Browsing Topic Best Severity Quotes

Men in excess of happiness or misery are equally inclined to severity. Witness conquerors and monks! It is mediocrity alone, and a mixture of prosperous and adverse fortune that inspire us with lenity and pity.

A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest – but if devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

God’s justice stands forever against the sinner in utter severity. The vague and tenuous hope that God is ‘too kind’ to punish the ungodly has become deadly opiate for the consciences of millions. It hushes their fears and allows them to practice all pleasant forms of iniquity while death draws everyday nearer and the command to repent goes unregarded. As responsible moral beings, we dare not so trifle with our eternal future.

Many people think that virtue consists of severity towards others.

I thought I could not breathe in that fine air That pure severity of perfect light I yearned for warmth and colour which I found In Lancelot.

For decades, I thought that scientific truth, solid economic case studies, and common sense were enough to bring about change on the environmental front. After all, the data is so compelling! I thought that if people just understood the severity of today’s environmental threats and knew about available solutions, those solutions would happen. Not so.

If, on a rare occasion, it is necessary to speak with some severity in order to make a grievous crime felt, we should always, at the conclusion of the rebuke, add some kind words. We must heal wounds, as the Samaritan did, with wine and oil. But as oil floats above all other liquors, so meekness should predominate in all our actions.

Nothing comes of severity if there be no leanings towards a change of heart. And if there be natural leanings towards a change of heart, what need for severity?

The science linking the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather to the climate crisis has matured tremendously in the last couple of years.

Never lose your self-respect, nor be too familiar with yourself when you are alone. Let your integrity itself be your own standard of rectitude, and be more indebted to the severity of your own judgment of yourself than to all external percepts. Desist from unseemly conduct, rather out of respect for your own virtue than for the strictures of external authority.

The economic repercussions of a stock market crash depend less on the severity of the crash itself than on the response of economic policymakers, particularly central bankers.

From the social cognitive perspective, it is mainly perceived inefficacy to cope with potentially aversive events that makes them fearsome. To the extent that people believe they can prevent, terminate, or lessen the severity of aversive events, they have little reason to be perturbed by them. But if they believe they are unable to manage threats safely, they have much cause for apprehension.

Charisma is the numinous aura around a narcissistic personality. It flows outward from a simplicity or unity of being and a composure and controlled vitality. There is gracious accommodation, yet commanding impersonality. Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self love.

Crimes are more effectually prevented by the certainty than the severity of punishment

Would you not be happier if you tried to forget her severity, together with the passionate emotions it excited? Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Every time I get injured I measure it’s severity by asking myself ‘Would this stop me from going to Disneyland?’

Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual severity.

Scientists have been warning about global warming for decades. It’s too late to stop it now, but we can lessen its severity and impacts.

If you take every challenge everyone has in their life and multiply it in severity you get what it’s like in the life of an actor.

No matter the severity of suffering we experience in this life, it will always be less that what we have deserved for our sins

We deny the severity of our loved one’s problem not because we are naive, but because we can’t know.

Such was the unhappy condition of the Roman emperors, that, whatever might be their conduct, their fate was commonly the same. A life of pleasure or virtue, of severity or mildness, of indolence or glory, alike led to an untimely grave; and almost every reign is closed by the same disgusting repetition of treason and murder.

It was a grey day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in mocking laughter by the light of the moon. The trees and clouds were carved in classical severity; the sounds of the countryside had harmonized to a monotone, metallic as a trumpet, breathless as the Grecian urn.

Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation – but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?

. . . gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.

Ridicule is often employed with more power and success than severity.

The noble man honours in himself the powerful one, him also who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and how to keep silence, who takes pleasure in subjecting himself to severity and hardness, and has reverence for all that is severe and hard.

The severity of your problems is a matter of perspective. Change your perspective and most of them become insignificant. Some of them will no longer exist as problems – but opportunities instead.

The chaste severity of the fathers in whatever related to the commerce of the two sexes flowed from the same principle — their abhorrence of every enjoyment which might gratify the sensual and degrade the spiritual nature of man. It was their favourite opinion, that if Adam had preserved his obedience to the Creator, he would have lived for ever in a state of virgin purity, and that some harmless mode of vegetation might have peopled paradise with a race of innocent and immortal beings.

The war against Russia is an important chapter in the German nation’s struggle for existence. […] The objective of this battle must be the demolition of present-day Russia and must therefore be conducted with unprecedented severity. Every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron resolution to exterminate the enemy remorselessly and totally. In particular, no adherents of the contemporary Russian Bolshevik system are to be spared.

The severity of penalties is only a vain resource, invented by little minds in order to substitute terror for that respect which they have no means of obtaining.

Ridicule often cuts the knot, where severity fails.

No severity of punishment deters when detection is uncertain, as it always must be.

The severity of the law of God is the necessary sequence of his infinite love.