Quotes about heart
page 65

Sheri-D Wilson photo

“Inverted heart,
becomes the testicles
of a man.”

Sheri-D Wilson (1958) Canadian Spoken Word Poet

"Heart"
Goddess Gone Fishing for a Map of the Universe (2012)

Anthony Bourdain photo
Daniel Drake photo

“A religious spirit animates the infancy of our literature, and must continue to gloe in its maturity. The public taste calls for this quality, and would relish no work in which it might be supplanted by a principle of infidelity. Our best authors have written under the influence of Christian feeling; but had they been destitute of this sentiment, they would have found it necessary to accommodate themselves to the opinions of the people, and follow Christian precedents. The beneficent influence of religion on literature, is like that of our evening sun, when it awakens in the clouds those beautiful and burning tints, which clothe the firmament in gold and purple. It constitutes the heart of learning - the great source of its moral power. Religion addresses itself to the highest and holiest of our sentiments - benevolence and veneration, and their excitement stirs up the imagination, strengthens the undeerstanding, and purifies the taste. Thus, both in the mind of the author and the reader, Christianity and literature act and react on each other, with the effect of elevating both, and carrying the human character to the highest perfection which it is destined to reach. Learning should be proud of this companionship, and exert all her wisdom to render it perpetual.”

Daniel Drake (1785–1852) American physician and writer

Daniel Drake (1834). Discourse on the History, Character, and Prospects of the West: Delivered to the Union Literary Society of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, at Their Ninth Anniversary, September 23, 1834. Truman and Smith. p. 31

Tim McGraw photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Michael Moorcock photo
Rudyard Kipling photo

“They change their skies above them,
But not their hearts that roam!”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

The Native-Born, Stanza 2 (1895).
The Seven Seas (1896)

Yane Sandanski photo

“As I worked in the mountains, I will continue to work for the sacred fatherland with heart and soul in any kind of duty for which the fatherland employs me and any kind of task the fatherland expects from me.”

Yane Sandanski (1872–1915) Bulgarian revolutionary

Source: Yeni Asır, No. 1306, 31 July 1908, p. 1; Cited in: Hacısalihoğlu, Mehmet. " Yane Sandanski as a political leader in Macedonia in the era of the Young Turks http://ceb.revues.org/1192." Cahiers balkaniques 40 (2012).
Context: This was Sandanski’s answer to the question: “You have been used to living in the mountains for years. What kind of job will you do now?”

Calvin Coolidge photo

“What's left of me
is just for you to see
in your heart
Even though we may be
far apart
Never fear
if I should disappear
You will see there are still stars that shine
after me”

Ysabella Brave (1979) American singer

"The Moon was Red (an original Ysabella Brave!)" (16 June 2008) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjoQQD5XtKA

Ben Gibbard photo
Alexander Mackenzie photo
Winthrop Mackworth Praed photo

“And oh! I shall find how, day by day,
All thoughts and things look older;
How the laugh of pleasure grows less gay,
And the heart of friendship colder.”

Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802–1839) British politician, poet

"Twenty-eight and Twenty-nine" in The Poetical Works of Winthrop Mackworth Praed (published 1860) p. 212.

Friedrich Tholuck photo
Bill Maher photo
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing photo

“Vous n'avez pas, M. Mitterrand, le monopole du cœur. (You do not have, Mr Mitterrand, the monopoly of heart).”

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (1926–2020) President of France

To presidential candidate François Mitterrand, during the 1974 French Presidential debate.

Jane Taylor photo

“Far from mortal cares retreating,
Sordid hopes and vain desires,
Here, our willing footsteps meeting,
Every heart to heaven aspires.”

Jane Taylor (1783–1824) British poet

Hymn, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Colin Wilson photo
George Gordon Byron photo

“So, we'll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

St. 1.
So, We'll Go No More A-Roving (1817)

Elton John photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Theodore L. Cuyler photo

“Never despair of a child. The one you weep the most for at the mercy-seat may fill your heart with the sweetest joys.”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 50.

Stanisław Lem photo
William Cowper photo

“Here the heart
May give a useful lesson to the head,
And Learning wiser grow without his books.”

Source: The Task (1785), Book VI, Winter Walk at Noon, Line 85.

