#tenderness

A man must at times be hard as nails: willing to face up to the truth about himself, and about the woman he loves, refusing compromise when compromise is wrong. But he must also be tender. No weapon will breach the armor of a woman's resentment like tenderness. ↗

— Elisabeth Elliot

#manhood #relationships #tenderness #love

Without tenderness, a man is uninteresting. ↗

— Marlene Dietrich

#tenderness #uninteresting #without

[The] insistence on the absolutely indiscriminate nature of compassion within the Kingdom is the dominant perspective of almost all of Jesus' teaching. What is indiscriminate compassion? 'Take a look at a rose. Is is possible for the rose to say, "I'll offer my fragrance to good people and withhold it from bad people"? Or can you imagine a lamp that withholds its rays from a wicked person who seeks to walk in its light? It could do that only be ceasing to be a lamp. And observe how helplessly and indiscriminately a tree gives its shade to everyone, good and bad, young and old, high and low; to animals and humans and every living creature -- even to the one who seeks to cut it down. This is the first quality of compassion -- its indiscriminate character.' (Anthony DeMello, The Way to Love)... What makes the Kingdom come is heartfelt compassion: a way of tenderness that knows no frontiers, no labels, no compartmentalizing, and no sectarian divisions. ↗

— Brennan Manning

#compassion #faith #jesus #kingdom #light

We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch. ↗

— Anne Enright

#touch #art

I couldn't have foreseen all the good things that have followed my mother's death. The renewed energy, the surprising sweetness of grief. The tenderness I feel for strangers on walkers. The deeper love I have for my siblings and friends. The desire to play the mandolin. The gift of a visitation. ↗

— Mary Schmich

#deeper #desire #energy #feel #followed

Among leaders who have made the greatest impact through ages, I would consider Muhammad before Jesus Christ. ↗

— James Gavin

#atheist #christ #christian #fair #gavin

Tucker strokes my hair. There's something so tender about the gesture. It might as well have been him whispering I love you. ↗

— Cynthia Hand

#hair #love #tenderness #tucker #love

Falling in love was easy-when romantic attraction was combined with hungry, unsated desire, they formed a glamorous, glittering bauble as fragile as it was alluring, a bauble that could shatter as soon as it was grasped. Tenderness was a different story. It had staying power and the promise of a future. ↗

— Robyn Donald

#poetry #tenderness #romantic

Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who'll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you're in the wrong house, that's what it means. ↗

— Henny Youngman

#affection #come #do you know #give #home

As she stooped over him, her tears fell upon his forehead. The boy stirred, and smiled in his sleep, as though these marks of pity and compassion had awakened some pleasant dream of a love and affection he had never known; as a strain of gentle music, or the rippling of water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or even the mention of a familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim remembrances of scenes that never were, in this life; which vanish like a breath; and which some brief memory of a happier existence, long gone by, would seem to have awakened, for no voluntary exertion of the mind can ever recall them. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#memory #tenderness #dreams