Quotes About Powerlessness

His entire life had been a futile effort to stop a storm by yelling at it. The storm didn't care.

Powerlessness is dangerous. For most of us, the inability to effect change is a desperate feeling. We need resilience and hope and a spirit that can carry us through the doubt and fear. We need to believe that we can effect change if we want to live and love with our whole hearts.

Anguish is an almost unbearable and traumatic swirl of shock, incredulity, grief, and powerlessness. Shock and incredulity can take our breath away, and grief and powerlessness often come for our hearts and our minds. But anguish, the combination of these experiences, not only takes away our ability to breathe, feel, and think—it comes for our bones.

We believe that the most terrifying and destructive feeling that a person can experience is psychological isolation. This is not the same as being alone. It is a feeling that one is locked out of the possibility of human connection and of being powerless to change the situation. In the extreme, psychological isolation can lead to a sense of hopelessness and desperation. People will do almost anything to escape this combination of condemned isolation and powerlessness.

The element of powerlessness is what makes anguish traumatic.

The connection between failure and powerlessness is important, because all of my years of research lead me to argue that we are most dangerous to ourselves and to the people around us when we feel powerless. Powerlessness leads to fear and desperation. Look behind an act of violence, from bullying to terrorism, and you will often find a frantic attempt to escape powerlessness.

schadenfreude is also born out of fear, powerlessness, and/or a sense of deservedness.

Larry Hein, who wrote the blessing: May all your expectations be frustrated, may all your plans be thwarted, may all your desires be withered into nothingness, that you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God who is Father, Son, and Spirit

Finally, my old and now retired spiritual director, Larry Hein, who wrote this blessing—"May all your expectations be frustrated, may all your plans be thwarted, may all your desires be withered into nothingness, that you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God, who is Father, Son, and Spirit"— has come up with another one:

Jesus' whole life and mission involve accepting powerlessness and revealing in this powerlessness the limitlessness of God's love.

The whole world seemed to unroll like a pornographic film whose tragic theme is impotence.

It is an old story But one that can still be told About a man who loved And lost a friend to death And learned he lacked the power To bring him back to life. It is the story of Gilgamesh And his friend Enkidu.

One of the things that you have trouble with politicians, particularly in Washington, is when you get mad at them and you can't touch them; you can't punch them; you can't yell at them.

If a patient wants to live, doctors are impotent.

For the sake of God, boy, let go of all this obsessive worry and fretting. You are powerless over such a mess." (Quote from Father Bede)

The cancer is something completely out of my control, but the fear, I realized, is not.

Can anything be imagined so ridiculous, that this miserable and wretched creature [man], who is not so much as master of himself, but subject to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less to command the whole?

He who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall.

Az igazi jóság csak olyasvalaki iránt nyivlánulhat meg kristáltisztán és szabadon, aki semmiféle erÅ't nem képvisel. Az emberiség legalapvetÅ'bb, igazi erkölcsi próbaköve, a viszonya azokhoz, akik ki vannak neki szolgáltatva: az állatokhoz. S itt vallott az ember végzetes kudarcot, annyira végzeteset, hogy az összes többi ebbÅ'l fakadt.

A man may fight the greatest enemy, take the longest journey, survive the most grievous wound -- and still be helpless in the hands of the woman he loves.

Jean Baker Miller pointed out that the so-called need to control and dominate others is psychologically a function, not of a feeling of power, but of a feeling of powerlessness. Distinguishing between power for oneself and power over others, she writes: In a basic sense, the greater the development of each individual the more able, more effective, and less needy of limiting or restricting others she or he will be.

They slept because they were exhausted and weak and because most human beings can learn to endure almost anything, even the cries of the tormented. It was not that their hearts had hardened; it was because they could do nothing about it, and powerlessness leads to its own form of serenity.

We are very afraid of being powerless. But we have the power to look deeply at our fears, and then fear cannot control us.

I lay there, no longer fighting, since my head was spinning too much. And because I wasn't going to win anyway. And because I kind of liked the feeling of sensual captivity, at least by this particular jailer.