Emotional Defense Quotes

Arrogance is a way for a person to cover up shame. After years of arrogance, the arrogant person is so out of touch, she truly doesn't know who she is. This is one of the greatest tragedies of shame cover-ups: not only does the person hide from others, she also hides from herself.

It's not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It's like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death's terror. We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.

I think that it is important that one grows a thick skin fast in this business, and I think we have done that.

We judge people in areas where we're vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we're doing.

It is a mistake to think you cant be hurt if you don't care

I'll never harden my heart but I've toughened the muscles around it.

Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.

Guard thy heart on this weak side, where most our nature fails.

If you believe in love, you're setting yourself up to be disappointed.

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.

I won't let you close enough to hurt me.

People say all kinds of hurtful things, but I've learned to tune it out the best I can.

I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work.

Those with the softest hearts build the hardest shells.

When it comes to accepting emotional support or affection, I'm a little guarded and hardened to that.

On one level, I am a total softie, sort of depressed and afraid of losing the people I love or failing them. To disguise that, there's all this harsh, poop-centric, external swagger, full of nastiness. I'm a cloaking device.

I think once you enter the dating world and you realise it's nothing like those Disney movies you watched when you were a little girl, you just become more guarded.

We build our character as a carapace to keep away the fear of the abyss. That's what our character is for.

The enemy is more easily overcome if he be not suffered to enter the door of our hearts, but be resisted without the gate at his first knock.

I have this odd tendency to be really sarcastic when I'm uncomfortable and I don't really know why but it just comes out and it's come out since I was a child.

I try not to hear anything negative about me, and if I do hear it, I try to block it out.

Because of that she had never had enough energy to be herself, a person who, like everyone else in the world, needed other people in order to be happy. But other people were so difficult. They reacted in unpredictable ways, they surrounded themselves with defensive walls, they behaved just as she did, pretending they didn't care about anything. When someone more open to life appeared, they either rejected them outright or made them suffer, consigning them to being inferior, ingenuous.

Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself.

At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.

Don't let anyone see your vulnerable spots. Once they knew how to hurt you, they would do it again and again.