Quotes about tender
page 3

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
William Wordsworth photo
Honoré de Balzac photo

“A mother’s life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

La maternité comporte une suite de poésies douces ou terribles. Pas une heure qui n’ait ses joies et ses craintes.
Part I, ch. XLV.
Letters of Two Brides (1841-1842)

Francis Escudero photo
Julian of Norwich photo
George William Russell photo

“Something you see in me I wis not:
Another heart in you I guess:
A stranger's lips — but thine I kiss not,
Erring in all my tenderness.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

By Still Waters (1906)

Theodore Dreiser photo

“Parents are frequently inclined, because of a time-flattered sense of security, to take their children for granted. Nothing ever has happened, so nothing ever will happen. They see their children every day, and through the eyes of affection; and despite their natural charm and their own strong parental love, the children are apt to become not only commonplaces, but ineffably secure against evil. […] The astonishment of most parents at the sudden accidental revelation of evil in connection with any of their children is almost invariably pathetic. […] But it is possible. Very possible. Decidedly likely. Some, through lack of experience or understanding, or both, grow hard and bitter on the instant. They feel themselves astonishingly abased in the face of notable tenderness and sacrifice. Others collapse before the grave manifestation of the insecurity and uncertainty of life—the mystic chemistry of our being. Still others, taught roughly by life, or endowed with understanding or intuition, or both, see in this the latest manifestation of that incomprehensible chemistry which we call life and personality, and, knowing that it is quite vain to hope to gainsay it, save by greater subtlety, put the best face they can upon the matter and call a truce until they can think. We all know that life is unsolvable—we who think. The remainder imagine a vain thing, and are full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

Source: The Financier (1912), Ch. XXVI

Samuel Johnson photo
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
George William Russell photo

“Thy tender kiss hath memory we are kings
For all our wanderings.
Thy shining eyes already see the after
In hidden light and laughter.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

James Martineau photo
Carlos Santana photo
Calvin Coolidge photo

“The first duty of a government is to be true to itself. This does not mean perfection, it means a plan to strive for perfection. It means loyalty to ideals. The ideals of America were set out in the Declaration of Independence and adopted in the Constitution. They did not represent perfection at hand, but perfection found. The fundamental principle was freedom. The fathers knew that this was not yet apprehended. They formed a government firm in the faith that it was ever to press toward this high mark. In selfishness, in greed, in lust for gain, it turned aside. Enslaving others, it became itself enslaved. Bondage in one part consumed freedom in all parts. The government of the fathers, ceasing to be true to itself, was perishing. Five score and ten years ago, that divine providence which infinite repetition has made only the more a miracle, sent into the world a new life destined to save a nation. No star, no sign foretold his coming. About his cradle all was poor and mean, save only the source of all great men, the love of a wonderful woman. When she faded away in his tender years from her deathbed in humble poverty, she endowed her son with greatness. There can be no proper observance of a birthday which forgets the mother. Into his origin, as into his life, men long have looked and wondered. In wisdom great, but in humility greater, in justice strong, but in compassion stronger, he became a leader of men by being a follower of the truth. He overcame evil with good. His presence filled the nation. He broke the might of oppression. He restored a race to its birthright.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Duty of Government (1920)

William Wordsworth photo

“Whom neither shape of danger can dismay,
Nor thought of tender happiness betray.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Source: Character of the Happy Warrior http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww302.html (1806), Line 72.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis photo
Charlotte Brontë photo
Jean Paul Sartre photo
John Hoole photo

“Ah! why so rare does cruel Love inspire
Two tender bosoms with a mutual fire?
Say, whence, perfidious, dost thou pleasure find
To sow dissension in the human mind?”

John Hoole (1727–1803) British translator

Book II, line 1
Translations, Orlando Furioso of Ludovico Ariosto (1773)

Rollo May photo
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey photo
Henry Van Dyke photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Henry Jacob Bigelow photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Max Scheler photo
George Eliot photo
Edwin Markham photo

“It will all come back — the wasted splendor,
The heart's lost youth like a breaking flower,
The dauntless dare, and the wistful, tender
Touch of the April hour.”

Edwin Markham (1852–1940) American poet

Source: The Shoes of Happiness, and Other Poems (1913), The Crowning Hour, III

John Napier photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Emily Dickinson photo
Elinor Glyn photo
Arshile Gorky photo

“On ilk beugh till embrace Writtin in a bill was O Dowglass, O Dowglass Tender and trewe!”

Richard Holland (1420–1480) Scottish cleric and poet

The Buke of the Howlat (c. 1450), Stanza xxxi. The allegorical poem of The Howlat was composed about the mid-fifteenth century, and printed by the Bannatyne Club, 1823.

