Quotes About Passivity

he was not a person to whom things simply happened. His life had been lived in some kind of neutral gear, he had never broken a limb, never been stung by a bee, never been close to love or death. He had never strived for greatness, and his reward had been a small life.

You can't write novels about people who are timid, risk-averse and passive. Or you can, but they're called literary novels.

Prefieren un régimen de inactividad y una

A man whose bloodIs very snow-broth; one who never feelsThe wanton stings and motions of the sense.

Nor less I deem that there are PowersWhich of themselves our minds impress;That we can feed this mind of oursIn a wise passiveness.

Western men are openly hostile toward the Christian faith, I believe most are simply ambivalent toward it. What's more troubling, the men who do go to church seem to become more passive and detached by the

being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

Outside, it still smelled bad. I couldn't do anything about that. Neither could anyone. It was called life: a cocktail of love and hate, strength and weakness, violence and passivity.

Estaba solo, era ajeno al mundo. Sintió que siempre había estado a un lado, mirando pasar automóviles, personas, sucesos.

The happy passive nature, locked up with itself like a mirror in an airy room, reflects what goes on but demands not to be approached.

Maybe you grew up in an environment where people just sat around watching TV and waiting for stuff to happen to them.

You're too lazy, passive to suffer. I do that for you too.

I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.

Primero eliminaremos a los subversivos; después a sus cómplices; luego a sus simpatizantes; por último, a los indiferentes y a los tibios

se derrumbó del todo cuando descubrió los placeres del fracaso, la serenidad de la abulia absoluta, la venenosa satisfacción de estar todo el día en la cama, sin otro compromiso que esperar la llegada de un nuevo día de pasividad, de estricta indolencia.

The Chinaman has only a passive courage, but this courage he possesses in the highest degree. His indifference to death is truly extraordinary. When he is ill, he sees it approach, and does not falter. When condemned, and already in the hands of an officer, he manifests no fear.

Passivity is a tacit endorsement of evil we are too afraid to oppose actively.

Japanese gaman is not a philosophical concept. The conventional translations fail to convey the passivity and abnegation that the idea contains, the extent to which gaman often seems indistinguishable from a collective lack of self-esteem. Gaman was the force that united the reeling refugees in the early days after the disaster; but it was also what neutered politics, and permitted the Japanese to feel that they had no individual power over and no responsibility for their national plight.

I turned round, mechanically, like an automaton. Such passivity was worse than undignified, it was galling; I knew that well. I resented it with secret rage. But in that room, in that presence, I was invertebrate.

I mean here to propound a paradox, that people can actively enter into their own passivity.

Wasn't it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn't really wanted to do?

Beta wave activity in the brain correlates with outer-directed activity and dominance of sympathetic nervous system functions. Alpha wave activity, and lower brain frequencies, correlate with inner-directed passivity and dominance of parasympathetic nervous system functions.

Husserl disagreed with traditional philosophy (and anticipated modern neurology) in denying that we passively receive impressions. He insisted on an intentionality of consciousness, in which we vary from intense alertness, to moderate alertness, to weak alertness, to the total passivity that Occidental philosophers regard as normal.

This means that a small state in the midst of adversaries, such as Israel, has to be particularly passive, or particularly aggressive, in order to survive. It is primarily a matter of geography. 29