his attendants. "I dragged them like a ball and chain all the way across the palace and back."
"If sterner measures are called for, we can find a larger ball and chain." The queen turned and disappeared into the partment.
"Oh, dear," Eugenides muttered as he followed ... The queen's sterner measures, dispensed by the Eddisian Ambassador, arrived before dawn. — Megan Whalen Turner

How rarely boyhood loves to paint in glowing tints his future bright, a picture where no line is faint
whose very clouds are touch'd with light. And girlhood hails a world unknown and reads it in her own glad dreams, as lilies see themselves alone reflected in their azure streams. But rosy clouds that morning brings, ere noon may deepen into thunder
and life's dark stream has sterner things than silver lilies growing under. — Cecil Frances Alexander

You are going to find that buying the car is much less satisfying than working for it. — Thomas M. Sterner

Rushing had become so much of a habit that I was amazed at the amount of concentration it took to work slowly on purpose. — Thomas M. Sterner

Her manners had been imposed upon her by her mother's gentle admonitions and the sterner discipline of her mammy; her eyes were her own. — Margaret Mitchell