Hardening Of The Heart Quotes

It's the hard things that break; soft things don't break. It was an epiphany I had today and I just wonder why it took me so very, very long to see it! You can waste so many years of your life trying to become something hard in order not to break; but it's the soft things that can't break! The hard things are the ones that shatter into a million pieces! ~ C. JoyBell C.

Don't let hard lessons harden your heart. ~ Carlos A. Rodriguez

If the entity allows [the relationships with individuals] to produce a hardening of the heart, or of a determination to get even, or of those conditions that hold for discontent, malice, or otherwise, these must surely bring the destructive forces that build that which the entity must meet; for, in truth, that builded in the mental forces of a body is as active in the experiences as must come to the entity as were done in the very material act ... ~ Edgar Cayce

Everything we do, our every objective, must be undertaken for the sake of ... purity of heart ... we must practice the reading of the Scripture, together with all the other virtuous activities ... to hold our hearts free of the harm of every dangerous passion and in order to rise step by step to the high point of love. ~ John Cassian

The songs of Japan take the human heart as their seed and flourish as myriad leaves of words. As long as they are alive to this world, the cares and deeds of men and women are endless, so they speak of things they hear and see, giving words to the feelings in their hearts. Hearing the cries of the warbler among the blossoms or the calls of the frog that lives in the waters, how can we doubt that every living creature sing its song? Not using force, it moves heaven and earth, makes even the unseen spirits and gods feel pity, smoothes the bonds between man and woman, and consoles the hearts of fierce warriors-such a thing is poetry. ~ Ki No Tsurayuki

A man needs a friend to share goals with, a woman to share his heart with, and a nation to serve with all of his heart. That's the best life one can live. ~ Yi Sun-sin

This organ deserves to be styled the starting point of life and the sun of our microcosm just as much as the sun deserves to be styled the heart of the world. For it is by the heart's vigorous beat that the blood is moved, perfected, activated, and protected from injury and coagulation. The heart is the tutelary deity of the body, the basis of life, the source of all things, carrying out its function of nourishing, warming, and activating body as a whole. But we shall more fittingly speak of these matters when we consider the final cause of this kind of movement. ~ William Harvey

The Saint - for I was convinced he was a Saint, indeed, whatever the rest of us might have been - now had a fistful of dangling mind-fire threads. "She is broken, this one, in her mind and heart," he said, carefully scooping up the blazing filaments and packing them back into Jannoula. "You must learn to fill yourself with yourself, Blessed."
"D-don't break her any further," I pleaded, feeling responsible.
He gave me a sidelong look, and for a moment I thought he was angry. But he said, "Would you break a mirror, Seraphina, because you fear to look into it? ~ Rachel Hartman

Here's the problem: when every sin is seen as the same, we are less likely to fight any sins at all. Why should I stop sleeping with my girlfriend when there will still be lust in my heart? Why pursue holiness when even one sin in my life means I'm Osama bin Hitler in God's eyes? Again, it seems humble to act as if no sin is worse than another, but we lose the impetus for striving and the ability to hold each other accountable when we tumble down the slip-n-slide of moral equivalence. All of a sudden the elder who battles the temptation to take a second look at the racy section of the Lands End catalog shouldn't dare exercise church discipline ont he young man fornicating with reckless abandon. When we can no longer see the different gradations among sins and sinners and sinful nations, we have not succeeded in respecting our own badness; we've cheapened God's goodness. ~ Kevin DeYoung

He had always thought the Holy Grail would be finding a girl who submitted gladly and whole- heartedly to his leadership. Now he saw how much more powerful it was when the surrender was a bit reluctant, when she had to overcome her own strong will before yielding to his. He didn't want an off-the-shelf submissive after all. He wanted a girl with a mind of her own, whose heart and will had to be tamed, who would submit to him and him alone. ~ Sweden Reese

I have never written the music that was in my heart to write; perhaps I never shall with this brain and these fingers, but I know that hereafter it will be written; when instead of these few inlets of the senses through which we now secure impressions from without, there shall be a flood of impressions from all sides; and instead of these few tones of our little octave, there shall be an infinite scale of harmonies - for I feel it - I am sure of it. This world of music, whose borders even now I have scarcely entered, is a reality, is immortal. ~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Most members of our community are genuinely dear souls who love the Lord Jesus with their whole heart and honor in pious conduct. Also in external things everything is completely orderly and Christian. And even when Satan sometimes wishes to sow his seeds of some discord, they resist him and follow our counsel imparted to them from God's Word. Their exactness in public worship on Sundays and in the daily evening prayer services is indeed uncommon, and their attention during the proclamation of the divine Word is so great and persistent that we ourselves are not little encouraged through it and consider ourselves completely unworthy of the grace of God that He demonstrates to us in our calling through these upright souls. ~ Johann Martin Boltzius

