Inner Destruction Quotes

Something’s died in me,” she goes. “It took a long time for it to do it, but it’s dead. You’ve killed something, just like you’d took an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.

… knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul

Everything is destroyed by its own particular vice: the destructive power resides within. Rust destroys iron, moths destroy clothes, the worm eats away the wood; but greatest of all evils is envy, impious habitant of corrupt souls, which ever was, is, and shall be a consuming disease.

Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before - it takes something from him.

The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of contemporary violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activity neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

The curse of covetousness is that it destroys manhood by substituting money for character.

But souls can't be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.

Sin is its own punishment, devouring you from the inside.

I believe in evil, but all my life I've gone back and forth about whether or not there's an outside evil, whether or not there's a force in the world that really wants to destroy us, from the inside out, individually and collectively.

...women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps...they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.

Go straight for souls, and go for the worst.

The real end of the world is the destruction of the spirit; the other kind depends on the insignificant attempt to see whether after such a destruction the world can go on.

What will break me into a million pieces so that I am beyond repair, beyond usefulness?

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow field, just as well as under a pile of money.

Hatred is the spiritual malignancy of our species, and like any other form of cancer, does its most terrible work not outwardly, but from within us.

There is peace more destructive of the manhood of living man than war is destructive of his material body.

Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater. Keep your thoughts free from hate, and you need have no fear from those who hate you.

Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

Un-forgiveness is like cancer; it eats you from the inside out.

For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

The money turned me into a monster

Miraculously, smoke curled out of his own mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes, as if his soul had been extinguished within his lungs at the very moment the sweet pumpkin gave up its incensed ghost.

Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside