Inability Quotes - Page 9

• The disappearance of theology from the life of the Church, and the orchestration of that disappearance by some of its leaders, is hard to miss today, but oddly enough, not easy to prove. It is hard to miss in the evangelical world--in the vacuous worship that is so prevalent, for example, in the shift form God to the self as the central focus of faith, in the psychologized preaching that follows this shift, in the erosion of its conviction, in its strident pragmatism, in its inability to think incisively about the culture, in its reveling in the irrational.

  David F. Wells

  Thinking, Erosion, Self

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• He was welcome everywhere he went, and was well-aware of his inability to tolerate solitude. He felt no inclination to be alone and avoided it as far as possible; he didn't really want to become any better acquainted with himself. He knew that if he wanted to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box.

  Stefan Zweig

  Lying, Heart, Flames

  Stefan Zweig (2008). “Burning Secret”, p.7, Pushkin Press

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• Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.

  Samuel Beckett

  Use It Or Lose It, Solitude, Three Things

  Samuel Beckett (2009). “Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable”, p.389, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• She was trying to say something else; she was trying to say that the inability to articulate what one feels in any satisfactory way is one of our enduring tragedies. It wouldn't have been much, and it wouldn't have been useful, but it would have been something that reflected the gravity and the sadness inside her. Instead, she had snapped at him for being a loser. It was as if she were trying to find a handhold on the boulder of her feelings, and had merely ended up with grit under her nails.

  Nick Hornby

  Sadness, Feelings, Tragedy

  Nick Hornby (2009). “Juliet, Naked”, p.224, Penguin UK

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• I don't think Harry cares about being forgiven," Poppy said glumly. "Of course he does. Men love to be forgiven. It makes us feel better about our inability to learn from our mistakes.

  Lisa Kleypas

  Mistake, Feel Better, Men

  Lisa Kleypas (2009). “Tempt Me at Twilight”, p.256, Macmillan

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• Cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human mind. They realize...that we have an infuriating inability to understand, let alone follow, even the simplest and most explicit of directions.

  Cleveland Amory

  Cat, Mind, Realizing

  Cleveland Amory (2002). “The cat who came for Christmas ; The cat and the curmudgeon ; The best cat ever”

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• It's why I get miffed at all the dashing around in recent zombie films. It completely misses the point; transforms the threat to a straightforward physical danger from the zombies themselves, rather than our own inability to avoid them and these films are about us, not them. There's far more meat on the bones of the latter, far more juicy interpretation to get our teeth into. The first zombie is by comparison thin and one dimensional and ironically, it is down to all the exercise.

  Simon Pegg

  Exercise, Missing, Zombie

  "Nerd Do Well". Book by Simon Pegg, www.wired.com. 2010.

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• Envy and jealousy stem from the fundamental inability to rejoice at someone else's happiness or success

  Matthieu Ricard

  Buddhism, Envy, Suffering

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• You can drive.” When he raised an eyebrow, she said, "I've had enough contact with human males to realize you seem to have a congenital inability to function while a female is at the wheel, and I'd rather your full attention be on the case.

  Nalini Singh

  Eyebrows, Car, Wheels

  Nalini Singh (2012). “Nalini Singh: The Psy-Changeling Series”, p.733, Penguin

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• But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is kind of meaningless), I'm going to blame John Cusack.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Relationship, Fall, Mind Blowing

  Chuck Klosterman (2004). “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto”, p.2, Simon and Schuster

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• He's seeing my soul, my fears, my fragility, my inability to deal with a world which i pretend to master, but about which I know nothing

  Paulo Coelho

  Soul, Fragility, World

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• That [American exceptionalism] is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  Issues, People, Anxiety

  "Spokespersons of US Right 'In Most Cases Stunningly Ignorant'". Interview with Gregor Peter Schmitz, www.spiegel.de. December 6, 2010.

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• All mankind's troubles are caused by one single thing, which is their inability to sit quietly.

  Blaise Pascal

  Life, Trouble, Mankind

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• Part of the problem with the word 'disabilities' is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can't feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren't able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.

  Fred Rogers

  Relationship, Strong, Disappointment

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• I am pissed off at your insensitive inability to understand why I'm pissed off in the first place.

  Ai Yazawa

  Pissed Off, Firsts, Insensitive

  "Fictional character: Nana "Hachiko" Komatsu". "Nana", 2000.

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• A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children. They inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism.

  Eric Hoffer

  Children, Lying, Integrity

  Eric Hoffer (1980). “The True Believer”

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• The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Imagination, Design, Fossils

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• The main cause of my difficulties stemmed from the tragedy of my daughter's unsound birth and my inability to face my feelings.

  Gene Tierney

  Daughter, Mother, Feelings

  Gene Tierney, Mickey Herskowitz (1979). “Self-portrait”, Peter Wyden

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• Through neglect, ignorance, or inability, the new intellectual Borgias cram hairballs down our throats and refuse us the convulsion that could make us well. They have forgotten, if they ever knew, the ancient knowledge that only by being truly sick can one regain health. Even beasts know when it is good and proper to throw up. Teach me how to be sick then, in the right time and place, so that I may again walk in the fields and with the wise and smiling dogs know enough to chew sweet grass.

  Ray Bradbury

  Wise, Dog, Sweet

  Ray Bradbury (1991). “On stage: a chrestomathy of his plays”, Plume

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• I have since learned that the most mature believer is the one who is bent over, leaning most heavily on the Lord, and admitting his total inability to do anything without Christ. The greatest Christian is not the one who has achieved the most but rather the one who has received the most.

  Jim Cymbala

  Christian, Admitting, Mature

  Jim Cymbala, Dean Merrill (1999). “Fresh Faith: What Happens When Real Faith Ignites God's People”, p.45, Zondervan

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• The source of my difficulties has always been the same: an inability to accept what to others seems natural, and an irresistible tendency to voice opinions no one wants to hear . . .

  Isabel Allende

  Voice, Want, Opinion

  Isabel Allende (2003). “My invented country: a memoir”, HarperPerennial

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• The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set. . . . We become missionaries for a position . . . practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Creativity, Diversity, Making Love

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• She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

  Jane Austen

  Ignorance, Vanity, Knowing

  'Northanger Abbey' (1818) ch. 14

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• The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Positive, Ignorance, Knowledge

  The Call of Cthulhu ch. 1 (1928)

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• Why is geometry often described as cold and dry? One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline or a tree.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Nature, Lying, Science

  "Benoît Mandelbrot obituary' by Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, www.theguardian.com. October 17, 2010.

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