Prem Rawat photo
Honoré de Balzac photo

“Unfortunately her portrait will cure no one of the addiction to loving sweetly smiling angels with dreamy looks, innocent faces, and a strong-box for a heart.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Malheureusement, ce portrait ne corrigera personne de la manie d’aimer de anges au doux sourire, à l’air rêveur, à figure candide, dont le cœur est un coffre-fort.
La cousine Bette http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Cousine_Bette_-_4#XXXVII._R.C3.A9flexions_morales_sur_l.E2.80.99immoralit.C3.A9 (1846), translated by Sylvia Raphael, ch. XXXVII: Moral reflections on immorality.

“[C. West Churchman exposed the indifferentist position of some researchers — planners belonging to this school in the following terms:] And if our clients blow up the world, land us in starvation or totalitarianism, that is too bad, but we remained pure in heart to the last, didn't we?”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1940s - 1950s, Costs, Utilities, and Values, Sections I and II. (1956), p. 412 as cited in: Bogdan Mieczkowski, Oleg Zinam (1984) Bureaucracy, ideology, technology: quality of life East and West. p. 97

John F. Kennedy photo
Henry D. Moyle photo

“This great principle does not deny to the needy nor to the poor the assistance they should have. The wholly incapacitated, the aged, the sickly are cared for with all tenderness, but every able-bodied person is enjoined to do his utmost for himself to avoid dependence, if his own efforts can make such a course possible; to look upon adversity as temporary; to combine his faith in his own ability with honest toil; to rehabilitate himself and his family to a position of independence; in every case to minimize the need for help and to supplement any help given with his own best efforts. We believe [that] seldom [do circumstances arise in which] men of rigorous faith, genuine courage, and unfaltering determination, with the love of independence burning in their hearts, and pride in their own accomplishments, cannot surmount the obstacles that lie in their paths. We know that through humble, prayerful, industrious, God-fearing lives, a faith can be developed within us by the strength of which we can call down the blessings of a kind and merciful Heavenly Father and literally see our handicaps vanish and our independence and freedom established and maintained.”

Henry D. Moyle (1889–1963) Member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles

Conference Report, Apr. 1948, p. 5, and quoted in The Celestial Nature of Self-reliance http://lds.org/portal/site/LDSOrg/menuitem.b12f9d18fae655bb69095bd3e44916a0/?vgnextoid=2354fccf2b7db010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD&locale=0&sourceId=0b3ac5e8b4b6b010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____&hideNav=1|
Quotes as an apostle

George Eliot photo

“He had a sense that the old man meant to be good-natured and neighbourly; but the kindness fell on him as sunshine falls on the wretched — he had no heart to taste it, and felt that it was very far off him.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 10 (at page 79)

Karl Barth photo

“For the millions that suffer unjustly, the Confessing Church does not yet have a heart.”

Karl Barth (1886–1968) Swiss Protestant theologian

On the lack of passionate resistence to Nazi policies of persecution of Jews, even in the Confessing Church he helped found in opposition to Nazi influences on churches, in a letter written before leaving Germany in 1935, as quoted in Hitler's Willing Executioners : Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1997) by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, p. 437.

John Muir photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo
Salman Rushdie photo
George Hendrik Breitner photo

“It is just most delightful to me that I live in this way in the heart of Amsterdam. In a second you can eat somewhere and be back home again. You never have to wait for the tram. It is less than seven minutes [walking] from Dam Square. To me that is so unusual and so pleasant. I walk there daily.... the window [of his new studio] is about 2.25 m wide and high, and underneath a standing window of the same size, breadth-wise.”

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) Dutch painter and photographer

translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat van Breitner's brief, in het Nederlands:) 't is al allerheerlijkst voor me, dat ik zoo midden in Amsterdam woon. In een oogenblik kun je ergens gaan eten en weer 't huis zijn. Je hoeft nooit op de tram te gaan staan. 't is niet verder dan een minuut of zeven van de Dam. dat is voor mij zoo ongewoon en zoo prettig. Ik loop er heen, dag in en uit.. ..'t raam [van het atelier] is ongeveer 2.25 m breed en hoog, en daaronder een staand raam van zelfde breedte.
Quote of Breitner in his letter from Amsterdam, 11 May 1893, to Herman van der Weele; from the original letter in the RKD-Archive, The Hague https://rkd.nl/explore/excerpts/1154
1890 - 1900

“Heart disease syphilis pregnancy”

Blood and Guts in High School (1978)

“It is costing much money here, a thing I regret. But you will get your money's worth. My legs curse you. But my heart says 'Thank you.”

