Quotes About Passivity

Hell is not populated mainly by passionate rebels but by nice, bland, indifferent, respectable people who simply never gave a damn.

De Caussade makes this matter of duty very simple, too, as he makes everything simple: "We have two duties to fulfill: we must actively seek to carry God's will into effect and passively accept all that his will sends us" (p. 73). That's all. That's it.

She makes life over, he realized. She controls life, whereas I just sit on my can and let it happen to me.

Sebastian sat silently and passively, like a chicken, listening.

She felt so alone. She felt as if her life had gone into a kind of hibernation, as if part of her were asleep and maybe dreaming the rest. She let herself be passive; she accepted whatever happened.

Thoughts that didn't bear thinking kept crowding in and shouldering aside her pretended passivity.

Così sosteneva Jerry, e così era andata. La teoria di Jerry è che lo Svedese è buono, cioè passivo, cioè uno che cerca sempre di fare le cose giuste: un carattere socialmente controllato che non esplode mai, non cede mai all'ira. Non avendo la rabbia al passivo, non l'ha neppure all'attivo. Secondo questa teoria , è la mancanza di rabbia che finisce per uccidere.

It is Jerry's theory that the Swede is nice, that is to say passive, that is to say trying always to do the right thing, a socially controlled character who doesn't burst out, doesn't yield to rage ever. Will not have the angry quality as his liability, so doesn't get it as an asset either. According to this theory, it's the no-rage that kills him in the end. Whereas aggression is cleansing or curing.

La narrativa o mueve montañas o es aburrida; o mueve montañas o se sienta sobre su propio culo

Inaction counted as a choice.

forgive me also that I didn't fight like Lord Byron for the happiness of captive peoples that I watched only risings of the moon and museums

I was not an activist.

A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they're not dead, really. They're just backing away from life. They're players, but they think life is a practice game and they'll save themselves for later. So they sit on the bench, and the only championship they'll ever see goes on before them. The clock ticks away the quarters. At any moment they can join in.

Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.

Il dispotismo mite è composto da un intreccio di benevolenza, compiacimento, seduzione, diffusione di notizie false o reticenti, carisma da parte di chi vuole imporlo e sostanziale «passività» dei cittadini.

Indeed, the price one had to pay to remain true to the logic of History was terrible. One had to behold passively the death of thousands, take on one's conscience the torture of women and children transformed into human torches

To be depressed or neurotic is passive. It happened to us; we are its victim, and we have no control over it.

I would say that 'Schindler's List,' as powerful as it was, seemed to have continued with a particular iconography of victimization and passivity. That was the iconography with which I had grown up and to which I had grown accustomed.

existen dos tipos de personas: las que eligen ser dueñas de su propio destino y las que esperan sentadas mientras los demás bailan.

The comb tugged a little too hard, and Win murmured an apology and rubbed the smarting spot with her fingertips. So gently. It made his throat tight and his eyes sting. Deeply disquieted, and bewildered, Kev swallowed back the feeling. He stayed tense but passive beneath her touch. He could hardly breathe for the pleasure she gave him.

The genuflection toward 'fairness' is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what 'fairness' has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.

Enfim, é preciso que eu tente levar as coisas um pouco mais passivamente e ter paciência

my own instinctive feeling is that you do not work through bereavement. It works through you. It is the passivity that's involved in bereavement, the feeling that something terrible is being done to you – which it is – that is the most frightening.

The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.