Empowerment requires a major shift in attitude. The most crucial place that this shift must occur is in the heart of every leader. ~ Kenneth H. Blanchard

The Book of Mormon is our handbook of instructions as we travel the pathway from bad to good to better and strive to have our hearts changed. ~ David A. Bednar

Never is he going to be his old self again. Never is he going to have his old resilience. Whatever inside him was given the task of mending the organism after it was so terribly assaulted, first on the road, then in the operating theatre, has grown too tired of the job, too overburdened. And the same holds for the rest of the team, the lungs, the heart, the muscles, the brain. They did for him what they could as long as they could; now they want to rest. ~ J.M. Coetzee

It serves the American socialists as a leading argument in their endeavor to depict American capitalism as a curse of mankind. Reluctantly forced to admit that capitalism pours a horn of plenty upon people and that the Marxian prediction of the masses' progressive impoverishment has been spectacularly disproved by the facts, they try to salvage their detraction of capitalism by describing contemporary civilization as merely materialistic and sham.
Bitter attacks upon modem civilization are launched by writers who think that they are pleading the cause of religion. They reprimand our age for its secularism.
They bemoan the passing of a way of life in which, they would have us believe, people were not preoccupied with the pursuit of earthly ambitions but were first of ali concerned about the strict observance of their religious duties. They ascribe ali evils to the spread of skepticism and agnosticism and passionately advocate a return to the orthodoxy of ages gone by.
It is hard to find a doctrine which distorts history more radically than this antisecularism. There have always been devout men, pure in heart and dedicated to a pious life. But the religiousness of these sincere believers had nothing in common with the established system of devotion. It is a myth that the political and social institutions of the ages preceding modem individualistic philosophy and modem capitalism were imbued with a genuine Christian spirit. The teachings of the Gospels did not det ~ Ludwig Von Mises

The poetry of the new year is problematically punctual. An impeccable guest who arrives on time when you are running frantically behind schedule. Catching you precisely at that awkward stage of housecleaning when the contents of closet and cupboard are strewn across the room and there is no sensible place left to sit down. No, you haven't had a chance to change the guest room towels, your clothes or your habits. It is at this stage that you begin to stammer out apologies and resolutions. The visitor fixes you with a gaze that breaks like dawn over your clutter and chagrin. 'What a beautiful life,' murmurs your guest, pressing an oddly shaped package into your hands. Gladness rises in the heart like a cloud of hummingbirds. Always the same, unpredictable, utterly original gift. You consider the paradox of that as you hold it between your palms. Like freshly kneaded dough: this brand new day. ~ Pavithra K. Mehta

And far away, as Frodo put on the Ring and claimed it for his own, even in Sammath Naur the very heart of his realm, the Power in Barad-dûr was shaken, and the Tower trembled from its foundations to its proud and bitter crown. The Dark Lord was suddenly aware of him, and his Eye piercing all shadows looked across the plain to the door that he had made; and the magnitude of his own folly was revealed to him in a blinding flash, and all the devices of his enemies were at last laid bare. Then his wrath blazed in consuming flame, but his fear rose like a vast black smoke to choke him. For he knew his deadly peril and the thread upon which his doom now hung.

From all his policies and webs of fear and treachery, from all his stratagems and wars his mind shook free; and throughout his realm a tremor ran, his slaves quailed, and his armies halted, and his captains suddenly steerless, bereft of will, wavered and despaired. For they were forgotten. The whole mind and purpose of the Power that wielded them was now bent with overwhelming force upon the Mountain. At his summons, wheeling with a rending cry, in a last desperate race there flew, faster than the winds, the Nazgûl, the Ringwraiths, and with a storm of wings they hurtled southwards to Mount Doom. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

There are things of which I may not speak;
There are dreams that cannot die;
There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,
And bring a pallor into the cheek,
And a mist before the eye. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The awareness that we stand in the presence of the Living God is one of the most important realizations we can install in our operative consciousness. God is always present. The question is, how present are we? We want to stand in that Presence without opacity. Our work is to penetrate, in meditation and in action, to the very heart of being nokhach penei ha-Shem (Lamentations 2:19), of being truly present before God. ~ Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

