Callous Quotes

1. "The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival."
Author: Adrienne Rich

2. "In every Magical, or similar system, it is invariably the first condition which the Aspirant must fulfill: he must once and for all and for ever put his family outside his magical circle.Even the Gospels insist clearly and weightily on this.Christ himself (i.e. whoever is meant by this name in this passage) callously disowns his mother and his brethren (Luke VIII, 19). And he repeatedly makes discipleship contingent on the total renunciation of all family ties. He would not even allow a man to attend his father's funeral!Is the magical tradition less rigid?Not on your life!"
Author: Aleister Crowley

3. "Often neglected in proper society, swearing effectively is an art form most people simply don't appreciate until they have something callous to say and end up making themselves appear the fool. Like a virgin in the sack, a celibate cusser will find himself stumbling around blind in a worthwhile attempt to impress that only serves to bring ridicule down upon them."
Author: Artemas Khan

4. "Baby, in a couple of minutes I'm going to rip off your god damned panties and show you some turkey neck you'll remember all the way to the graveside. I have a vast and curved penis, like a sickle, and many a gutted pussy has gasped come upon my callous and roach-smeared rug. First let me finish this drink."
Author: Charles Bukowski

5. "Writing makes me hard, like a fisherman, and brown from the heat. Tossing out and reeling in is a job for visionaries and those with calloused hands."
Author: Chila Woychik

6. "But this new class seeks to reduce the American working class to the levels of this global serfdom. After all, anything that drains corporate coffers is a loss of freedom--the God-given American freedom to exploit other human beings to make money. The marriage of this gospel of prosperity with raw, global capitalism, and the flaunting of the wealth and privilege it brings, are supposedly blessed and championed by Jesus Christ. Compassion is regulated to private, individual acts of charity or left to the churches. The callousness of the ideology, the notion that it in any way reflects the message of the gospels, which were preoccupied with the poor and the outcasts, illustrates how the new class has twisted Christian scripture to serve America's god of capitalism and discredited the Enlightenment values we once prized."
Author: Chris Hedges

7. "Fuck, babe," Chocolate Eyes said, stepping forward. He grabbed her arm and hauled her to her feet off the tiled floor. "You look like crap...worse, actually." He wiped her tears with the calloused pad of his thumb. "You want to get out of this pisshole or not?"
Author: Cindy Paterson

8. "Who doesn't love 'Frogger?' It draws its power from our shared memories of powerlessness. Wherever we are now, at one time or another we have all felt the poor frog's anxiety in the face of the world's intransigence, its blind and callous disregard for our happiness or well-being."
Author: D. B. Weiss

9. "I looked at our hands, caked and coated in red, but entwined. The pristine moment when they were clasped like that earlier in the day seemed weeks ago."Clean." Peter said."Can I get a water bottle or something to clean his hands?" I scanned the crowd. He drew my attention back to him with a pull of my hand."No," Peter said. "I'm...clean."I had missed who Peter was until that very moment.I had called him names and treated him callously. I had read every micro expression in a vacuum of how it related to Austin Glass. And in return Peter had cared for my wounds, treated me tenderly and assured me that he was HIV negative while bleeding out in a hallway of strangers.I broke. It wasn't a visible fracture. I didn't sob or explode into anguish. I didn't give in to my vomitus urge that came from the burst of self-loathing. But I shattered nonetheless."
Author: Dani Alexander

10. "All the words we use are stripped bare, so that no one ever knows what anyone else is saying, so that all kindness is cruelty, all selfishness generous, all care callous."
Author: David Levithan

11. "I think God is a callous bitch not making me a lesbian. I'm deeply disappointed by my sexual interest in men."
Author: Diamanda Galás

12. "Aye, well, he'll be wed a long time," he said callously. "Do him no harm to keep his breeches on for one night. And they do say that abstinence makes the heart grow firmer, no?""Absence," I said, dodging the spoon for a moment. "AND fonder. If anything's growing firmer from abstinence, it wouldn't be his heart."
Author: Diana Gabaldon

13. "A lady both callous and brashMet a man with a vast black moustache;She cried, 'Shave it, O do!And I'll put it with glueOn my hat as a sort of panache."
Author: Edward Gorey

14. "People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel...but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make."
Author: Eudora Welty

15. "Good gods, you look like cold shit." Ghleanna gazed at her brother and again wondered why she hadn't smashed his bloody egg when she had the chance. Her mother would have eventually forgiven her."Thank you, brother. And you look fat and happy. Having an easy time of it here, are you?" "Fat? Fat?" He speared the moaning human at his feet. "How dare you! My human form is in fighting trim, you callous cow." "If you say so."
Author: G.A. Aiken

