Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.
— Charles Dickens
Delighting Hardened Heart quotations
If the heart becomes hardened, the eye becomes dry.
A preacher should have the mind of a scholar, the heart of a child, and the hide of a rhinoceros. His problem is how to toughen his hide without hardening his heart.
Don’t be afraid to speak from personal experience;
in many ways, those vulnerable moments will be the key that unlocks a hardened heart.
There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell.
There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.
Don't think being 'religious' means becoming harsh or hard.
When Allah enters a heart, He softens it--He doesn't harden it.
Rage and bitterness do not foster femininity. They harden the heart and make the body sick.
Children keep us in check. Their laughter prevents our hearts from hardening. Their dreams ensure we never lose our drive to make ours a better world. They are the greatest disciplinarians known to mankind.
Does capital punishment tend to the security of the people? By no means.
It hardens the hearts of men, and makes the loss of life appear light to them; and it renders life insecure, inasmuch as the law holds out that property is of greater value than life.
You don't have the game you played last year or last week.
You only have today's game. It may be far from your best, but that's all you've got. Harden your heart and make the best of it.
Better a broken heart than a hardened one.
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?
The longer men sin, the more easily they can;
for every act of transgression weakens conscience, stupefies intellect, hardens hearts, adds force to bad habits, and takes force from good example. And, surely, there is nothing in such associations; as wicked affinities will insure to the sinner in the future state, to incline him to repentance.
In a few days I'll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears.
On I plod --always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults --rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my crystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.
I am certain that to preach the wrath of God with a hard heart, a cold lip, a tearless eye, and an unfeeling spirit is to harden men, not benefit them.
Have a heart that never hardens
I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.
The mistake that men make is that they do not believe in theater.
Otherwise, they would know that every man is allowed to play thecelestial tragedies and to become god. All he has to do is harden his heart.
In a few days I'll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears.
On I plod-always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults-rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my crystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.
It may perhaps be said that it signifies nothing to a man what is done to him after he is dead; but it signifies much to the living; it either tortures their feelings or hardens their hearts.
The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
We feel it in a thousand things. I say that the heart naturally loves the Universal Being, and naturally loves itself; and it gives itself to one or the other, and hardens itself against one or the other, as it chooses...it is the heart that feels God, not the reason; this is faith.
All that God had to do to harden Pharaoh's heart, or to harden your heart, is to withhold His own grace.
Loving a holy God is beyond our moral power. The only kind of God we can love by our sinful nature is an unholy god, an idol made by our own hands. Unless we are born of the Spirit of God, unless God sheds His holy love in our hearts, unless He stoops in His grace to change our hearts, we will not love Him... To love a holy God requires grace, grace strong enough to pierce our hardened hearts and awaken our moribund souls.
The tendency to cruelty should be watched in children and if they incline to any such cruelty, they should be taught the contrary usage. For the custom of tormenting and killing other animals will, by degrees, harden their hearts even toward man. Children should from the beginning, be brought up in an abhorrence of killing or tormenting living beings.
Both Christian and Adrian had worried there would be some piece of Strigoi left in him, but their fears had been about violence and bloodshed. No one would have guessed this: that living as a Strigoi had hardened his heart, killing any chance of him loving anyone. Killing any chance of him loving me. And I was pretty sure that if that was the case, then part of me would die too.
Nothing so hardens the heart of man as a barren familiarity with sacred things.
Every fresh act of sin lessens fear and remorse, hardens our hearts, blunts the edge of our conscience, and increases our evil inclination.
At birth, we are like cartilage - soft, flexible tissue. By the same natural process by which cartilage becomes hard bone, the soft, tender heart of an innocent child can become hardened by the circumstances into which she is born.
If our theology does not quicken the conscience and soften the heart, it actually hardens both.
To love our success more than God and our neighbor hardens the heart, making us less able to feel and to sense.
In some ways I feel sorry for racists and for religious fanatics, because they so much miss the point of being human, and deserve a sort of pity. But then I harden my heart, and decide to hate them all the more, because of the misery they inflict and because of the contemptible excuses they advance for doing so.
Perhaps the worst thing about suffering is that it finally hardens the hearts of those around it.
For a Christian to defy adversities is to "despise" chastisement. Instead of hardening himself to endure stoically, there should be a melting of the heart.
Let it never be forgotten that, although we may do nothing about the Word we hear, the Word will do something to us. The same sun melts ice and hardens clay, and the Word of God humbles or hardens the human heart.
Why has a religious turn of mind always a tendency to narrow and harden the heart?
I have to not harden my heart, because I want to stay open to feel things.
I'll never harden my heart but I've toughened the muscles around it.
It seems to me that physical sickness softens, just as moral sickness hardens, the heart.
Contact with the world either breaks or hardens the heart.
Lovesick, bitter and hardened heart. Aching, waiting for life to start
Life is unjust, people can be cruel, and yet if you harden your heart, you will lose what little love there is in this world.
Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish. Alas, the heart hardens as the blood ceases to run. The cold snow strikes down from the head, and checks the glow of feeling. Who wants to survive into old age after abdicating all his faculties one by one, and be sans teeth, sans eyes, sans memory, sans hope, sans sympathy?
The most tremendous judgment of God in this world is the hardening of the hearts of men.
As a child, he had hardened his heart and learned to take their punches. He had learned to spit back and take down anyone who cast a jaundiced eye or who made a comment about either him, his mother, or his sister. He’d told himself that he didn’t need anyone’s love or caring. And so he had learned to live like a feral animal, always ready to strike out when someone tried to touch him.
Who can assure us that we will be alive tomorrow? Let us listen to the voice of our conscience, to the voice of the royal prophet: "Today, if you hear God's voice, harden not your heart." Let us not put off from one moment to another (what we should do) because the (next moment) is not yet ours.