Quotes About Resistance

There are girls, but they baffle him. They pretend to be stupid, by way of protective coloration. Passive, still, and cryptic. They say the opposite of what they mean, to test if you can see through them. Which they want. Then resent when you do.

People mean to drag her violently back into what people mistakenly call the world.

but no one could control Mark Littleberry; the man was fundamentally uncontrollable.

Alternating current had a massive advantage over direct current: it could be transformed easily into a higher or lower voltage. Voltage, like water pressure, moves electric charge. Amperage, like water volume, delivers more charge. The two qualities interact inversely. Stepping up voltage reduces amperage. Stepping up voltage allows alternating current to flow on wires of smaller diameter without encountering as much energy-sapping resistance.

Unlike the Stockton & Darlington, which had won through the parliamentary authorization process with little difficulty, the Liverpool & Manchester encountered fierce resistance from canal owners, stagecoach operators, turnpike trusts, and innkeepers who had come to understand that railway competition was likely to be fatal to their businesses and investments. Nor did the landed gentry whose wayleave the new railway needed to acquire want any part of so noisy and smoky a fire hazard.

The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo – even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future.

We all become well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. Most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot.

We all remain who we are. But on the way to healing or liberation we have to do what the Romans called agere contra: we have to act against the grain of our natural compulsions. This requires clear decisions. Because it does not happen by itself, it is in a way unnatural or supernatural . . . (we) simply have to cut loose now and then, and in the process . . . make mistakes.

If you try to assert wisdom before people have themselves walked it, be prepared for much resistance, denial, push-back, and verbal debate.

What the ego (the False Self) hates and fears more than anything else is change. It will think up a thousand other things to be concerned about or be moralistic about—anything rather than giving up "who I think I am" and "who I need to be to look good.

Grace is just the natural loving flow of things when we allow it, instead of resisting it. Sin is any cutting or limiting of that circuit.

Without law in some form, and, also, without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily or naturally. We have to have something hard and half-good to rebel against.

The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling or changing or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo, even when it is not working. It attaches to past and present, and fears the future.

I would ask you to consider the crucifix as a homeopathic image, like those medicines that give you just enough of the disease so you could develop a resistance and be healed from it. The cross dramatically reveals the problem of ignorant killing, to inoculate us against doing the same thing.

The reason we do anything one more time is because the last time did not really satisfy us deeply. As English poet W.H. Auden put it in "Apropos of Many Things": "We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.

This resistance to change is so common, in fact, that it is almost what we expect from religious people, who tend to love the past more than the future or the present.

Christ can hold together everything. In fact, Christ already does this; it is we who resist such wholeness, as if we enjoy our arguments and our divisions into parts.

You fight things only when you are directly called and equipped to do so. We all become a well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. You lose all your inner freedom.

people cling to folly as if it were their most prized possession, defending it, sometimes with violence, against the possibility of wisdom. It

You're falling now. You're swimming. This is not harmless. You are not breathing.

This is crazy, he said. You don't just shoot people. Yes I do, Parker said.

You can't make me do nothing but die!

Held at bay by the hate of others, preoccupied with his own feelings, he was continuously at war with reality.

He was not concerned with whether these acts were right or wrong; they simply appealed to him as possible avenues of escape. He felt that some day there would be a black man who would whip the black people into a tight band and together they would act and end fear