Human heart

“ Then you should have a human heart. But have you, indeed? What is your heart made of? Is there no such principle as compassion there? Do you never feel another's pain? Have you no sympathy? no sense of human woe? ”

“ Youth, thy blood is warm and crimson—thy heart is soft and tender—such natures are alive to human kindness—this warmth of feeling melts my obdurate wisdom. If the frost of age or sorrow's leaden pressure had chilled the springtide vigor of thy spirits —if black congealed blood had closed the avenues of thy heart against the approaches of humanity—then would thy mind be attuned to the language of my grief, and thou wouldst look with admiration on my project. ”

“ I will see you with joy, part from you with regret, grieve in your griefs, enter with zeal into your concerns, interest myself in your honour and welfare, and endeavour, with all my little power, to contribute to your comfort and satisfaction.—Is your heart so differently constituted from every other human heart, that an affection, thus ardent and sincere, excites in it no grateful, and soothing, emotions? ”

“ For the first time my heart is alive to the most profound, the most delicate, the most ardent, and most refined of all human passions. I am now conscious that I have hitherto mistaken the senses for the heart, and the blandishments of a vitiated imagination for the pleasures of the soul. ”

“ Well, listen at this stage to one of them, and one of the best of them, on this present matter—the human heart, that is. ‘Our heart,’ he says, ‘is our manner of existence, or the state in which we feel ourselves to be; it is an inward life, a vital sensibility, which contains our manner of feeling what and how we are; it is the state of our desires and tendencies, of inwardly seeing, tasting, relishing, and feeling that which passes within us ”

“ The workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe. One moment they make us despair of our kind, and the next we see in them the reflection of the divine image. ”

“ It shows how, in the last analysis, that which touches the human heart has more vitality and more enduring interest than what concerns the intellect or those achievements of the human mind which are external to our emotional nature. ”

“ And thus in such a mood reading becomes a patient tracing out of human emotion, human feeling, when confronted with the sorrows, the hopes, the motives, the sufferings which beckon us and threaten us on every side. One desires to know what pure and wise and high-hearted natures have made of the problem; one desires to let the sense of beauty—that most spiritual of all pleasures—sink deeper into the heart; one desires to share the thoughts and hopes, the dreams and visions, in the strength of which the human spirit has risen superior to suffering and death. ”

“ Heart, in the sense in which it is currently understood, suggests the warm center of human life or any other life. When we say of a man that he 'has a good deal of heart' we mean that he is 'summery.' When you come near him it is like getting around to the south side of a house in midwinter and letting the sunshine feel of you, and watching the snow slide off the twigs and the tear-drops swell on the points of pendant icicles. Brain counts for a good deal more to-day than heart does. ”

“ As the heart of a child naturally begins developing before the soul feelings, let us talk about that first. And when we speak about the "heart," it is, of course, understood that we are not referring to the physical organ which pumps blood, but to that part of human nature which responds to affection and sympathy. ”

“ A tending God's hand, leading and feeding the inner man (the child of the outer one) , teaching him to go and to speak, educating, refining him, is shown in all things, from the shapeless earthworm to the brilliant human face, from the chaotic nations of the primitive ages to the present century, from the first faint pulsation of the invisible heart to its full, bold, throbbing pulse in manhood,—and why? ”

“ As all the multiform varieties of plant life have one common soil from which to draw their sustenance, and by virtue of which they live and thrive, so all the varied activities of human life are rooted in, and draw their vitality from, one common source—the human heart. The cause of all suffering and of all happiness resides, not in the outer activities of human life, but in the inner activities of the heart and mind ”

“ Never say you know the last words about any human heart! ”

“ Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. ”

“ From the propelling power in affection, or from its collected and concentrated activity, the heart beats. Affection, or love, flows into the will, where, by the human organism, its endeavor is turned into the power of heart-throbs by Correspondence, just as the endeavor of affection is turned into the light of the understanding, and thence into the act of the hand. ”

“ But who can fathom the subtleties of the human heart? Certainly not those who expect from it only decorous sentiments and normal emotions. ”

“ In such supreme moments as that one was, heart speaks to heart with a complete understanding which passeth all human knowledge, and which can be understood only by the two who are most concerned, and by God, who created such impulses. ”

“ If it can be established that the fundamental emotions of the human heart originated in historical time, the widely spread, but unproved, theory that everything great and decisive existed from the beginning will be contradicted. ”

“ Is it not reasonable therefore to conclude yet further, that as the heart, both in the language of GOD and of man, is figurative of the affections of the human will, or love, in like manner the lungs are figurative of the thoughts of the human understanding, which thoughts are found to be in close connection with those affections? ”

“ Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; also coffin. The same sentiment says “yes” and “no” in the human heart. Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light, alas! ”

“ Nothing could be imagined more touching than the look of suffering impressed on his features, while the gentle and resigned cast of his whole physiognomy was but a fair transcript of the mind within, for a better, purer, or more upright heart could scarcely have beaten in human form. ”

“ Do not these show that the human heart yearns for the beautiful in all ranks of life? ”

“ Let us train our minds, first to think aright, believe aright, that the meditations of our hearts may be correct, for our actions will naturally correspond with that that is in the heart. This, my brethren and sisters, is our duty. ”

“ there is no instinct like the heart— The heart—which may be broken: happy they! Thrice fortunate! who of that fragile mould, The precious porcelain of human clay, Break with the first fall: they can ne'er behold The long year link'd with heavy day on day, And all which must be borne, and never told; ”

