Severity Quotes

Our passions may be compared to certain slaves--the more severity we show them, the better they obey us.

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.

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

Many people think that virtue consists of severity towards others.

The severity of the itch is proportional to the reach.

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

A victorious general must know how to employ severity, justness, and mildness by turns, if he would allay sedition or prevent it.

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.

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.

... it is highly unlikely that a structural derangement could produce pain equal in severity to acute muscle spasm.

If you wage war, do it energetically and with severity. This is the only way to make it shorter and consequently less inhuman.

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

All severity that does not tend to increase good, or prevent evil, is idle.

It is pride which fills the world with so much harshness and severity. We are rigorous to offenses as if we had never offended.

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.

Severity is allowable where gentleness has no effect.

Better make penitents by gentleness than hypocrites by severity.

In slave times the Negro was kept subservient and submissive by the frequency and severity of the scourging, but, with freedom, a new system of intimidation came into vogue; the Negro was not only whipped and scourged; he was killed.

Generosity should begin lightly and deepen later, fro when it is first rich and then lessens, people forget the kindness. Authority should begin strictly and loosen up later, for if it is loose first and then strict, people will resent the severity.

The severity of the laws prevents their execution.

Still, it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders' hearth.

Punishments of unreasonable severity, especially where indiscriminately afflicted, have less effect in preventing crimes, and amending the manners of a people, than such as are more merciful in general, yet properly intermixed with due distinctions of severity.

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.

What does the Earth Desire? I will put it in just a few short sentences... To be admired in her loveliness, To be tasted in her delicious fruits, To be listened to in her teaching, To be endured in the severity of her discipline, To be cared for as a maternal source from whence we come, a destiny to which we return. It's very simple.

Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns.

...there seems to be a correlation between the intensity of the official attacks on gold and the severity of monetary crises.

It is worth while too to warn the teacher that undue severity in correcting faults is liable at times to discourage a boy's mind from effort.

That kind of discipline whose pungent severity is in the manifestations of paternal love, compassion, and tenderness is the most sure of its object.

It is better that a judge should lean on the side of compassion than severity.

A great reserve and severity of manners are necessary for the command of those who are older than ourselves.

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

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?

Many and many a person in Georgia asked me why we did not go to South Carolina; and, when I answered that we were en route for that State, the invariable reply was, - Well, if you will make those people feel the utmost severities of war, we will pardon you for your desolation of Georgia.

When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.

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.

One would think that an unsuccessful volume was like a degree in the school of reviewing. One unread work makes the judge bitter enough; but a second failure, and he is quite desperate in his damnation. I do believe one half of the injustice - the severity of 'the ungentle craft' originates in its own want of success: they cannot forgive the popularity which has passed them over.

There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful.

This avoidance of the difficult things of Scripture — of sinfulness and hell and God’s notable severity — is idolatrous and cowardly. If a man or a woman who teaches the Scriptures is afraid to explain to you the severity of God, they have betrayed you, and they love their ego more than they love you.

Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or—and the outward semblance is the same—crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more.

Few men survey themselves with so much severity as not to admit prejudices in their own favour, which an artful flatterer may gradually strengthen, till wishes for a particular qualification are improved to hopes of attainment, and hopes of attainment to belief of possession.

If a close examination of the evidences of Christianity may be expected of one class of men more than another, it would seem incumbent upon lawyers who make the law of evidence one of our peculiar studies. Our profession leads us to explore the mazes of falsehood, to detect its artifices, to pierce its thickest veils, to follow and expose its sophistries, to compare the statements of different witnesses with severity, to discover truth and separate it from error.

I am myself persuaded, on the basis of extensive study of the historical evidence, that... the severity of each of the contractions - 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38 - is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities and would not have occurred under earlier monetary and banking arrangements.

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?

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.

It is better to err by excess of mercy than by excess of severity. . .Wilt thou become a Saint? Be severe to thyself but kind to others.

Ambiguity lurks in generality, and may thus become an instrument of severity.

I become quite inhibited particularly when I do comedy, I won't - there's a whole thing of allowing an audience in and if you - if you cover yourself with a mask of, kind of, severity, which I'm quite good at doing, that's masking fear of course, then people feel shut out.

Excessive severity misses its own aim.

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.

But this inestimable privilege was soon violated: with the knowledge of truth the emperor imbibed the maxims of persecution; and the sects which dissented from the catholic church were afflicted and oppressed by the triumph of Christianity. Constantine easily believed that the heretics, who presumed to dispute his opinions or to oppose his commands, were guilty of the most absurd and criminal obstinacy; and that a seasonable application of moderate severities might save those unhappy men from the danger of an everlasting condemnation.