Other sorrows soften the heart, — poverty hardens it. Nothing like poverty for chilling the affections and repressing the spirits. Its annoyances are all of the small and mean order ; its regrets all of a selfish kind ; its presence is perpetual ; and the scant meal, and the grudged fire, are repeated day by day, yet who can become accustomed to them ?

The hearts of the rich are hardened. The existence of the poor is a reproach to them.

The harder the heart is, the more dead is it in sin, and the more unable to exert good affections and acts.

To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

The human heart is greedy; it will use religion, color, or any other excuse to justify its greed. Blame the human heart.

Wealth has an irresistible power, and when a human being enters into the dynamic of gaining more and living better, money replaces the providence of God and demands absolute submission. The heart of the individual trapped by money hardens, he tends to seek only his own interests, he doesn't think of the suffering and needs of others…there is no place for solidarity nor for a God who is a merciful Father and compassionate with all his children.

I am a man with a heart that offends with its lonely and greedy demands.

Now a man will eat his heart, if ever, now while the earth is bare, barren and cheerless, and we have the coldness of winter without the variety of ice and snow; but methinks the variety and compensation are in the stars now. How bright they are now by contrast with the dark earth!

…thirst is harder to bear than hunger, heat, or cold.

The man afflicted by hunger for power or money for its own sake is just that: afflicted. He is tormented by incessant desires for more without cause. He is the most likely to wear a social mask to succeed, and thus he is always unsure of himself and his life, the deep tear inside always causing him to obsess about how to get more, why he doesn't have it already, and whom he will have to please or become in order to get it.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love

Suffering is the decay of the heart, all that we have loved becomes the 'forbidden' when we have not understood it all, as the pauper is the rudiment of a city, knowing something of the city, which the city, for its own destiny, wants to forget. So the lover must got against nature to find love.

My heart's like a wounded beast, clawing me in its death-throes . . . My stomach's a bottomless pit, my mouth a funnel of fire. Hunger and thirst, hunger and thirst . . .

A desolate place, because of the great barrenness that reigns there, causes us to acquire a deadness of heart <to the world>,