Maynard Owen Williams (1888–1963) American journalist

from a letter to John Oliver la Gorce, the Geographic's assistant editor (1923)

Fred Weatherly photo
Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein photo
Nadezhda Durova photo
James Anthony Froude photo
Thomas Carlyle photo

“At bottom, it is the Poet's first gift, as it is all men's, that he have intellect enough. He will be a Poet if he have: a Poet in word; or failing that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act. Whether he write at all; and if so, whether in prose or in verse, will depend on accidents: who knows on what extremely trivial accidents, — perhaps on his having had a singing-master, on his being taught to sing in his boyhood! But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart of things, and the harmony that dwells there (for whatsoever exists has a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and exist), is not the result of habits or accidents, but the gift of Nature herself; the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what sort soever. To the Poet, as to every other, we say first of all, See. If you cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other, and name yourself a Poet; there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, 'But are ye sure he's not a dunce?”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

Why, really one might ask the same thing, in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider it as the one inquiry needful: Are ye sure he's.
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet

J.M. Coetzee photo
Paul McCartney photo

“Lovely Rita, Meter Maid, nothing could come between us.
When it gets dark I'll tow your heart away”

Paul McCartney (1942) English singer-songwriter and composer

"Lovely Rita" from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
Lyrics, The Beatles

Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo
Bob Dylan photo

“But my heart is not weary; it's light and it's free
I've got nothing but affection for those who've sailed with me.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Love and Theft (2001), Mississippi

P. D. James photo

“The intention of any novelist must surely be to make that straight avenue to the human heart.”

P. D. James (1920–2014) English crime writer

Time to be Earnest - a Fragment of Biography

Sara Teasdale photo

“So you say, so you say,” murmured Fflewddur, hurrying after him. “Look closer into your heart. You may find your opinion to be somewhat different.”

Source: The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–1968), Book III: The Castle of Llyr (1966), Chapter 5

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Peace to the weary and the beating heart,
That fed upon itself!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

A History of the Lyre
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

Nâzım Hikmet photo

“At eighteen the heart shoots like a pebble from a slingshot
and the head doesn't sit on the shoulder.”

Nâzım Hikmet (1902–1963) Turkish poet

From Human Landscapes from My Country, Book Two, Section VII

Frederick William Robertson photo
W. Somerset Maugham photo
Elizabeth Kostova photo

“We came down from the trees, up from the grasslands, and into an SUV. We drove. We motored. We headed for that Texas horizon, flat as the flat-line on a heart monitor, straight to the brink of extinction, all the while pumping gas.”

Andrea Lewis (writer) Microsoft employee

"Cryonic Freeze" Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Winter 2013) "Felix, Living History Enactor, Despairs."
2010-

Ludovico Ariosto photo

“What sweeter bliss and what more blessed state
Can be imagined than a loving heart,
But for the torment which Man suffers, that
Suspicion, sinister and deep, that smart,
That aching wretchedness, that malady,
That frenzied rage, which we call jealousy?”

Che dolce più, che più giocondo stato
Saria di quel d'un amoroso core?
Se non fosse l'uom sempre stimulato
Da quel sospetto rio, da quel timore,
Da quel martìr, da quella frenesia,
Da quella rabbia detta gelosia.
Canto XXXI, stanza 1 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Charles Kingsley photo
Loni Anderson photo
David Berg photo
Alexander Maclaren photo
James A. Garfield photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Herman Wouk photo
Martin Scorsese photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Leslie Feist photo
Ivan Goncharov photo
Stevie Wonder photo

“I just called to say I love you,
I just called to say how much I care,
I just called to say I love you,
And I mean it from the bottom of my heart.”

