Quotes About Passivity

Only one thing I'll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye: they're not hurting anyone while they're sitting in front of that Eye. But neither was Japhy….

I had lone, schooled myself to be oblivious to pain. I had neither doubts nor fears. All the content of my mind seemed to be an absolute faith in the overlordship of the mind. This passivity was almost dream-like, and yet, in its way, it was positive almost to a pitch of exaltation.

The jellyfish doesn't actively move anywhere - it's just moved with the tides. Is that what man is? Man's just the jellyfish: stuff happens to you, and you get twisted in different directions.

I'm really interested in passivity as a type of action - sort of allowing the situation to change you, choosing to give in being an act of agency rather than an act of submission.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

Being pretty is fundamentally a passive quality; even when you work at it, you're working at being passive.

The worst of all listeners is the man who does nothing but listen.

Modern English has given us two terms we need to explain this phenomenon: "geeking out" and "vegging out." To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal—and to have a good time doing it. To veg out, by contrast, means to enter a passive state and allow sounds and images to wash over you without troubling yourself too much about what it all means.

Much later, humans might rouse themselves to take action and be agents once again. But now and for long into the future they would be nothing more than patients.

What had he done to try to save himself? Nothing. He'd done nothing. He'd let fate decide, closing his eyes and giving himself up to the judgment of the universe.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

But, for the so-called apocalyptics, McLuhan's conviction was translated into a tragic consequence: Liberated from the contents of communication, the addressee of the messages of the mass media receives only a global ideological lesson, the call to narcotic passiveness. When the mass media triumph, the human being dies.

And others were born to... what? To stand in the crowd and do nothing, try nothing, say nothing, and accept every serving of bitter nothing as their due?

the worrying gap that seems to persist between the spontaneity of reason and the passivity of sensibility can be overcome if one no longer thinks of nature exclusively in the deterministic terms of modern scientism;

What keeps a person passive and compliant," he explained, "is fear of repercussions, but once you let go of your attachment to things that don't ultimately matter—money, career, physical safety—you can overcome that fear.

This is a deal that invites passivity, obedience, and conformity. The safest course, the way to ensure being "left alone," is to remain quiet, unthreatening, and compliant.

Life is a peculiar commodity, with dimensions of its own. Still, if you were to live a million years, engaged in continual pleasures of mind, spirit and body, so that every day you discovered a new delight, or solved an antique puzzle, or overcame a challenge; even a single hour wasted in torpor, somnolence or passivity would be as reprehensible as if the fault were committed by an ordinary person, with scanty years to his life.

You are judged more by what you do passively than by what you do actively.

Just standing around looking beautiful is so boring.

Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within.

But the fact that the debased culture of which rap music is a product receives such serious attention and praise deludes its listeners into supposing that nothing finer exists than what they already know and like. Such flattery is thus the death of aspiration, and lack of aspiration is, of course, one of the causes of passivity.

I'm a writer. Life is supposed to pass me by, while I watch it.

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, and diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.