But after he was pleased to reveal himself to me I did presently, like Abraham, run to Hagar. And after that he did let me see the atheism of my own heart, for which I begged of the Lord that it might not remain in my heart. ~ Anne Hutchinson

He would give anything if he could feel toward a lover one tenth of what he felt for Darling. Just for one heartbeat. But it wasn't meant to be. He'd accepted that a long time ago. Darling would always be heterosexual. Nothing would ever change that, and his best friend would die before sleeping with him. Why can't I walk away from Darling? Honestly, he'd tried. He'd gone from one man to another, hoping, aching that one of them would find a way into his jaded heart. And every one of them had disappointed him, and left him with scars that were deeper and uglier than the ones marring his body. But as he breathed Ture in, that part of him that he hated most surged forward. Hope was a fickle whore, and he hated the fact that he was her bitch. You've walked this path a million times, Mari. Only Darling was Darling. Everyone else was a poor substitution. Clenching ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

She was now drowning in that pool of desires without having any idea about the depth of it. ~ Viraj J. Mahajan

For three weeks straight I had been observing the ocean. On the twenty-first day, I saw a man running along the shoreline. I could hear his feet hitting the sand. It was the first time I was able to discern with utter precision every nuance, every gearshift, every soft click of another person's mind.

He remembered that he was there to run, and he even remembered a time there was a reason for it. He did not remember the reason, nor did he want to. He feared he might be running for the old reasons, and didn't want to imitate himself. That would be running in place. Not too far down below the top shelves of memory he knew he was there to run for a reason, but still he decided to invent a different reason. He was reinvigorated by this decision to find a new reason, and ran even faster. He'd run seventeen miles when he realized in dismay that he'd forgotten to do it. He'd been running off the memory of an idea.

He was exhausted and his lungs burned. He pushed his head into the sand and his legs ran in a circle around his head that he was screwing into the sand. He pushed down and screw-drove himself until only his toes stuck out. His toes were twined around each other. I could no longer hear his thoughts. Was he dead? His heart was still beating. ~ Miranda Mellis

The imitation lives we see on TV and in the movies whisper the idea that human existence consists of revelations and abrupt changes of heart; by the time we've reached full adulthood, I think, this is an idea we have on some level come to accept. Such things may happen from time to time, but I think that for the most part it's a lie. Life's changes come slowly…the whole idea of curious cats attaining satisfaction seemed slightly absurd. The world rarely finishes its conversations. ~ Stephen King

You will find all the riches you ever need
in the center of your heart.
Go there. Explore. ~ Melody Lee

Nelson! Stop that this minute!" She turns rigid in the glider but does not rise to see what is making the boy cry. Eccles, sitting by the screen, can see. The Fosnacht boy stands by the swing, holding two red plastic trucks. Angstrom's son, some inches shorter, is batting with an open hand toward the bigger boy's chest, but does not quite dare to move forward a step and actually strike him...Nelson's face turns up toward the porch and he tries to explain, "Pilly have - Pilly -" But just trying to describe the injustice gives it unbearable force, and as if struck from behind he totters forward and slaps the thief's chest and receives a mild shove that makes him sit on the ground. He rolls on his stomach and spins in the grass, revolved by his own incoherent kicking. Eccles' heart seems to twist with the child's body; he knows so well the propulsive power of a wrong, the way the mind batters against it and each futile blow sucks the air emptier until it seems the whole frame of blood and bone must burst in a universe that can be such a vacuum. ~ John Updike

Working with these distractions, steadying the canoe, letting the waves pass by, and coming back again and again in a quiet and collected way, is at the heart of meditation. After ~ Jack Kornfield

I realized little by little that words are very powerful, and taking those words to encourage people rather than tear them apart was the desire of my heart. ~ Tracie Peterson

A tiny part of my heart is so happy to see him safe and laughing, but the other part is a black pit that threatens to suck all of me into it. He is happy without me. He is laughing without me. But what about me? ~ Carrie Jones

Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. ~ Joseph Conrad

The life of a sannyasin should be a life of no expectations. And then every moment is such a bliss, such a benediction, because whatsoever God gives is so much. Then you always feel grateful. But your desires are so much that whatsoever God gives always looks so little; and you feel frustrated, and you feel complaints, and you cannot feel grateful. And without gratitude, there is no possibility of prayer arising in your heart. Gratitude is prayer. ~ Rajneesh

Suppose someone were to describe a small country that provided free education through university for all of its citizens, transportation for schoolchildren, and free health care - including heart surgery - for all. You might suspect that a country is either phenomenally rich or on the fast track to fiscal crisis. ~ Joseph E. Stiglitz