Heartlessness Quotes

“How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless."

"Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them."

"I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“By this curious turn of disposition I have gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness; how undeserved, I alone can appreciate.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“You must know,’ said Estella, condescending to me as a beautiful and brilliant woman might, ‘that I have no heart—if that has anything to do with my memory.’
I got through some jargon to the effect that I took the liberty of doubting that. That I knew better. That there could be no such beauty without it.
‘Oh! I have a heart to be stabbed in or shot in, I have no doubt,’ said Estella, ‘and, of course, if it ceased to beat I should cease to be. But you know what I mean. I have no softness there, no—sympathy—sentiment—nonsense.’
… ‘I am serious,’ said Estella, not so much with a frown (for her brow was smooth) as with a darkening of her face; ‘If we are to be thrown much together, you had better believe it at once. No!’ imperiously stopping me as I opened my lips. ‘I have not bestowed my tenderness anywhere. I have never had any such thing.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Talkativeness and charm are both, as is well-known, characteristics somewhat feminine; and they often add up to guile. Certainly there was a strong streak of the female in Roosevelt, though this is not to disparage his essential masculinity. Confidence in his own charm led him into occasional perilous adventures—almost as a woman may be persuaded with a long series of glittering successes behind her, to think she is irresistible forever and can win anybody's scalp.”
― John Gunther, Roosevelt In Retrospect: A Profile in History

“Charm has an occasional contrary concomitant, heartlessness. The virtuoso is so pleased by the way he produces his effects that he disregards the audience. Once Dorothy Thompson came in to see FDR after a comparatively long period of having been snubbed by the White House—although she had deserted Wilkie for Roosevelt during the campaign just concluded, and as a result had been fired from The New York Herald Tribune, the best job she ever had. Roosevelt greeted her with the remark, "Dorothy, you lost your job, but I kept mine—ha, ha!”
― John Gunther, Roosevelt In Retrospect: A Profile in History

“Mr. Roosevelt liked to be liked. He courted and wooed people. He had good taste, an affable disposition, and profound delight in people and human relationships. This was probably the single most revealing of all his characteristics; it was both a strength and a weakness, and is a clue to much. To want to be liked by everybody does not merely mean amiability; it connotes will to power, for the obvious reason that if the process is carried on long enough and enough people like the person, his power eventually becomes infinite and universal. Conversely, any man with great will to power and sense of historical mission, like Roosevelt, not only likes to be liked; he has to be liked, in order to feed his ego. But FDR went beyond this; he wanted to be liked not only by contemporaries on as broad a scale as possible, but by posterity. This, among others, is one reason for his collector's instinct. He collected himself—for history. He wanted to be spoken of well by succeeding generations, which means that he had the typical great man's wish for immortality, and hence—as we shall see in a subsequent chapter—he preserved everything about himself that might be of the slightest interest to historians. His passion for collecting and cataloguing is also a suggestive indication of his optimism. He was quite content to put absolutely everything on the record, without fear of what the world verdict of history would be.”
― John Gunther, Roosevelt In Retrospect: A Profile in History

“I don't think I am heartless. Do you?'
'You have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight to be entitled to give yourself that name, Dorian,' answered Lord Henry with his sweet melancholy smile.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It amazes me how as beings in an unpredictable world, how we glorify our brothers falling.”
― Xela Ffonrims

“mnY reason of b"kup, but it hurts moRe when you don"t know evN a single-1. ”
― Sumit Ð choudhary c2

“When we deny reason we are prone to holding the rest of the world hostage through the worship of our feelings, thus making feelings no longer sacred and personal and delicate things we can express. Oppositely, this way of life confuses the world and further pushes it to being heartless and unfeeling.”
― Criss Jami

“If you are good hearted, I will never fail to donate my blood to save you and if you are heartless, I will never fail to gift your blood in crucifying you”
― P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

“Some people will rip out your heart with a steak knife then say, “Oops, sorry, do you need a plaster?”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“Lots of people are all cold and heartless. Who do you think works in a prison? Who do you think works on death row? It's a job.”
― Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers

“No matter what you're going through, don't let that be a reason to be heartless to others, because when the damage is done it cannot be reversed.”
― Ojingiri Hannah

“He took the Captain as he was, and was fond of him, with his cheery heartlessness, his incapacity to think beyond a couple of thoughts, for which his skull was far too roomy, his insignificant love affairs and childish infatuations, and the pointless and unconnected remarks that came out of his mouth, seemingly at random. He was a mediocre officer, who didn't care about his comrades, his men, his career.”
― Joseph Roth, The Tale of the 1002nd Night

“The Eugenic optimism seems to partake generally of the nature of that dazzled and confused confidence, so common in private theatricals, that it will be all right on the night. They have all the ancient despotism, but none of the ancient dogmatism. If they are ready to reproduce the secrecies and cruelties of the Inquisition, at least we cannot accuse them of offending us with any of that close and complicated thought, that arid and exact logic which narrowed the minds of the Middle Ages; they have discovered how to combine the hardening of the heart with a sympathetic softening of the head.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“Time sometimes becomes very merciless, heartless -- it switches off the brightness of the eyes that you once loved.”
― Elmar Hussein