Quotes About Passivity

We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more visibly and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully than we do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive meditative life, and our education that enlarges the separated, self-moving mind, have made our souls less sensitive.

Who gives is positive; who receives is negative; still there remains an immense class of mere passives.

Some people worry that prayer may lead to passivity, that we will retreat to prayer as a substitute for action. Jesus saw no contradiction between the two: he spent long hours in prayer and then long hours meeting human needs.

Male passivity is a disease that robs a man of his purpose while it destroys marriages, ruins families, and spoils legacies. A passive man doesn't engage; he retreats. He neglects personal responsibility. At its core, passivity is cowardice.

I don't enter, I'm entered. It's up to someone else. It's up to them.

You don't have to do anything in the movies. You just sit there. Well, that's not entirely true. You do less.

People resist exploitation. They resist as actively as they can, as passively as they must.

How long are you going to let yourself be dragged passively by the plot? You had flung yourself into the action, filled with adventurous impulses: and then? Your function was quickly reduced to that of one who records situations decided by others, who submits to whims, finds himself involved in events that elude his control. Then what use is your role as protagonist to you? If you continue lending yourself to this game, it means that you, too, are an accomplice of the general mystification.

We are no longer in a world in which it is thought normal to be moderate or even necessary to be normal. Most men now are not so much rushing to extremes as merely sliding to extremes; and even reaching the most violent extremes by being almost entirely passive. . . . We can no longer trust even the normal man to value and guard his own normality.

are we wired to be passive and inert? Or are we wired to be active and engaged?

It is unfortunate that Americans are no longer aware of what the constitution says and what their rights are. Because of that, we are often very passive about what happens when the government violates those rights.

I don't understand why black people have been so quiescent, so passive over the hundreds of years of American history. Why hasn't there been more violence, more armed struggle? I know answers to some of that, but it seems to me it's an issue of faith, an abiding faith in some sort of great beyond, or great spirit, or even in the American dream.

To be violent is the ultimate laziness. War always seems a great effort, but it is the easy way. And false non-violence is also an idol.

They waited for life to happen to them. They waited for someone to save them. Or heal them. They did nothing for themselves.

The opposite of love, you think, isn't hate. It's complacency.

Inaction is itself an action;

Inaction, letting be, neither creating nor destroying--that is my evil. And also the knower as one without desire.

I think of myself as an excellent actress with a lot to offer, but I'm not aggressive; I'm not ambitious. In fact, I'm anti-ambitious.

7. En séptimo y último lugar, ¿es sabio enseñar a los creyentes que no piensen tanto en luchar y esforzarse contra el pecado, sino que más bien se "sometan a Dios" y sean pasivos en las manos de Cristo? ¿Coincide esto con lo que afirma la Palabra de Dios? Lo dudo. Es claro que la enseñanza de "someterse a Dios" es algo a lo que Dios

I don't want to get involved" has become our national motto. -Mike McIntyre

We have even lost any critical insight we may once have had into the organic basis of perception, taking for granted the basic fact that a normal person has two eyes. We have nearly ceased to consider this as even knowledge at all and are no longer conscious of our own participation in perception. Instead, we feel a complete passivity in the face of a power that is independent of us; a power we call "existence" or "reality.

As Robert Bly laments in Iron John, "Some women want a passive man if they want a man at all; the church wants a tamed man—they are called priests; the university wants a domesticated man—they are called tenure-track people; the corporation wants a . . . sanitized, hairless, shallow man.

The spirit of our day is a soft acceptance of everything—except deep conviction in anything.

Mary watched everything as a mere spectator.