Quotes About Powerlessness

At the core of every formerly mistreated adult —even high achievers—is a little child who feels powerless and afraid.

How childish lovers can seem - perhaps that is why love is so alarming, it reduces us to children again, little and vulnerable and powerless in a great world we do not understand.

Making a wish is like saying, 'I can't deal with anything, I give up, somebody bigger come along and solve it all instead.

It is a very terrible thing to be far smaller than one's rage.

The real cause of hunger is the powerlessness of the poor to gain access to the resources they need to feed themselves.

Thousands of pastors, Sunday school teachers, and Christian workers are powerless because they do not make the Word the source of their preaching or teaching.

I had a vision with which I might have saved my people, but I had not the strength to do it.

that we humans have little or no influence on the two most important moments of our life. Being born and dying. That felt like the right kind of fuck-you to the universe that a great punk rock song requires.

The moment of surrender is the moment you choose to lose control of your life, the split second of powerlessness where you trust that some kind of "higher power" better be in charge, because you certainly aren't.

Myron was playing Mr. Bureaucrat to the hilt; nothing made a person feel more impotent. There is no darker pit than the blank stare of a bureaucrat.

He was furious. He wouldn't let me bury them. It didn't matter. There was no way to dig up the deckplates. He dried up the snow. He brought the night. He roared and sent locusts. It didn't do a thing; they stayed dead. I'd had him.

I am living in hell from one day to the next. But there is nothing I can do to escape. I don't know where I would go if I did. I feel utterly powerless, and that feeling is my prision. I entered of my own free will, I locked the door, and I threw away the key.

A state of chronic powerlessness eats away at a person

Considering the sense of powerlessness that such a state of affairs would bring about, to have people floating in a pool of mysterious question marks seems like a minor sin.

Simplemente, hazte a la idea, me digo. En este caso, pensar no sirve de nada. Nada de todo esto está en tus manos. Lo veas como lo veas, no puedes resistirte. Se ha decidido en otra parte.

If the boat they were riding in was plunging over the falls upside down, there was nothing to do but fall with it. Tebngo could struggle all he wanted to at this point, and it would do nothing to change the flow of the river.

I'm beginning to feel as though everything has happened before, that our story has already been told. Just as we were powerless to stop the fox stealing the chicken, so there seems to be an inevitability to all that takes place at Mosel. This is a ghost story. And we have somehow become the ghosts of these young men who worked this estate before the Great War. The living are the dead.

My earnestness at the injustices I witnessed when I was writing 'Random Family' may have been my gravest reportorial offense during the early years of reporting. When I discuss the book with students, they often ask me how I could 'stand by' in the face of so much suffering; the egregiousness wasn't my powerlessness but my surprise.

You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.

Let's make the best possible use of our feet first and learn to know ourselves. And yet it seems to me that we will never know ourselves unless we seek to know God. Glimpsing his greatness, we recognize our own powerlessness; gazing upon his purity, we notice where we are impure; pondering his humility, we see how far from humble we are.

Suddenly, you could find yourself trapped and alone, in a situation that was out of control. It was like being trapped in a cage with an angry bear—in fact, the most dangerous part of a tornado was often referred to as the bear's cage. And it could all happen in the blink of an eye. Even so, Tim kept trying to pilot the van closer and closer to the storm.

sie fühlte sich wehrlos seinem Spiel gegenüber, und so unsäglich

Es gehört zur Tragik aller Despoten, daß sie den unabhängigen Menschen selbst dann noch fürchten, wenn sie ihn politisch machtlos und mundtot gemacht haben. Es genügt ihnen nicht, daß er schweigt und schweigen muß. Schon daß er nicht ja sagt, nicht dient und nicht buckelt, daß er sich nicht geschäftig in die Schar ihrer Schmeichler und Diener einreiht, macht sein Vorhandensein, sein Nochvorhandensein für sie zum Ärgernis.

Ninety percent of the population were serfs who could be beaten, killed, transported away from their family, or sold for a gambling debt or as collateral for a loan (a healthy male at the time would fetch between 200 and 500 rubles in the Moscow market; a good-looking young female, several times that).