16. "I got down to business and started writing furiously. I wore my fingers down to a callous state writing with every Tom, Dick and Harry around the world, including a chap named Charlie who plays for a man named Bob, to wrestle my emotions and bring out the raw grit hiding in my tightly guarded sub-conscious."
Author: Gin Wigmore

17. "If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!"
Author: H.P. Lovecraft

18. "Among sportsmen are the noble, the diligent and the caring, as there are the callous, the cheats and the criminals."
Author: Harsha Bhogle

19. "The very thought of such people's intolerant worldview, their inflated sense of self superiority, and their callous imposition of their own beliefs on others was enough to fill her with rage."
Author: Haruki Murakami

20. "He could never care about you. He sees you in the same way they see all of us: ruthless, cruel and power hungry." He laughed callously. "I guess we're about to prove them right."
Author: Heather James

21. "And what of Nature itself, you say – that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang? Well, it is not so much of an engine as you think. As for "red in tooth and fang," whenever I hear the phrase or its intellectual echoes I know that some passer-by has been getting life from books."
Author: Henry Beston

22. "It enraged and exhausted me to observe how the common daily life callously demanded its due and devoured the abundance of optimism I had brought with me."
Author: Hermann Hesse

23. "Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that, symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn't see my mourning. Callous: all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you think you're listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It's on account of the sounds it is."
Author: James Joyce

24. "I suggest we depict penguins as callous and unfeeling creatures who insist on bringing up their children in what is little more than a large chest freezer."
Author: Jasper Fforde

25. "It is a well-worn truth that cops grow callous, a cliché so tattered that it is even common on television. All cops face things every day that are so gruesome, brutal, and bizarre that no normal human being could deal with them on a daily basis and stay sane. And so they learn not to feel, to grow and maintain a poker-faced whimsy toward all the surprising things their fellow humans find to do to each other. All cops practice not-feeling, and it may be that Miami cops are better at it than others, since they have so many opportunities to learn."
Author: Jeff Lindsay

26. "I'm not this callous clown walking around laughing at life all the time. I've had some serious, serious problems in my life. But I've come out with a smile."
Author: John Lydon

27. "And they had folded his brother's hands across his suited chest, as if he would be preserved in this sanguine pose forever, but only the heavy callouses visible at the sides of his hands seemed real. It was only the callouses that appeared to be familiar and believable."
Author: Kent Haruf

28. "I wasn't afraid to die. But, as odd as it was after our years of fighting, I was afraid to live in a world without Damon. My brother was callous, rude, and destructive. And yet he had saved me on more than one occasion during our time in London. He was the one on whom I could count when no one else could be trusted. He was all I had."
Author: L.J. Smith

29. "Reseph had never been cruel or callous,had lived in fear of succumbing to his evil side. And if he was that bad now that his Seal had been broken… Ares was screwed."
Author: Larissa Ione

30. "Just give me a bit, let me pretend you're still alive," Andrei said hoarsely. "Let me pretend that I don't have to give you up.""Andrei," Warm, calloused hands cupped Anrei's face. "Look at me. I'm real. I'm still with you. A part of me will always be with you. Even after I go through that doorway."
Author: Marguerite Labbe

31. "Trust, trust in the world, because this human being exists - that is the most inward achievement of the relation in education. Because this human being exists, meaninglessness, however hard pressed you are by it, cannot be the real truth. Because this human being exists, in the darkness the light lies hidden, in fear salvation, and in the callousness of one's fellow-men the great Love."
Author: Martin Buber

32. "I am the keeper of the beast, though all men harbor a beast in the depths of their heart -- callous, calamitous creatures, driven by deviant demands and derisive diligence. -- From the short story What Rough Beast"
Author: Michael Hibbard

33. "When someone speaks he looks at a mouth, not eyes and their colors, which, it seems to him, will always alter depending on the light of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any other point on the spectrum of character. For him they are the most intricate aspect of faces. He's never sure what an eye reveals. but he can read how mouths darken into callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge an eye from its reaction to a simple beam of sunlight."
Author: Michael Ondaatje

34. "What are the unreal things, but the passions that once burned one like fire? What are the incredible things, but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things? The things that one has done oneself. No, Ernest; life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet- master. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its train. We come across some noble grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take its place, and on some grey windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver, we find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we had once so wildly worshipped and so madly kissed."
Author: Oscar Wilde

35. "A sentimentalist is one who delights to have high and devout emotions stirred whilst reading in an arm-chair, or in a prayer meeting, but he never translates his emotions into action. Consequently a sentimentalist is usually callous, self-centred and selfish, because the emotions he likes to have stirred do not cost him anything."
Author: Oswald Chambers

36. "He lay on top of me, buried deep, and fell asleep.He slept all night like that, and I did not move him, did not want to. I gasped breath in and out and closed my eyes and thought that I would never forget this feeling, of him on me and in me, of him consuming my soul and letting me go.He was too callous, too far gone to realize that I'd never be free of him, and all he'd really done was set me adrift.I never left that bed.That feeling of helpless abandonment and unendurable longing stayed inside of me, for hours, for minutes, for weeks.For years.I went through my life, through tragedy and pain, through hardship and life, and my heart, my very sould, stayed in that bed.I felt broken after that last encounter.Pieces of me had been shattered on that bed, important, essential pieces, and they would not, could not, ever find their way back together.But I kept going. Life is cruel like that."
Author: R.K. Lilley

37. "Death and its associates, after the initial shock, produce callousness."
Author: R.K. Narayan

38. "Rabbits (says Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss. They have a certain quality which it would not be accurate to describe as callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now. A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass."
Author: Richard Adams

39. "It appears the Kochs are among the most defensive billionaires, preferring the comfy confines of their callous and intellectually dishonest world view."
Author: Robert Greenwald

40. "I had started climbing trees about three years earlier, or rather, re-started; for I had been at a school that had a wood for its playground. We had climbed and christened the different trees (Scorpio, The Major Oak, Pegagsus), and fought for their control in territorial conflicts with elaborate rules and fealties. My father built my brother and me a tree house in our garden, which we had defended successfully against years of pirate attack. In my late twenties, I had begun to climb trees again. Just for the fun of it: no ropes, and no danger either.In the course of my climbing, I learned to discriminate between tree species. I liked the lithe springiness of silver birch, the alder and the young cherry. I avoided pines -- brittle branches, callous bark -- and planes. And I found that the horse chestnut, with its limbless lower trunk and prickly fruit, but also its tremendous canopy, offered the tree-climber both a difficulty and an incentive."
Author: Robert Macfarlane

41. "Every person you meet is waging his or her own war against a callous universe that is plotting against them."
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

42. "But he fails to realize that, by declining the opportunity to define himself, he allows others, less interested, more callous, meaner others, to create definitions for him."
Author: Stephen Dau

43. "I seem to grow more acutely conscious of the swift passage of time as I grow older. When I was small, days and hours were long and spacious, and there was play and acres of leisure, and many children's books to read. I remember that as I was writing a poem on "Snow" when I was eight. I said aloud, "I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now while I'm still little, because when I grow up I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like." And so it is that childlike sensitivity to new experiences and sensations seems to diminish in an inverse proportion to growth of technical ability. As we become polished, so do we become hardened and guilty of accepting eating, sleeping, seeing, and hearing too easily and lazily, without question. We become blunt and callous and blissfully passive as each day adds another drop to the stagnant well of our years."
Author: Sylvia Plath

44. "Hope? Hope is not the absence of tragedy, my friend. It is the conviction that tragedy can be endured. Hope is the spark in you that is not subdued in the face of the vast and callous indifference of the universe. Hope is that which is not shattered by hardship. Hope is the urge to fight what is wrong even when you know it will destroy you. Hope is the decision to love and need someone knowing that they will one day die. For me to promise that there are no obstacles would be the cruelest lie I could possibly tell. That lie is not hope. Hope is the will which needs no lies."
Author: Travis Beacham

45. "The views of the Courts in regard to imprisonment have however undergone modification in the last ten years. Imprisonment is seen more and more as a harsh and drastic punishment to be reserved for callous and impenitent characters. We wish to adopt a more enlightened approach in which the probable effect of incarceration upon the life of the accused person and those near to her is carefully weighed."
Author: V.G. Hiemstra

46. "It being her experience that the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their feelings"
Author: Virginia Woolf

47. "To be in any form, what is that?(round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)If nothing lay more develop'd the quahung in it's callous shell were enough.Mine is no callous shell.I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,they seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and I am happy, to touch my person to someone else's is about as much as I can stand."
Author: Walt Whitman

48. "Tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values. Shakespeare's Henry V—the story of a willful and immature prince who becomes a passionate but sensitive, callous but sentimental, inspiring but flawed king—begins with the exhortation "O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention." For Steve Jobs, the ascent to the brightest heaven of invention begins with a tale of two sets of parents, and of"
Author: Walter Isaacson

49. "In my blood there is no Jewish blood. In their callous rage, all anti-Semites must hate me now as a Jew. For that reason I am a true Russian."
Author: Yevgeny Yevtushenko

50. "His conviction of having no purpose in life other than to act as a distillation of poison was part of the ego of an eighteen-year-old. He had resolved that his beautiful white hands would never be soiled or calloused. He wanted to be like a pennant, dependent on each gusting wind. The only thing that seemed valid to him was to live for the emotions--gratuitous and unstable, dying only to quicken again, dwindling and flaring without direction or purpose."
Author: Yukio Mishima

Callous Quotes Pictures