Stevie Wonder (1950) American musician

I Just Called to Say I Love You
Song lyrics, The Woman in Red (1984)

Anne Brontë photo
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi photo
John Steinbeck photo
Edward FitzGerald photo
Marvin Gaye photo
Brandon Boyd photo

“Maybe if I looked in my heart, I could find a back door.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

Lyrics, Make Yourself (1999)

Ray Bradbury photo
Hugo Ball photo
Margaret Atwood photo
Ossip Zadkine photo

“In October 1945 I returned from America, where I had stayed during the war. I arrived in Le Havre, full of ruins, a carcass of a city. It took one night to reach Paris on a train with no windows. That night I got the idea for the monument. I sketched it on paper and forgot about it, until I visited Rotterdam for the first time in 1947. I saw a city without a heart. I saw a crater in the body of a city. And I remembered that night, the sketches. I made a small terracotta model and sent it to an exhibition of French art in Germany.”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

Quote of Zadkine from interview in 'Het Vrije Volk', (Dutch newspaper), 4 July 1950; as cited in 'Unveiling of the Dutch City https://www.wederopbouwrotterdam.nl/en/tijdlijn/unveiling-of-the-destroyed-city/
Ossip Zadkine explained in 1950 the genesis of his large bronze sculpture 'Destroyed City', commissioned by the city Rotterdam
1940 - 1960

Leonid Brezhnev photo

“Every man must be made to realize that further retreat is impossible. He must realize with his mind and heart that this is a matter of life and death of the Soviet state, of the life and death of the people of our country…the Nazi troops must be stopped now, before it is too late.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Statement made in World War II, as a commissar on the southern front, as quoted in Leonid I. Brezhnev : Pages from his Life (1978) by Academy of Sciences of the USSR, p. 49; also in For the Soul of Mankind : The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (2007) by Melvyn P. Leffler, p. 237

Thomas Carlyle photo
François de La Rochefoucauld photo

“The mind is always the dupe of the heart.”

L'esprit est toujours la dupe du coeur.
Maxim 102.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Henry Campbell-Bannerman photo
George William Curtis photo

“Pooh! Pooh! Nonsense!' was the reply, 'that's all very well in theory, but it doesn't work so. The returning of slaves amounts to nothing in fact. All that is obsolete. And why make all this row? Can't you hush? We've nothing to do with slavery, we tell you. We can't touch it; and if you persist in this agitation about a mere form and theory, why, you're a set of pestilent fanatics and traitors; and if you get your noisy heads broken, you get just what you deserve'. And they quoted in the faces of the abolitionists the words of Governor Edward Everett, who was not an authority with them, in that fatal inaugural address, 'The patriotism of all classes of citizens must be invited to abstain from a discussion which, by exasperating the master, can have no other effect than to render more oppressive the condition of the slave'. It was as if some kindly Pharisee had said to Christ, 'Don't try to cast out that evil spirit; it may rend the body on departing'. Was it not as if some timid citizen had said, 'Don't say hard things of intemperance lest the dram-shops, to spite us, should give away the rum'? And so the battle raged. The abolitionists dashed against slavery with passionate eloquence like a hail of hissing fire. They lashed its supporters with the scorpion whip of their invective. Ambition, reputation, ortune, ease, life itself they threw upon the consuming altar of their cause. Not since those earlier fanatics of freedom, Patrick Henry and James Otis, has the master chord of human nature, the love of liberty, been struck with such resounding power. It seemed in vain, so slowly their numbers increased, so totally were they outlawed from social and political and ecclesiastical recognition. The merchants of Boston mobbed an editor for virtually repeating the Declaration of Independence. The city of New York looked on and smiled while the present United States marshal insulted a woman as noble and womanly and humane as Florence Nightingale. In other free States men were flying for their lives; were mobbed, seized, imprisoned, maimed, murdered; but still as, in the bitter days of Puritan persecution in Scotland, the undaunted voices of the Covenanters were heard singing the solemn songs of God that echoed and re-echoed from peak to peak of the barren mountains, until the great dumb wilderness was vocal with praise — so in little towns and great cities were heard the uncompromising voices of these men sternly intoning the majestic words of the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence, which echoed from solitary heart to heart until the whole land rang with the litany of liberty.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Franklin D. Roosevelt photo
John Muir photo

“Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is done and suffered by her creatures. All scars she heals, whether in rocks or water or sky or hearts.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

24 March 1895, page 337
John of the Mountains, 1938