Quotes About Powerlessness

We're so far from having any control over what happens to us, it's not even funny. Well, that's not true, actually. It is funny.

In modern states, the citizen is politically impotent. A citizen, it is true, may complain, make suggestions, or cause disruptions, but in the ancient world these were privileges that belonged to any slave.

When external sources of power are sought in personal relationships to overcome inner feelings of powerlessness, power comes not from a place of strength but from a place of weakness. This can only lead to trouble. Using

Trusting God is choosing to act in utter dependence on Him; trying harder is opting to retain control.

We are all hopelessly addicted to the delusion that we are in control of anything.

Accepting is most valuable when we are powerless to make a difference. Yet our ineffectuality is precisely the condition we are most loath to accept. It triggers our finest moments of counterproductive behavior.

Security puts a premium on feebleness.

As much as I acted as if I could move mountains with my willpower, like thinking I could force a new business win, I knew I wasn´t really in charge of anything. Deep inside, I believed that God was. But oh, how I tried.

That's the horror, the most awful thing: to have a child the world wants to destroy and know that you're helpless to help him. Nothing worse than that. Nothing worse.

In fact, the tension between the sheer quantity of horrifying news and your real-world impotence to do much about it is part of our consumer strategy. We create the illusion that being informed is a kind of action in itself. So to wash that guilt out—to eliminate the shame and discomfort you feel over doing nothing as the world goes mad—you'll keep tuning in.

As it turns out, there is a utility in keeping us divided. As people, the more separate we are, the more politically impotent we become.

To defeat your adversary and bury him is one thing. To dress him in a jester's costume and have him perform for you is another, more crushing blow. He survives to give witness ot his own powerlessness

I mean, being a child was being a child, was being a creature without power, without pocket money, without escape routes of any kind. So I didn't want to be a child.

noc donosi ono sto hoce, i covjek ne moze nista da izmjeni. Moze samo da se osveti, i to je ljudsko, ako moze. Nije uvijek pametno, nije nikad pametno, ali i to biva.

This girl, this girl, and he a man with a business and a secretary and a house with a furnace and bills and a son and a roof with three shingles and a pretty birdpath made of stone that I sometimes see Mrs.Shaw, her tied back with a scarf, cleaning with a dainty skimmer. How does this man, a man like this, like any of them, come to walk at night and stand in a girl's backyard, and then, smoking and looking up, suddenly feel himself helpless to bher bright magic?

Some people are so weak that whenever they see a hammer, they immediately turn into a nail!

We didn't let them do anything to us, Travanion," Beatriss said fiercely, "They did it without out permission.

I feel tears well in my eyes and I can't even stop them from happening. I can't stop anything from happening in my life.

The pillars of wisdom are these: humility, powerlessness, poverty, loneliness, sickness, rejection, and abandonment.

Terror and shame go hand in hand. There is fear in realizing that we are helpless to persuade others that we are human. In that moment

He stood at the edge of town feeling very small, powerless. Night in the mountains could do that to you, reminding you of your place in the world and laughing at any sense of self-importance.

Jaden felt their boredom, their tired eternity. Beyond that, she felt their dying essence. They were immortal—all-powerful beings—and yet they were powerless against the onslaught of ever-changing time. They were lost in a modern world, one they didn't have the energy to understand. And, in being lost, they were immobilized against it. Not even their judgments could assuage their exhausted wisdom of forever.

The gods where like the weather; sometimes good, sometimes bad, and either way, always beyond her.

Despair is anger with no place to go.