Passivity Quotes - Page 2

• Communion with God does not imply turning off your mind but turning it on - to be renewed in our minds. We're to love God with all our mind as well as heart. So true communion with God empowers hard work with the Bible, rather than bypassing work in favor of pure passivity.

  Vern Poythress

  Hard Work, Heart, Empowering

  Source: www.biblegateway.com

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• Once a depressed person becomes active and hopeful, self-esteem always improves. Bolstering self-esteem without changing hopelessness, without changing passivity, accomplishes nothing.

  Martin Seligman

  Depression, Self Esteem, Accomplish Nothing

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• Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity, in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead.

  Aldous Huxley

  Soul, Contemplation, Divine

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• Take the so-called standard of living. What do most people mean by "living"? They don’t mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science, in its finite but unbounded wisdom, has succeeded in selling their wives.

  e. e. cummings

  Mean, People, Wife

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• I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

  Julian Barnes

  Years, Littles, Made

  Julian Barnes (2011). “The Sense of an Ending”, p.144, Random House

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• The soul journey inward is when we are invited to cast aside beliefs and behaviors that no longer serve us and release all tendencies toward victimhood, stagnation, passivity, and self-destruction that keep us disempowered or cause frustration and suffering to ourselves and others. This is no easy task, and one in which we can use all the divine support possible to help us on our way. It is a time to pray.

  Sonia Choquette

  Journey, Frustration, Self

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• ...When we quietly go about our business as our rights are plundered, when we yield to passivity and switch on the wii and hand over our power, we are not acting like true Americans. Indeed, at those moments we are giving up our citizenship.

  Naomi Wolf

  Giving Up, Yield, Rights

  Naomi Wolf (2008). “Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries”, p.6, Simon and Schuster

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• Republicans, supposed defenders of limited government, actually are enablers of an unlimited presidency. Their belief in strict construction of the Constitution evaporates, and they become, in behavior if not in thought, adherents of the woolly idea of a 'living Constitution.' They endorse, by their passivity, the idea that new threats justify ignoring the Framers' text and logic about shared responsibility for war-making.

  George Will

  War, Responsibility, Government

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• Inaction, letting be, neither creating nor destroying--that is my evil. And also the knower as one without desire.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Objectivity, Creating, Evil

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• Faith is the very heroism and enterprise of intellect. Faith is not a passivity, but a faculty. Faith is power, the material of effect. Faith is a kind of winged intellect. The great work men of history have been men who believed like giants.

  Charles Henry Parkhurst

  Faith, Men, Heroism

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• You can't make positive choices for the rest of your life without an environment that makes those choices easy, natural, and enjoyable.

  Deepak Chopra

  Positive, Uplifting, Choices

  "The Real Secret to Staying Healthy for Life (Part 1)" by Deepak Chopra, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 30, 2012.

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• One thing that has helped me personally in the past was to stop interfering with the people around me and getting frustrated when I couldn’t change them. Instead of intrusion and passivity, may I suggest submission? Some people make the mistake of confusing “submission” with “weakness”, whereas it is anything but. Submission is a form of peaceful acceptance of the terms of the universe, including the things we are currently unable to change or comprehend.

  Elif Safak

  Mistake, Acceptance, Past

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• Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Description, Subjects, Objects

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• The church of Jesus needs to wake up from the exile of passivity and embrace liminality and adventure or continue to remain a religious ghetto for culturally co-opted, fearful, middle-class folk.

  Alan Hirsch

  Religious, Jesus, Adventure

  Michael Frost, Alan Hirsch (2011). “The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage”, p.92, Baker Books

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• Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.

  Eric Hoffer

  Mean, Power, Men

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• It's not okay for a woman to be in control of her own body, her own reproductive system, much less of her life. There's opposition even to that. So passivity is rewarded as feminine.

  Gloria Steinem

  Passivity Is, Body, Feminine

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bittersweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt and take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.

  Alain de Botton

  Hurt, Giving Up, Pain

  Alain de Botton (2006). “On Love: A Novel”, p.45, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer's passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down.

  James Wolcott

  Reality, One Direction, Passivity Is

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• We are not brought by faith into a realm of passivity, but rather, we are brought into the realm of diligent activity.

  Alistair Begg

  Realms, Activity, Diligent

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• The male dares to be different to the degree that he accepts his passivity and his desire to be female, his fagginess. The farthest out male is the dragqueen, but he, although different from most men, is exactly like all other dragqueens; like the functionalist, he has an identity - a female; he tries to define all his troubles away - but still no individuality. Not completely convinced that he's a woman, highly insecure about being sufficiently female, he conforms compulsively to the man-made feminine stereotype, ending up as nothing but a bundle of stilted mannerisms.

  Valerie Solanas

  Insecure, Men, Individuality

  Valerie Solanas (1971). “SCUM manifesto”

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• Lacan , Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction.

  Camille Paglia

  Self, Perfect, Personality

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Camille Paglia, "Arion", Third Series, Volume 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

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• Do not turn the superior eye of critical passivity upon these efforts .... We must not be ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint-box.

  Winston Churchill

  Eye, Effort, Joy

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• The sooner our society admits that the Negro Revolution is no momentary outburst soon to subside into placid passivity, the easier the future will be for us all.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Our Society, Revolution, Easier

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2011). “Why We Can't Wait”, p.99, Beacon Press

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• Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature.

  Camille Paglia

  May, Reducing, Form

  Camille Paglia (2018). “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism”, p.26, Canongate Books

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• So go marry someone, provided you're equally yoked and you actually like being with each other. Go get a job, provided it's not wicked. Go live somewhere in something with somebody or nobody. But put aside the passivity and the quest for complete fulfillment and the perfectionism and the preoccupation with the future, and for God's sake start making some decisions in your life. Don't wait for the liver-shiver. If you are seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, you will be in God's will, so just go out and do something.

  Kevin DeYoung

  Jobs, Decision, Waiting

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