Inadequacy Quotes - Page 6

• The prospect of future lives in remote heavens as a compensation for the inadequacy of our present lives is a bad tradeoff for losing out on the present.

  Francis Harold Cook

  Heaven, Losing, Life Is

  Francis Harold Cook (1978). “How to Raise an Ox: Zen Practice as Taught in Zen Master Dogen's Shobogenzo, Including Ten Newly Translated Essays”

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• Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by 'tolerantly amused eyes' was years away from me. I don't think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understood, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

  Doris Lessing

  Attitude, Confused, Eye

  "The Golden Notebook". Book by Doris Lessing, www.theguardian.com. 1962.

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• Some have said that I can accept inadequacies in my players but not in umpires. That completely misses the point. I can't tolerate anyone's mistake.

  Earl Weaver

  Mistake, Player, Umpires

  Earl Weaver, Terry Pluto (1984). “Weaver on Strategy”, Macmillan Publishing Company

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• It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.

  Eric Hoffer

  Spring, Winning, Power

  "The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms". Book by Eric Hoffer. Section 42, 1955.

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• My ex—may he soon discover tiny worms have invaded his body and are slowly eating him alive—once told me God made men so perfect because He'd wanted to make up for the inadequacies of women.

  Gena Showalter

  Men, Perfect, Alive

  Gena Showalter (2012). “Animal Instincts”, p.118, Harlequin

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• Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself — these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.

  Susan Sontag

  Names, Feelings, Want

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• I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Thinking, Facts, Belief

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• The real value of tests is not that they detect bugs in the code but that they detect inadequacies in the methods, concentration, and skills of those who design and produce the code.

  Tony Hoare

  Real, Skills, Design

  "How Did Software Get So Reliable Without Proof?". Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol. 1051, 1996 pp. 1-17: FME '96: Industrial Benefit and Advances in Formal Methods, Third International Symposium of Formal Methods Europe, Co-Sponsored by IFIP WG 14.3, Oxford, UK, March 18 - 22, 1996. Proceedings, March 6, 1996.

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• It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution.

  Ken Thompson

  Criminals, Serious, Hackers

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• Therein lies the social significance of art: It is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is more lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious, which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. The artist seizes on this image and, in raising it from deepest unconsciousness, he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers.

  Carl Jung

  Art, Lying, Mind

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• Say what we may of the inadequacy of translation, yet the work is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest undertakings in the general concerns of the world.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  World, May, Concern

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• However, in recent years our nation has seen a sizable influx of illegal immigration that at best highlights some alarming inadequacies and at worst indicates a broken system.

  Spencer Bachus

  Broken Heart, Years, Immigration

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• Mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy are common during the first year of any marriage.

  James Thurber

  Years, Firsts, Common

  James Thurber (1996). “James Thurber: Writings & Drawings (including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)”, p.37, Library of America

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• To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy to this I have found is to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own—a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art.

  Francine Prose

  Art, Light, Differences

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• All each ism does, in its revolt against the inadequacy of the previous one, is to thoroughly upset the order of terms of this ideal entity and to bring to the fore yet another inadequacy.

  Jean Helion

  Order, Upset, Doe

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• The life we live today - the environment in which we live - is not one of security - it's one of doubt, one of suspicion, one of absolute tension - we're not a pastoral society any more. We feel around us the pressure of man's inadequacy to control his own development. The time when the great forces of nature, the stones and the rocks, were the gods, is gone.

  Reg Butler

  Men, Rocks, Doubt

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• Politics, as I never tire of saying, is for social and emotional misfits, handicapped folk, those with a grudge. The purpose of politics is to help them overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power.

  Auberon Waugh

  Emotional, Feelings, Overcoming

  Auberon Waugh (1986). “Another Voice: An Alternative Anatomy of Britain”

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• In their quest for power and self-importance, to compensate for whatever feelings of social inadequacy or sexual insecurity, they (Politicians)are prepared to perpetrate something which is hard to distinguish from mass murder if they think they can get away with it.

  Auberon Waugh

  Thinking, Self, Feelings

  Auberon Waugh (1991). “Will this do?: the first fifty years of Auberon Waugh : an autobiography”, Vintage

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• The glory does not lie in our inadequacy, but lies in the adequacy of Christ discovered in our weakness and in our insufficiency.

  Alistair Begg

  Lying, Weakness, Doe

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• After a foreign invasion, there has to be a sort of feeling of musical inadequacy in the country.

  Simon Le Bon

  Country, Feelings, Musical

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• Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities. Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy. But with self-confidence you can succeed. A sense of inferiority and inadequacy interferes with the attainment of your hopes, but self-confidence leads to self-realization and successful achievement.

  Norman Vincent Peale

  Believe, Humble, Successful

  Dr. Norman Vincent Peale (2003). “The Power of Positive Thinking: 10 Traits for Maximum Results”, p.15, Simon and Schuster

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• It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

  Marianne Williamson

  Confidence, Fear, Light

  A Return to Love ch. 7 (1992). Frequently misattributed to Nelson Mandela.

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• I feel very lucky to have grown up having interaction with adults who were making change but who were far from perfect beings. That feeling of not being paralyzed by your incredible inadequacy as a human being, which I feel every day, is a part of the legacy that I've gotten from so many of the adult elders.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Perfect, Feelings, Adults

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• Never suffer youth to be an excuse for inadequacy, nor age and fame to be an excuse for indolence.

  Benjamin Haydon

  Suffering, Age, Reputation

  Benjamin Robert Haydon, Frederick Wordsworth Haydon (1876). “Correspondence and Table-talk: With a Memoir”, p.467

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• Every painting is a war. You have to struggle every day, and to struggle every day with your inadequacies is a damn nuisance.

  Neil Welliver

  Art, War, Struggle

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