Inability Quotes - Page 10

• If you were to fault yourself in one of three areas, which would it be: (1) the inability to prioritize; (2) the inability or desire to organize around those priorities; or (3) the lack of discipline to execute around them? ... Most people say their main fault is a lack of discipline. On deeper thought, I believe that is not the case. The basic problem is that their priorities have not become deeply planted in their hearts and minds. They haven't really internalized Habit 2 [Begin with the end in mind].

  Stephen Covey

  Inspirational, Believe, Heart

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• Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional experience, including love and caring, except when such experience can be calculated as a coldly intellectual task.

  Martha Stout

  Caring, Emotional, Intellectual

  Martha Stout, Ph.D. (2005). “The Sociopath Next Door”, p.126, Harmony

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• He endeared himself to me forever the first night we met, when I was getting frustrated with my inability to find the words I wanted in Italian, and he put his hand on my arm and said, "Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Italian, Night, Hands

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.59, A&C Black

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• I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.

  John Fowles

  War, Psychosis, Historical

  John Fowles (1968). “The Magus”, Pan

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• The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Contentment, Heartbreaking, Glitches

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2009). “Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything”, p.128, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• To call someone anti-American, indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that matter anti-Indian, or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie, you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not Good, you're Evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.

  Arundhati Roy

  Hate, Evil, Imagination

  Arundhati Roy (2003). “War Talk”, p.50, South End Press

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• Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can't vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.

  Charles Bukowski

  Real, Sadness, Needs

  Charles Bukowski (2015). “On Writing”, p.132, Canongate Books

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• A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

  Alain de Botton

  Suicide, Animal, Emotion

  Alain de Botton (2015). “On Love: A Novel”, p.113, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• The inability to forget is far more devastating than the inability to remember.

  Mark Twain

  Humor, Deep Thought, Remember

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• The historian ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his own ignorance; he is perpetually confronted with his own humiliating inability to interpret his material correctly; he is, in a sense that no other writer is, in bondage to that material.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Ignorance, Men, History

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• Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.

  H. L. Mencken

  Freedom, Thinking, Stupidity

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• There’s a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it’s really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can’t ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it’s quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia’s the sane realisation you just can’t be doing with all that anymore.

  Glen Duncan

  Cancer, Years, Ifs And

  Glen Duncan (2011). “The Last Werewolf (The Last Werewolf 1)”, p.16, Canongate Books

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• In the short term, corporal punishment may produce obedience. But it is a fact documented by research that in the long term the results are inability to learn, violence and rage, bullying, cruelty, inability to feel another's pain, especially that of one's own children, even drug addiction and suicide, unless there are enlightened or at least helping witnesses on hand to prevent that development.

  Alice Miller

  Suicide, Bullying, Children

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• Class warfare or soaking the so-called rich may make for good populist demagoguery and serve the political ends of the governing masterminds, but it does nothing to solve the grave realities of the federal government's insatiable appetite for spending and its inability to reform itself.

  Mark Levin

  Reality, Government, Class

  Mark R. Levin (2013). “The Liberty Amendments”, p.91, Simon and Schuster

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• Remember that introverts react not only to new people, but also to new places and events. So don’t mistake a child’s caution in new situations for an inability to relate to others. He’s recoiling from novelty or overstimulation, not from human contact. Introverts are just as likely as the next kid to seek others’ company, though often in smaller doses

  Susan Cain

  Children, Mistake, Kids

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• So this is it. You are scored on my heart, Clark. You were from the first day you walked in, with your ridiculous clothes and your bad jokes and your complete inability to ever hide a single thing you felt.

  Jojo Moyes

  Heart, Clothes, Firsts

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• God does not ask your ability Or your inability. He asks only your availability.

  Mary Kay Ash

  God, Religious, Availability

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• God actually delights in exalting our inability. He intentionally puts his people in situations where they come face to face with their need for him.

  David Platt

  People, Needs, Delight

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• If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a "genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Strong, Sunset, Appreciate

  Robert M. Sapolsky (2004). “Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping - Now Revised and Updated”, p.272, Macmillan

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• Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—-to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.

  Alan Watts

  Intelligent, Technology, Men

  Alan W. Watts, Daniel Pinchbeck (2013). “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness”, p.112, New World Library

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• It's only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other.... For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.

  David Levithan

  Race, Focus, Different

  David Levithan (2012). “Every Day”, p.77, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• Anxiety, the illness of our time, comes primarily from our inability to dwell in the present moment.

  Nhat Hanh

  Anxiety, Moments, Illness

  Nhất Hạnh (Thích.), Thich Nhat Hanh (1998). “The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering Into Peace, Joy, & Liberation : the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, & Other Basic Buddhist Teachings”

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• Our lack of compassion stems from our inability to see deeply into the nature of things.

  Surya Das

  Compassion, Spirituality, Stem

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• Our inability to think beyond our own species, or to be able to co-habit with other life forms in what is patently a massive collaborative quest for survival, is surely a malady that pervades the human soul.

  Lawrence Anthony

  Thinking, Soul, Survival

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• Practically everyone now bemoans Western man's sense of alienation, lack of community, and inability to find ways of organizing society for human ends. We have reached the end of the road that is built on the set of traits held out for male identity-advance at any cost, pay any price, drive out all competitors, and kill them if necessary.

  Jean Baker Miller

  Men, Community, Identity

  Jean Baker Miller (2012). “Toward a New Psychology of Women”, p.88, Beacon Press

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