Quotes About Dependence

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.

I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.

Those willing to accept the tranquility of servitude, had best be prepared to crouch to his knee's, and lick the hand that feeds him.

She yawns for men and not with her mouth. She weeps for men and not with her eyes. She drinks men down, she is a cave for me.

It is a kind of pride to insist that none of our prayers should ever be petitions for our own needs: for this is only another subtle way of trying to put ourselves on the same plane as God – acting as if we had no needs, as if we were not creatures, not dependent on Him and dependent, by His will, on material things, too.

What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?

For true humility is, in a way, a very real despair: despair of myself, in order that I may hope entirely in You.

One of the humiliating things about it was that I wanted them to argue, and they despised argument. It was as if they realized, as I did not, that my attitude and my desire of argument and religious discussion implied a fundamental and utter lack of faith, and a dependence on my own lights, and attachment to my own opinion.

The time will come when they will sell you even your rain.

The more we are content with our own poverty, the closer we are to God, for then we accept our poverty in peace, expecting nothing from ourselves and everything from God.

It is a law of man's nature, written into his very essence, and just as much a part of him as the desire to build houses and cultivate the land and marry and have children and read books and sing songs, that he should want to stand together with other men in order to acknowledge their common dependence on God, their Father and Creator.

One reason why we are less fervent than we ought to be is that we cripple our own spirit by taking ourselves too seriously. We expect too much from ourselves when we ought to expect everything from God on Whom we utterly depend.

It is a law of man's nature, written into his very essence, and just as much a part of him as the desire to build houses and cultivate the land and marry and have children and read books and sing songs, that he should want to stand together with other men in order to acknowledge their common dependence on God, their Father and Creator. In fact, this desire is much more fundamental than any purely physical necessity.

It takes heroic charity and humility to let others sustain us when we are absolutely incapable of sustaining ourselves.

Perhaps the only reason they survived, Stencil reasoned, was that they were not alone. God knew how many more there were with a hothouse sense of time, no knowledge of life, and at the mercy of Fortune.

But Lottie staggered on the lowest verandah step like a bird fallen out of the nest. If she stood still for a moment she fell asleep, if she leaned against anything her eyes closed. She could not walk another step.

voluntary slavery

Believing is a lot like trusting.

You could cut off my hand, and I would still live. You could take out my eyes, and I would still live. Cut off my ears, my nose, cut off my legs, and I could still live. But take away the air, and I die. Take away the sun, and I die. Take away the plants and the animals, and I die. So why would I think my body is more a part of me than the sun and the earth?

Wags couldn't make it through the night without creeping over to Tory and whimpering that she had to use the ladies' room. So Tory would have to get out of bed, take her outside and down the stairs, and stand there in the middle of a chilly spring night, waiting for Wags to attend to herself.

When I want to know a thing, I resort to books and feel strangely exposed without books to fall back on, as though standing on a ledge.

No one had ever advocated her independence before. The entire success of her marriage, her whole career as a woman, depended largely upon her cheerful, uncomplicated dependence, first on her family and then on her husband. But now this stranger was challenging her; asking her to make choices, take responsibility.

It was the small things she took pleasure in. The faint hum of a huge furry bumble bee busily flitting from one flower to another, oblivious to the fact that it was completing a task on which the entire human race depended.

As she voiced all this out loud for the first time, she found a long-buried inner strength, and with it a conviction that her sanity and indeed her very survival depended on her walking away.