Hardness of heart

“ The heart has also its childish and cradle malady, which may be fatal, but which, if once surmounted, enables the patient to meet with becoming power all the real convulsions and fevers of passion that are the heirloom of our after-life. ”

“ Perhaps this great amount of trouble is no more than is necessary to take us to Heaven. You know the saying, 'Adversity hardens the heart, or it opens it to Paradise.' It may be that our hearts continue so hard, that the long-continued life's trouble is requisite to soften them. ”

“ The shadows darken and passion stirs up my sickness amain And
longing rouses within me the old desireful pain.
The anguish of parting hath taken its sojourn in my breast And
love and longing and sorrow have maddened heart and brain.
Passion hath made me restless and yearning consumes my soul And
tears discover my secret, that else concealed had lain.
I know of no way to ease me of sickness and care and woe; Nor
can my weak endeavour reknit Love's severed skein.
My heart is a raging furnace, because of the heat whereof My
entrails are racked with anguish, that nothing can assain. ”

“ Hard is the heart that cannot feel his sorrows, when, stretched beside the common way, without a human face to look on, he called upon the mother whose brain, had she known his situation, would have been riven—whose affectionate heart would have been broken, by the knowledge of his affliction. ”

“ Oh, because in its anguish the heart is weak, and I needed to tell myself that I was not going for ever.
To walk through the crowded streets, with a horrible grief in one's heart, and a dizzy aching in one's head; to push by happy, careless, busy creatures, and have a dreadful question shoot across one's brain of eternity,—of infinity,—which is answered by nothing but a vague though acute sense of suffering;—to meet the vacant stare, or the bow of recognition, when the head is splitting and the heart breaking;—who is there that has known all this? ”

“ Nothing can ever cure me, no dream of my mind can ever efface the dream of my heart.—All has been in vain; this anguish is killing me. I feel that my hurt is mortal, my heart pains me as if some one were actually crushing it, were tearing it to pieces. My agony of mind is so great that it has become a physical torment—atrocious, unbearable. ”

“ If I regarded his illness as merely physical, it grieved me sincerely:—if he laboured under mental affliction, how much more was I grieved that I could not employ all the resources of consolation with which the heart naturally overflows for those whom we truly love. ”

“ Fatigue yourself, but once, to utter exhaustion, and to the end of life you shall not recover the former vigour of your frame. Let heart-sickness pass beyond a certain bitter point, and the heart loses its life for ever. ”

“ It tortures me minutely all the minutes and moments and hours. And yet my all-round life moves on beside it and often passes it on the road.
My Broken Heart contributes nothing, no cause and no urge, to the writing of this song of my Soul and bones. It rather is a handicap. It makes me sit and brood. It makes my eyelids heavy and my head droop. It makes my shoulders ache. It makes me sit longish half-hours with my head on my lonely hands. It fills me with foolish wasting despair. ”

“ When your time comes, as it surely will before long, the revulsion of feeling will in itself be so deep a joy that whole years of suffering will be swallowed up.
I grieve to hear of your declining health. Dear Tom, a stout heart keeps a man healthy. ”

“ Then the soul of the heart-sick woman is nailed as with iron clamps to two opposite points--the present and the expected moment, and the farther these two points recede from each other the more the poor heart is torn--an invisible rack of which the tension almost cracks her heart-strings. ”

“ I felt my heart softened more than it had been in all my misery; surely adversity is no tamer of the human heart—at least, I never felt it so. I am of opinion that it is calculated rather to draw forth the darker passions of our nature, and shut up all the holy avenues of the soul. ”

“ Whether the cause be referred to mental, physical, or spiritual conditions, everyone knows the effect; every one has felt that the looks, the actions or gestures of the beloved awaken some vestige of tenderness in those most deeply sinned against and grievously wronged. Though it is hard for the mind to forget, though we still smart under the injury, the heart returns to its allegiance in spite of all. ”

“ Alas! this is an evil world, and man's heart is evil. From this dream there is too often a tearful awaking. Often, too often, hearts are suddenly torn asunder, and wounds are made that never heal, or, healing, leave hard, disfiguring scars. ”

