#cruelty

And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again. ↗

— Orson Scott Card

#death #greed #grief #growing-up #lost

My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#hemingway #sentimentality-cruelty-ideology #men

Cruelty is a part of nature, at least of human nature, but it is the one thing that seems unnatural to us. ↗

— Robinson Jeffers

#human #human nature #least #nature #one thing

I am an optimist because I want to change things for the better and I know that blood has to be spilled and disharmony and cruelty are necessary to do that. ↗

— Henry Rollins

#because #better #blood #change #change things

All cruelty springs from weakness. ↗

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

#springs #weakness

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

It's the worst kind of cruelty — the thoughtless kind. You can't cope with it. ↗

— L.M. Montgomery

#l-m-montgomery #dreams

For Mercy has a human heart; Pity, a human face; And Love, the human form divine: And Peace the human dress. Songs of Innocence Cruelty has a human heart And jealousy a human face, Terror the human form divine, And secrecy the human dress. The human dress is forged iron, The human form a fiery forge, The human face a furnace seal'd, The human heart its hungry gorge. Songs of Experience - This poem was discovered posthumously. ↗

— William Blake

#human-nature #innocence #experience

Why,' I said, quite surprised by my own eloquence in inventing all this stuff, 'it happens every day. The old old story. Boys and girls fall in love, that is, they are driven mad and go blind and deaf and see each other not as human animals with comic noses and bandy legs and voices like frogs, but as angels so full of shining goodness that like hollow turnips with candles put into them, they seem miracles of beauty. And the next minute the candles shoot out sparks and burn their eyes. And they seem to each other like devils, full of spite and cruelty. And they will drive each other mad unless they have grown some imagination. Even enough to laugh. ↗

— Joyce Cary

#beauty #boys #cruelty #devils #girls

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