
“Hard is that heart which beauty makes not soft.”
Crudel, che tal beltà turba e consuma.
Canto IV, stanza 77 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)
Um fraco Rei faz fraca a forte gente.
Stanza 138, line 8 (tr. Richard Fanshawe)
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto III
Um fraco Rei faz fraca a forte gente.
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto III
“Hard is that heart which beauty makes not soft.”
Crudel, che tal beltà turba e consuma.
Canto IV, stanza 77 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)
“Only firm people can be truly soft.”
Il n'y a que les personnes qui ont de la fermeté qui puissent avoir une véritable douceur.
Variant translation: It is only those who are firm who can be genuinely kind.
Maxim 479.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
"Cathlin of Clutha"
The Poems of Ossian
“Do not erase the designs the child makes in the soft wax of his inner life.”
“Them heavy people hit me in a soft spot.
Them heavy people help me.”
Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)
“We want this people to be hard, not soft, and you must steel yourselves for it in your youth!”
1930s, From the film Triumph of the Will (1935)
“I have a real soft spot in my heart for librarians and people who care about books.”
I would not live alway (published 1826), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“Plead, Sleep, my cause, and make her soft like thee,
That she in peace may wake and pity me.”
Sleep, Angry Beauty