#tenderness

As she stooped over him, her tears fell upon his forehead. The boy stirred, and smiled in his sleep, as though these marks of pity and compassion had awakened some pleasant dream of a love and affection he had never known; as a strain of gentle music, or the rippling of water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or even the mention of a familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim remembrances of scenes that never were, in this life; which vanish like a breath; and which some brief memory of a happier existence, long gone by, would seem to have awakened, for no voluntary exertion of the mind can ever recall them. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#memory #tenderness #dreams

I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out. ↗

— Ethel Waters

#desperately #handing #i #me #out

I understand by this passion the union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, which is inflamed by a single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which seeks her possession as the supreme or the sole happiness of our being. ↗

— Edward Gibbon

#desire #female #friendship #happiness #her

Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table. ↗

— Alfred Hitchcock

#domestic #exquisite #homey #kitchen #kitchen table

A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#arms #children #made #mother #sleep

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return. ↗

— George Eliot

#ease #ill #indifference #love #return

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them. ↗

— H. L. Mencken

#always #begins #bunch #first #first love

We win by tenderness. We conquer by forgiveness. ↗

— Frederick William Robertson

#forgiveness #tenderness #win

There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise. ↗

— William James

#between #companionship #joyousness #life #need

My dad's a beautiful man, but like a lot of Mexican men, or men in general, a lot of men have a problem with the balance of masculinity and femininity - intuition and compassion and tenderness - and get overboard with the macho thing. It took him a while to become more, I would say, conscious, evolved. ↗

— Carlos Santana

#beautiful #become #compassion #conscious #dad