Emotional Hardening Quotes

The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.

At a certain point, I think, you harden yourself to the realities of the business.

When it comes to accepting emotional support or affection, I'm a little guarded and hardened to that.

Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.

People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.

I think that when you're kind of just shoved out there and you have to be tough and you're facing tough people and people are saying bad things about you, that all of a sudden, you have to become a little less sweet.

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 love closes, the self contracts and hardens: the mind having nothing else to occupy its attention and give it that change and renewal it requires, busies itself more and more with self-feeling, which takes on narrow and disgusting forms, like avarice, arrogance and fatuity.

She had changed him. The ice was in his eyes and in his heart, like he had predicted with that song, but now they were deep embedded there, all the pain of the world. Not pain to make you feel for somebody else but pain to make you stop feeling.

Since the great foundation of fear is pain, the way to harden and fortify children against fear and danger is to accustom them to suffer pain.

When I was younger, things got to me more, but not now.

It took me years on top of years to grow thick skin and it took me many hurtful days.

Gretchen shrugged. "After seeing how he acted when she almost died, I'm starting to get why she's with him." Then her voice hardened. "And really, Leila. That's twice now.

Certain people, in their eagerness to construct a world no external threat can penetrate build exaggeratedly high defense againts the outside world, againts new people, new places, different experiences and leave their own world stripped bare. It is there that bitterness begins irrevocable work.

No wonder men got impervious to superficial pain, I thought. It came from this habit of hammering each other incessantly.

God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

Tribulation will not hurt you, unless as it too often does; it hardens you and makes you sour, narrow and skeptical.

As the possibility of a relationship had faded, Emma had endeavored to harden herself to Dexter's indifference and these days a remark like this caused no more pain than, say, a tennis ball thrown sharply at the back of her head.

There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character... Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.

Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain

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.

Perhaps the worst thing about suffering is that it finally hardens the hearts of those around it.

The heart never grows better by age; I fear rather worse; always harder.

It is probably a very good thing for a boy to learn to live with enmity, as opposed to an atmosphere of love and affection, as it hardens him and gives him a taste of what he is going to run into later in life.

Man's heart away from nature becomes hard.