Quotes About Dependence

There was always an excuse for why Kaladin needed the spear again, wasn't there? This was what he'd been afraid of. This was what made him tremble. The worry that he would never be able to put it down.

Did you know that even then, with computers and libraries and all kinds of reminders, we found it easy to forget where we came from? Maybe because we had machines to do the remembering for us, we felt we could simply leave it to them.

That is good. I should not like to be maintained by one who lacks brain functions.

I am depending upon you to preserve us in power by means of this art we so freely call an abomination. Our hunger for power outweighs our conscience.

To grow to adulthood as a social species, including humans, is not to become autonomous and solitary, it's to become the one on whom others can depend.

Becoming a little child meant becoming aware that all is gift, that I am helpless and powerless to add a single inch to my spiritual stature. Without the subjective awareness of utter dependence, the personal consciousness of a dynamism outside of self at work in us, I seriously question whether anyone has made real progress in the spiritual life.

And that's the way the Father of Jesus is: He loves those most who need Him most, who rely on Him, depend upon Him and trust Him in everything. Little He cares whether you've been as pure as St. John or as sinful as the prostitute in Simon the Pharisee's house. All that matters is trust. It seems to me that learning how to trust God defines the meaning of Christian living. God doesn't wait until we have our moral life in order before He starts loving us.

Abandonment is the triumph of trust in our lives.

What Jesus longs to see in radical disciples is what he saw in little children: a spirit of sheer receptivity, utter dependence, and radical reliance on the power and mercy and grace of God mediated through the Spirit of Christ. He said, "Apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5).

One has to be able to trust people. Or rather, one has to be able to rely on one's own judgement.

The world says, "When you were young you were dependent and could not go where you wanted, but when you grow old you will be able to make your own decisions, go your own way, and control your own destiny." But Jesus has a different vision of maturity: It is the ability and willingness to be led where you would rather not go.

But once I am able to truly confess my most profound dependence on others and on God, I can come in touch with my true self and real community can develop.

Maybe my own deep-rooted fear to be on my own and alone kept me going from person to person, book to book and school to school, anxiously avoiding the pain of accepting the responsibility for my own life.

In the end, a life of prayer is a life with open hands—a life where we need not be ashamed of our weaknesses but realize that it is more perfect for us to be led by the Other than to try to hold everything in our own hands.

I need no longer always manage and muster support for my "cause.

Prayer has meaning only if it is necessary and indispensable. Prayer is prayer only when we can say that without it, we cannot live.

But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.

We have become the tool of our tools.

In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live.

She believed me, I was sure, absolutely; if she hadn't I don't know what would have become of me, for I couldn't have borne the strain alone.

Don't fail me. It would kill me.

A man in trouble must be possessed somehow of a woman," she said; "if she doesn't come in one way she comes in another.

She was the blessing that had now become his need, and what could prove it better than that without her he had lost himself?

For the man in the paddock, whose duty is is to sweep up manure, the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses. To tell him that it is disgusting to spend one's life shoveling up hot turds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if his livelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved.