brittleness Quotes

No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.

A tree that is unbending, is easily broken.

Weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.

The stubbornest of wills Are soonest bended, as the hardest iron, O'er-heated in the fire to brittleness,Flies soonest into fragments, shivered through.

There is so much fragility in kissing, in other people: It is all glass.

Expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack.

I find at moments I'm as fragile as glass.

Pull a string, a puppet moves ... each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly: the cat, the woman, the job, the front tire, the bed, the walls, the room; all our necessities including love, rest on foundations of sand - and any given cause, no matter how unrelated: the death of a boy in Hong Kong or a blizzard in Omaha ... can serve as your undoing. all your chinaware crashing to the kitchen floor, your girl will enter and you'll be standing, drunk, in the center of it and she'll ask: my god, what's the matter? and you'll answer: I don't know, I don't know.

We would make our heroes shallow.... We would make them brittle. It is they who must remind us of the true meaning of strength.

This earthly existence of ours is more brittle that the glass bangles that ladies wear.

An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile.

The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.

Lately, the world felt fragile, like a blown egg, as if it might shatter beneath a careless touch.

Sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove.

Civilization sails prettily like a child's rubber balloon until it hits a sharp object; then it is likely to collapse like the balloon.

Caught between glass and wood, that which breaks and that which bends, that which sings and that which survive. So our lives go.

There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the [the enemy] had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.

The idea of sustainability can imply there is one perfect, unchanging future, if only we could work out how to get there. Resilience might be more useful, in that it assumes a dynamic environment and that perfection is impossible. You need to design systems to accommodate failure rather than eliminate it. By trying to be perfect, many visions of sustainability are quite brittle

That religious earnestness forever tends toward fright and hence towards brittleness and inquisition is clear enough in mythology and history.

We like to think of industrialization as being despicable. I don't really know what to make of it. There's something terribly brittle about it.

Men are born soft and supple; dead, they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail.

Everything had shattered. The fact that it was all still there — the walls and the chairs and the children’s pictures on the walls — meant nothing. Every atom of it had been blasted apart and reconstituted in an instant, and its appearance of permanence and solidity was laughable; it would dissolve at a touch, for everything was suddenly tissue-thin and friable.

If your head is made of wax, don't walk in the sun

Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.

Everything here is so weak, little girl. Everything breaks so easily. They want such simple things.