Inspirational Quotes on Heartlessness

“You must know,’ said Estella, condescending to me as a beautiful and brilliant woman might, ‘that I have no heart—if that has anything to do with my memory.’ I got through some jargon to the effect that I took the liberty of doubting that. That I knew better. That there could be no such beauty without it. ‘Oh! I have a heart to be stabbed in or shot in, I have no doubt,’ said Estella, ‘and, of course, if it ceased to beat I should cease to be. But you know what I mean. I have no softness there, no—sympathy—sentiment—nonsense.’ … ‘I am serious,’ said Estella, not so much with a frown (for her brow was smooth) as with a darkening of her face; ‘If we are to be thrown much together, you had better believe it at once. No!’ imperiously stopping me as I opened my lips. ‘I have not bestowed my tenderness anywhere. I have never had any such thing.”

“The Eugenic optimism seems to partake generally of the nature of that dazzled and confused confidence, so common in private theatricals, that it will be all right on the night. They have all the ancient despotism, but none of the ancient dogmatism. If they are ready to reproduce the secrecies and cruelties of the Inquisition, at least we cannot accuse them of offending us with any of that close and complicated thought, that arid and exact logic which narrowed the minds of the Middle Ages; they have discovered how to combine the hardening of the heart with a sympathetic softening of the head.”