“ When your heart swells with quivering pulses that shake your flesh? When your eyes burn and the deafness of despair is in your ears; when your knees rock, and the guides and thews within you string themselves like cords against your tense nerves?
Those of you who have been in like case to mine can realize what I felt, when I saw the friend who had been to me as a brother, snatched into the darkness of that cold pit. You of the majority, who have stood in no such brain-wrenching mist of terror—to you no words can describe it. ”

“ Because for one hour my self-control deserted me, when my man's blood had been crying out for three years for the touch of her—because for one little hour my hungry arms held her close to my aching heart, there is no peace. Nowhere in earth nor in heaven nor in hell is there one moment's forgetfulness. Nowhere in all God's illimitable universe is there pardon and surcease of pain. ”

“ No other more distant can give such a stroke. And to the young heart, unaccustomed to sorrow, new to life, not knowing how many its burdens and how heavy; not knowing on the other hand the equalising, tempering effects of time; the first great pain comes crushing. ”

“ For the delirious disquietude that had taken possession of her, had its physical, not less than its mental, side. The long overstraining of the delicate nerves, the long overburdening of the heart that knew its own bitterness, were fast reaching the point beyond which must needs come fever, or insanity, or death. Nature—often the wisest of physicians, when left to herself—had sought to work restoration by means of the apathy aforementioned, wrapping her mind and heart as with quilted armor ”

“ Does the frail one pass thee by
⁠With a bended brow of sadness—
Frown not, in that heart now lie
⁠Thoughts that scorch the brain to madness.
Life is strong, and hearts are frail—
⁠In the struggle man may fall ”

“ Say that, having a heart, a heart for husband or child, means certain grief,—well, does not riding, walking down your stairs, mean the chance of broken bones? Does not living mean old age, disease, possible blindness or paralysis, and quite inevitable aches? If, as you say, I must needs grow a heart, and if a heart must needs give agony, why, I shall live through heartbreak as through pain in any other limb.
DIEGO
Yes,—were your heart a limb like all the rest,—but 'tis the very centre and fountain of all life.
PRINCESS
You think so? 'Tis, methinks, pushing analogy too far, and metaphor. ”

“ It was but natural, she had always argued with herself, that the thwarted consciousness, that the erring and suffering heart, should yield deeper insight into the dark and complicated ranges of spiritual truth than could the soul forever untried and unshaken. The tempted and troubled heart, from its lonely towers of unhappiness, must ever see further into the meaning of things than could those comfortably normal and healthy souls who suffered little because they ventured little. ”

“ The sigh of anguish he wishes to keep in, his very breath which he smothers, exhaust the lower part of his trunk, and works into his flanks, which make us judge in some degree of the palpitations of his visceral organs. But his own suffering appears to occasion less anguish than the pain of his children, who turn their faces toward their father, and implore him, crying for help. His father's heart shows itself in his eyes, full of sadness, and where pity seems to swim in a troubled cloud. ”

“ These nerves are the instruments of expression, from the smile upon the infant’s cheek, to the last agony of life. It is when the strong man is subdued by this mysterious influence of soul on body, and when the passions may be truly said to tear the heart, that we have the most afflicting picture of human frailty, and the most unequivocal proof that it is the order of functions we have been considering, that is thus affected. ”

“ At some moments her heart beat as strongly as if ten lives instead of one circled within her body, and every drop of that mighty stream revolted when she thought that she would have to stagnate and rot in idleness. ”

“ Then from the lowest, weakest tone of suffering, up to the loftiest pitch, the divinest acme of pain, there is not one pang to which the sensorium of the universe does not respond; never an untuneful vibration of nerve or spirit but thrills beyond the brain or the heart of the sufferer to the brain, the heart of the universe ”

“ Those who have struggled for something, tried with all their heart and soul, fought to the last atom of their strength, and failed, know something of the sickening heaviness, the dull, aching depression which takes the vitality and seems actually to slow up the beating of the heart. ”

“ When the heart lies crushed 'neath a load of sorrow,
When life's broad river moves sad and slow;
When hope is lost in a dread to-morrow,
Where all is worry and weight and woe;
When hands reject the cross they carry,
When feet would falter and strength would fail,
When better days seem bound to tarry;
Eyes grow tearful and lips grow pale.
When even the pleasantest hours are dreary,
And each new effort is like despair;
When we are so worn and weak and weary,
We fain would yield to the cruel care ”

“ Perhaps where the fibres of the heart are weakest, the strain brought on them by excited fancy snaps them in the misfortune that is dreaded; or perhaps some unseen spirit, charged with the decree of our individual sorrow, casts the dark shadow of his wing over our thoughts, and communicates the gloomy foreboding of a presentiment. ”

“ Do you persevere. Ah! when pain has thoroughly relaxed those nerves and softened the fibres that you take to be so pliant and yielding; when a shriveled heart has learned to expand and contract and to beat under this discipline; when the brain has capitulated—then, perhaps, passion may enter among the steel springs of this machinery that turns out tears and affectations and languors and melting phrases ”

“ When I see a woman weeping or convulsed at any distressing news, and find her pulse in its natural state, I know what to judge of her affliction.—On the contrary, if her grief be concentrated, but her heart beat strongly, or her pulse have been suddenly depressed, I know that she feigns a calm which she does not feel. ”

“ The brain centres are thereby depleted, the heart suffers strain, and the equilibrium of the whole system is disturbed. Ill health follows, the mind is centred upon the suffering body, spiritual aspiration ceases, and the neglected soul folds its wings and falls into the sleep of oblivion. ”

“ It must not be forgotten, however, that neurotic patients exaggerate their pains and describe their distress in the heart region as extremely severe and as producing a sense of impending death, when all they mean is that, because the pain is near their heart it produces an extreme solicitude and that a dread of death comes over them because of this anxiety. ”

“ It is at the bottom of those wasting declines from which people suffer for years, people who have loved too much, who have not been loved enough. It is in those maladies of the heart, where the heart bursts with emotion or dries up with despair. ”

“ Thus oppressed at once by love, jealousy, and disappointment, her spirits sunk, a settled melancholy preyed upon her heart, which with a natural tendency to a decay, impaired her health to such a degree, as to give the most alarming symptoms of an approaching dissolution. ”

“ On the contrary, the heart is so readily affected by mental states that, taking effect for cause, the old popular, and even scientific idea with regard to it, was that it was the organ of the emotions. The heart is stimulated more by favoring circumstances, and suffers more from depression, than almost any other organ. In the melancholic states it usually beats less frequently and is sluggish. When individuals are tired out and the heart has become weakened in its action, new courage will first be noted as having its effect upon the heart action. ”

“ To this terror was added the certain knowledge that the 'being' kept in my proximity for a definite purpose. And that this purpose had some direct bearing upon my well-being, indeed upon my life, I was equally convinced; for I became aware of a sensation of growing lassitude as though the vitality were being steadily drained out of my body. My heart began to beat irregularly at first, then faintly. I was conscious, even within a few minutes, of a general drooping of the powers of life in the whole system, an ebbing away of self-control, and a distinct approach of drowsiness and torpor. ”

“ Lastly, Wouldest thou grow in this grace of fear? then take heed of HARDENING THY HEART at any time against convictions to particular duties, as to prayer, alms, self-denial, or the like. Take heed also of hardening thy heart, when thou art under any judgment of God, as sickness, losses, crosses, or the like. I bid you before to beware of a hard heart, but now I bid you beware of hardening your soft ones. For to harden the heart is to make it worse than it is; harder, more desperate, and bold against God, than at the present it is. ”

“ In many cases we find the corruptible body presses down the soul; in this, the soul rather presses down the body, and weakens it more and more. Nay, I will not say, that deep and lasting sorrow of heart, may not sometimes weaken a strong constitution, and lay the foundation of such bodily disorders, as are not easily removed. And yet all this may consist with a measure of that faith which still worketh by love. ”