“ A heart purified by the grace of God, and firmly rooted in truth as its ground, is the source and common fountain for the successful development of all the main activities and functions of human life, those belonging to the sphere of sense, as well as to the psychical and spiritual realms, and this must more and more manifest itself as such a centre of the personality, sending forth light and life.—Lange’s Commentary. ”

“ How closely the heart is under the influence of the emotions we need not go to science to learn, for all human experience and all literature are overflowing with evidence that shows the extent of this relation. ”

“ The heart has a yearning for the unknown, a longing to penetrate the deep shadow and the winding glade, where, as it seems, no human foot has been. ”

“ Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe!
Thou Soul, that art the Eternity of thought!
And giv'st to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion! not in vain,
By day or star-light, thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human soul;
Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man,—
But with high objects, with enduring things,
With life and nature; purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying by such discipline
Both pain and fear,—until we recognise
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart. ”

“ I shall be able to endure, because ‘my good will is to it;’ and energetic, because I shall have a good motive; and healthy, because I shall be happy—because my heart will be right and at rest; for I say it again, because it is a great deep truth—‘Out of the heart are the issues of life!’ Yes, out of the heart are the issues of will, purpose, hope, health, strength, enterprise, achievement, SUCCESS! Out of the heart are the issues of all the good that can come back to us in time or eternity! ”

“ But that which issues from the heart alone,
Will bend tile hearts of others to your own. ”

“ Close twisted with the fibres of the heart!
Which, broken, break them; and drain off the soul
Of human joy; ”

“ Well is it when our eyes are filled with His beauty and our hearts are occupied with Him. In the measure in which this is true of us we shall recognize the correlative truth that His great heart is occupied with us. ”

“ If ye lay bound upon the wheel of change, And no way were of breaking from the chain, The Heart of boundless Being is a curse, The Soul of Things fell Pain. Ye are not bound! the Soul of Things is sweet, The Heart of Being is celestial rest; Stronger than woe is will: that which was Good Doth pass to Better—Best. I, Buddh, who wept with all my brothers' tears, Whose heart was broken by a whole world's woe, Laugh and am glad, for there is Liberty Ho! ”

“ I assure you, sir, such a view not only narrows the mind, but constricts humanity, and ossifies the heart—that special organ by which the world, despite present-day detractors, lives and moves and has its being. ”

“ It was the mighty heart in the little body, the little man and the big odds, the thing which, through all time, will hold and keep and fascinate humanity while there is an ounce of blood or nerve left in it. ”

“ Who has not known one period of life, and that so solemn that its shadows may rest over all life hereafter, when one human creature has over him a sovereignty more supreme and absolute than Orient servitude adores in the symbols of diadem and sceptre? What crest so haughty that has not bowed before a hand which could exalt or humble! What heart so dauntless that has not trembled to call forth the voice at whose sound open the gates of rapture or despair! That life alone is free which rules, and suffices for itself. That life we forfeit when we love! ”

“ As traditional sentiment,—as a wholesome subject for school-composition,—we have spoken and written of the weariness of the world-worn heart, and the frailty of earthly things. But, O! when our hearts have actually become worn, and tried; when we begin to learn that the things of this life are evanescent,—are dropping away from us, and we slipping from them,—what inspiration of reality comes to us in the oft-heard invitation, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest!" ”

“ As if compassion were not suffering—the suffering of love, it is true, the suffering of the heart. But what does suffer if not thy sympathising heart? No love, no suffering. The material, the source of suffering, is the universal heart, the common bond of all beings. ”

“ In all ages and by all peoples the heart has been looked upon as the centre of the passions, of feeling and of strength. Our word courage comes from 'cœur’—heart. Nearly two thousand years ago it was proved by physiologists that the heart was not the centre of sensibility, and yet poets and common opinion continue to say that the heart is the most sensitive part of the body. ”

“ In a necessarily more contracted sphere of action may there not from our faces, and our hearts, go forth a beam of light that shall be powerful to cheer up a desponding spirit, or to encourage a drooping heart, or to give comfort to a sorrowing soul, or to increase the faith and courage of a lonely life? ”

“ The heart is, therefore, the seat of the moral life, and as the source is known by the waters that flow from it, so will the moral life partake of the character and bear the impress of the heart whence it proceeds. ”

“ The fingers are thinner; the face has lines of care and sorrow crossing each other in a web-work that makes the golden tissue of humanity. But the heart is fond and steady; it is the same dear heart, the same self-sacrificing heart, warming, like a fire, all around it. Affliction has tempered joy ”

“ Oh, that by thy infinite power, to which nothing is impossible, I could possess, besides this narrow heart of mine, other hearts of boundless extent, whose whole wish, occupation, and continual endeavour, should be constantly to look up to, acknowledge, reflect upon, love, and praise thee, my God and my Lord. ”

“ Therefore the heart, which signifies all the affections generally, comes to be concealed and open, held by zeal, raised by magnificent thoughts, sustained by hope, weakened by fear, and in this state and condition will it ever be seen and found. ”

“ Is it not, rather, the mind, the soul, the heart, which merely employ those bodily organs to give forth into our external life that which is felt in our inner depths? so that it can be communicated to others, and awaken kindred chords in them, opening, in harmonious echoes, that marvellous kingdom from whence those tones come darting, like beams of light? ”

“ That which we have designated as external, refers to that faculty of the heart by which the sciences of geometry, medicine, astronomy, numbers, the science of law and all the arts are understood; and although the heart is a thing which cannot be divided, still the knowledge of all the world exists in it. All the world indeed, in comparison with it, is as a grain compared with the sun, or as a drop in the ocean.- In a second, by the power of thought, the soul passes from the abyss to the highest heaven, and from the east to the west. ”