A Quote by Nicolas Chamfort

Contact with the world either breaks or hardens the heart.

Nicolas Chamfort

Quote Topics

Breaks Contact Either Heart World

Quote Author

Nicolas Chamfort
French - Writer
April 6, 1741 - April 13, 1794

How surely a knowledge of the world hardens the heart!

Pedro Calderon de la Barca

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.

Vance Havner

The heart of a woman falls back with the night, / And enters some alien cage in its plight, / And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars / While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

Georgia Douglas Johnson

You know what, the thing that breaks my heart is that there's no way I can answer it without hurting someone on either side.

Brian D. McLaren

My heart is the throne of the Beloved, the Beloved the heart's destiny: Whoever breaks another's heart will find no homecoming in this world or any other.

Yunus Emre

The only question that nobody ever asks is: What breaks your heart? I think that should be asked of all "artists."... So, what breaks your heart?

Jonathan Carroll

It is only through letting our heart break that we discover something unexpected: the heart cannot actually break, it can only break open. When we feel both our love for this world and the pain of this world-together, at the same time-the heart breaks out of its shell. To live with an open heart is to experience life full-strength.

John Welwood

Have a heart that never hardens

Charles Dickens

The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe... All is registered in the 'boundless heart' of the bodhisattva. Through our deepest and innermost reponses to our world - to hunger and torture and the threat of annihilation - we touch that boundless heart.

Joanna Macy

Grant that I have enough suffering that my heart really opens to the great compassion of this world, that I be given enough so that I don't wall myself off from the world, that it breaks down the heart and the separation and the ego and the fear, and it lets me touch the nectar, the milk of kindness itself, of something greater.

Jack Kornfield

In a murderous time/the heart breaks and breaks/and lives by breaking.

Stanley Kunitz

But responsibility hardens the heart. It must.

Ford Madox Ford

We all have this misunderstanding about heartbreak, which is we think we should avoid it. But what I think is that heartache is a clue toward the work we're supposed to be doing in the world. What breaks each person's heart is different - be it racial injustice, war, or animals. And when you figure out what it is that breaks yours, go toward it.

Glennon Doyle Melton

The world stands out on either side No wider than the heart is wide; Above the world is stretched the sky, No higher than the soul is high. The heart can push the sea and land Farther away on either hand; The soul can split the sky in two, And let the face of God shine through. But East and West will pinch the heart That can not keep them pushed apart; And he whose soul is flat—the sky Will cave in on him by and by.