Quotes About Powerlessness

Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can't even cry.

The potency of myth is that it allows us to make sense of mayhem and violent death. It gives a justification to what is often nothing more than gross human cruelty and stupidity. It allows us to believe we have achieved our place in human society because of a long chain of heroic endeavors, rather than accept the sad reality that we stumble along a dimly lit corridor of disasters. It disguises our powerlessness.

It spins. The world changes. It turns. Each time it touches the sun and the moon… it takes a new shape. The one thing that does not change… …is my powerlessness. It's turning. If fate is a millstone… …then we are the grist. There is nothing we can do. So I wish for strength. If I cannot protect them from the wheel… …then give me a strong blade… …and enough strength… …to shatter fate.

We can't change things, you and I. We sit up here all day, under a bad sun, but we can't stop the weather turning. We make our piles of earth and they become graves around us. Nothing's as important as it seems.

Thus, after so many years, I feel I have found the solution to the only real problem we have on earth. I have recognized my powerlessness and this was grace. In faith, hope and love I have contemplated the all-power-fulness of God and this, too, was grace. God can do everything and I can do nothing. But if I offer this nothing in prayer to God, everything becomes possible in me.

Every means has proved powerless, every path too short. God's impenetrable night wraps round us. Terrible loneliness accompanies us, but this is necessary and inevitable. Every word of consolation seems like a lie. One believes one has been abandoned by God.

Their failure is just another expression of their helplessness

In retreating we cling to simplicity (recognition and acceptance of being powerless), sincerity, and serenity, and to the power of truth to correct the situation. Thus, we retain our inner independence, preserve the power of our personality, and are able to go on our way without any loss of self.

No one looked at him. No one spoke to him. No one paid him any mind. He was surrounded by men sworn to House Lannister, a vast host twenty thousand strong, and yet he was alone.

In our wholly factitious society, to have no cash at all means frightful want or absolute powerlessness.

All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse's pudgy face.

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

Quero vê-lo morto, mas ele já está morto - Roarke fletiu os nós dos dedos doridos. - Por isso não posso fazer nada. E ainda assim, quero enfiar-lhe os punhos na cara; queria ter-lhe arrancado o coração do peito antes mesmo de ele ter encostado um dedo em ti. Daria tudo o que tenho se o pudesse fazer. Mas em vez disso, não posso fazer nada.

His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face.

Non è stupro, non proprio, ma un atto indesiderato, profondamente indesiderato. Come se Melanie avesse deciso di lasciarsi andare, di morire dentro di sé per la durata del coito, come un coniglio quando le mascelle della volpe si chiudono sul suo collo. In modo che tutto ciò che le viene fatto avvenga, in un certo senso, lontano da lei.

There was no tracking the precise words, but there probably weren't any. Sometimes language couldn't go far enough. All you could do was scream.

Bullying made me feel insecure, alone, ugly, powerless, and hopeless at times.

The kind of Iraq that emerges from all of this is ultimately out of our hands.

It's not always easy to stand aside and be unable to do anything except record the sufferings around one.

There is a central flaw in contemporary culture and a corresponding and related inability to address it. Society seems somehow unable to adequately help or protect itself. Normal citizens feel powerless, isolated and disturbed.

One of the frustrations of prison life, which is also one of its intended consequences, is that the prisoner is made ineffective. He is unable to be of much use. The aim is to render him powerless.

The majority of us cannot see beyond a few years, just as some animals cannot see beyond a few steps. Just a little narrow circle — that is our world. We have not the patience to look beyond, and thus become immoral and wicked. This is our weakness, our powerlessness.

I used to think I sewed us together at the edges with my own hands, pulled the stitches tight and I could unpick them any time I wanted. Now I think it always ran deeper than that and farther, underground; out of sight and way beyond my control.

They've had it spelled out a dozen times, in cringey classes, in cringey parent talks: when to tell an adult. The idea never comes near any of their minds. This thing opening in front of them is nothing to do with those careful speeches. This mix of roaring rage and a shame that stains every cell, this crawling understanding that now their bodies belong to other people's eyes and hands, not to them: this is something new.