Torquato Tasso photo

“Now spread the night her spangled canopy,
And summoned every restless eye to sleep;
On beds of tender grass the beasts down lie,
The fishes slumbered in the silent deep,
Unheard were serpent's hiss and dragon's cry,
Birds left to sing, and Philomen to weep,
Only that noise heaven's rolling circles kest,
Sung lullaby to bring the world to rest.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Era la notte allor ch'alto riposo
Han l'onde e i venti, e parea muto il mondo,
Gli animai lassi, e quei che 'l mare ondoso,
O de' liquidi laghi alberga il fondo,
E chi si giace in tana, o in mandra ascoso,
E i pinti augelli nell’oblio giocondo
Sotto il silenzio de' secreti orrori
Sopían gli affanni, e raddolciano i cori.
Canto II, stanza 96 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Robert Southwell photo

“Behold a silly tender babe,
In freezing winter night,
In homely manger trembling lies;
Alas! a piteous sight.”

Robert Southwell (1561–1595) English Jesuit

"New Prince, New Pomp", line 1; p. 96.

Thomas Carlyle photo
Hilaire Belloc photo
Louisa May Alcott photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“The hope that clings to the least glimpse of blue
Amid a sky of murkiness; the fear
That sickens at itself; the fond deceit,
That will not see the truth; the tenderness,
That only asks to trust; and, at the last,
The knowledge we have known in vain so long
Comes like a thunderbolt, and crashes.”

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

(24th July 1824) Poetic Sketches - 5th Series. Sketch the Second. - Infidelity
(31st July 1824) Poetic Sketches - 5th Series. Sketch the Third.—The Knight’s Tale. See The Vow of The Peacock
The London Literary Gazette, 1824

William Shenstone photo

“For seldom shall she hear a tale
So sad, so tender, and so true.”

William Shenstone (1714–1763) English gardener

Jemmy Dawson (c. 1745), st. 20

John Keats photo
William Blake photo

“There may be some tenderness in the conscience and yet the will be a very stone; and as long as the will stands out, there is no broken heart.”

Richard Alleine (1611–1681) English clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 615.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Oh! frail are the many links that are
In the chain of affection's tender care”

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

The Golden Violet - The Ring
The Golden Violet (1827)

Thomas Brooks photo
Marianne von Werefkin photo
James Hudson Taylor photo

“Nearness to GOD calls for tenderness of conscience, thoughtfulness in service, and implicit obedience.”

James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) Missionary in China

(J. Hudson Taylor. Separation and Service: Or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. London: Morgan & Scott, n.d., 26).

Sherwood Anderson photo
Robert South photo

“There never was any heart truly great and generous that was not also tender and compassionate.”

Robert South (1634–1716) English theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 578.

John Muir photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“The lines were fill'd with many a tender thing,
All the impassion'd heart's fond communing.”

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

Written under a Picture of a Girl Burning a Love Letter from The London Literary Gazette (16th November 1822) Fragments in Rhyme II - Lines Written under a Picture of a Girl Burning a Love Letter
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Stephen R. Covey photo

“Self growth is tender; it's holy ground. There's no higher investment.”

Source: The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People (1989), p. 62

William Wordsworth photo
Horace Greeley photo
William Morley Punshon photo
Shah Jahan photo
Alexander Pope photo

“Is it, in Heav'n, a crime to love too well?
To bear too tender, or too firm a heart,
To act a lover's or a Roman's part?
Is there no bright reversion in the sky,
For those who greatly think, or bravely die?”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Source: The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope (1717), Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, Line 6.

Peter D. Schiff photo

“The Constitution denies the states the power to make anything other than gold or silver coins legal tender in payment of debts.”

Peter D. Schiff (1963) American entrepreneur, economist and author

Quotes from Crash Proof (2006)

Paul Bourget photo

“Well, you must now imagine my friend at my age or almost there. You must picture him growing gray, tired of life and convinced that he had at last discovered the secret of peace. At this time he met, while visiting some relatives in a country house, a mere girl of twenty, who was the image, the haunting image of her whom he had hoped to marry thirty years before. It was one of those strange resemblances which extend from the color of the eyes to the 'timbre' of the voice, from the smile to the thought, from the gestures to the finest feelings of the heart. I could not, in a few disjointed phrases describe to you the strange emotions of my friend. It would take pages and pages to make you understand the tenderness, both present and at the same time retrospective, for the dead through the living; the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins; the daily commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost love, with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly naïve and spontaneous thing in it, a young girl. She comes, she goes, she laughs, she sings, you go about with her in the intimacy of country life, and at her side walks one long dead. After two weeks of almost careless abandon to the dangerous delights of this inward agitation imagine my friend entering by chance one morning one of the less frequented rooms of the house, a gallery, where, among other pictures, hung a portrait of himself, painted when he was twenty-five. He approaches the portrait abstractedly. There had been a fire in the room, so that a slight moisture dimmed the glass which protected the pastel, and on this glass, because of this moisture, he sees distinctly the trace of two lips which had been placed upon the eyes of the portrait, two small delicate lips, the sight of which makes his heart beat. He leaves the gallery, questions a servant, who tells him that no one but the young woman he has in mind has been in the room that morning.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love

André Maurois photo
James Macpherson photo

“He produced a work of art which by its deep appreciation of natural beauty and the melancholy tenderness of its treatment of the ancient legend did more than any single work to bring about the romantic movement in European, and especially in German, literature.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

The Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910-11) vol. 17, p. 268.
Criticism

Barbara Hepworth photo
Ethan Allen photo
Ralph Waldo Trine photo
Algernon Sidney photo
George Eliot photo
Nicole Krauss photo

“Franz Kafka is dead.He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. […] They turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees, Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice.”

Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 187

Charles Evans Hughes photo

“…[I]n three notable instances the Court has suffered severely from self-inflicted wounds. The first of these was the Dred Scott case. … There the Supreme Court decided that Dred Scott, a negro, not being a citizen could not sue in the United States Courts and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories. … [T]he grave injury that the Court sustained through its decision has been universally recognized. Its action was a public calamity. … [W]idespread and bitter attacks upon the judges who joined in the decision undermined confidence in the Court. … It was many years before the Court, even under new judges, was able to retrieve its reputation.…[The second instance was] the legal tender cases decided in 1870. … From the standpoint of the effect on public opinion there can be no doubt that the reopening of the case was a serious mistake and the overruling in such a short time, and by one vote, of the previous decision shook popular respect for the Court.… [The third instance happened] [t]wenty-five years later, when the Court had recovered its prestige, [and] its action in the income tax cases gave occasion for a bitter assault. … [After questions about the validity of the income tax] had been reserved owing to an equal division of the Court, a reargument was ordered and in the second decision the act was held to be unconstitutional by a majority of one. Justice Jackson was ill at the time of the first argument but took part in the final decision, voting in favor of the validity of the statute. It was evident that the result [holding the statute invalid] was brought about by a change in the vote of one of the judges who had participated in the first decision. … [T]he decision of such an important question by a majority of one after one judge had changed his vote aroused a criticism of the Court which has never been entirely stilled.”

Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) American judge

"The Supreme Court of the United States: Its Foundation, Methods and Achievements," Columbia University Press, p. 50 (1928). ISBN 1-893122-85-9.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Wolfram von Eschenbach photo

“By the miracle of genius he created a masterpiece [Parzival], epic in scope, noble in purpose, humorous, humane, tender, and rational.”

Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170–1220) German knight and poet

Roger Sherman Loomis The Development of Arthurian Romance (New York: Dover, [1963] 2000) p. 67.
Criticism

Arthur Schopenhauer photo
Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
George William Russell photo
Nathanael Greene photo
Alexander Maclaren photo
Mary Baker Eddy photo
Mikhail Bulgakov photo
Henry More photo
Louis Pasteur photo

“When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments; tenderness for what he is, and respect for what he may become.”

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) French chemist and microbiologist

The phrase in French is found in Étienne Blanchard (1941), "Recueil d'idées", p. 76: "Quand je m'approche d'un enfant, il m'inspire deux sentiments: la tendresse pour ce qu'il est, et le respect pour ce qu'il peut être un jour." It doesn't give any reference, just like modern books which include the quote in English.
Disputed

Stig Dagerman photo
Propertius photo

“O like Venus attended by a thousand tender Cupids, setting foot upon the sea that gave her birth.”
Aut patrio qualis ponit vestigia ponto Mille Venus teneris cincta Cupidinibus.

Propertius (-47–-16 BC) Latin elegiac poet

II, ii, 9-10.
Elegies

“Why like a tender girl dost thou complain!
That strives to reach the mother's breast in vain;
Mourns by her side, her knees embraces fast,
Hangs on her robes, and interrupts her haste;
Yet, when with fondness to her arms she's rais'd,
Still mourns and weeps, and will not be appeas'd!”

Thomas Yalden (1670–1736) English poet

"Patroclus's Request to Achilles for his Arms; Imitated from the Beginning of the Sixteenth Iliad of Homer", in Tonson's The Annual Miscellany for the Year 1694.

Kyuzo Mifune photo
Adam Mickiewicz photo

“In spring's own country, where the gardens blow,
You faded, tender rose! For hours now past,
Like butterflies departing, on you're cast
The worms of memories to work you woe.”

Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) Polish national poet, dramatist, essayist, publicist, translator, professor of Slavic literature, and polit…

"The Grave of the Countess Potocki" http://daisy.htmlplanet.com/amick.htm
Crimean Sonnets

Omar Khayyám photo

“And this reviving Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River-Lip on which we lean —
Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

Source: The Rubaiyat (1120)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“And this is woman's fate:
All her affections are called into life
By winning flatteries, and then thrown back
Upon themselves to perish; and her heart,
Her trusting heart, filled with weak tenderness,
Is left to bleed or break!”

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

The Castilian Nuptuals from The London Literary Gazette (28th September 1822) Poetical Sketches. 3rd series - Sketch the Fourth
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Paul Weller (singer) photo

“If you gave me a fresh carnation, I would only crush its tender petals…”

Paul Weller (singer) (1958) English singer-songwriter, Guitarist

Carnation
The Gift (1982)

William Alcott photo
George III of the United Kingdom photo

“When the unhappy and deluded multitude, against whom this force will be directed, shall become sensible of their error, I shall be ready to receive the misled with tenderness and mercy!”

George III of the United Kingdom (1738–1820) King of Great Britain and King of Ireland

Source: Address to Parliament http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/amrev/shots/address.html (27 October 1775).