#cruelty

People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#cruelty #mankind #art

Denna is a wild thing," I explained. "Like a hind or a summer storm. If a storm blows down your house, or breaks a tree, you don't say the storm was mean. It was cruel. It acted according to its nature and something unfortunately was hurt. The same is true of Denna. ↗

— Patrick Rothfuss

#fantasy #insight #love #nature #personality

In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other’s blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven’s love. ↗

— Aberjhani

#fear #heaven #human-nature #love #spirituality

It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. ↗

— John Fowles

#humanity #pacifism #violence #love

That's most interesting. But I was no more a mind-reader then than today. I was weeping for an altogether different reason. When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I've never forgotten. ↗

— Kazuo Ishiguro

#coldness #cruelty #dancing #future #heartbreak

Seems to me-" Lee said, feeling for the words, "seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed.... ↗

— Philip Pullman

#cruelty

...here's what I've learned - people will hurt you, but you don't have to respond - not every mean comment or cruel act deserves to be noticed ... ↗

— John Geddes

#comments #cruelty #hurt #ignore #response

Kissing in front of the loveless is an act of cruelty. ↗

— Maggie Stiefvater

#maggie-stiefvater #cruelty

The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice. ↗

— Saul D. Alinsky

#doubt #cruelty

To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#suffering #cruelty