Helplessness Quotes - Page 5

• A humble and contrite heart knows that it can merit nothing before God, and that all that is necessary is to be reconciled to one's helplessness and let our holy and almighty God care for us, just as an infant surrenders himself to his mother's care.

  Ole Hallesby

  Mother, Heart, Humble

  Ole Hallesby (1975). “Prayer”, Augsburg Fortress Publishing

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• I do not have easy days at home now and I drift between fear and helplessness in sunny rooms where it is unspeakably cold. Strange shudders of transformation, bodily experienced to the point of vulnerability, visions of mysteries until the certainty of having died, ecstasies to the point of stony petrifaction, and a continuation of dreaming sad dreams.

  Georg Trakl

  Dream, Home, Vision

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• I don't think I could play a character that I couldn't relate to somehow. I'm not unfamiliar with frustration, anger, shame, helplessness and a load of other emotions that make up our psycho-soup. I try to focus on that frustration, that sense of unfairness, and multiply it.

  Terry O'Quinn

  Character, Frustration, Thinking

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• There's no way to escape the fact that we've grown up in a violent culture, we just can't get away from it, it's part of our heritage. I think part of it is that we've always felt somewhat helpless in the face of this vast continent. Helplessness is answered in many ways, but one of them is violence.

  Sam Shepard

  Thinking, Culture, Heritage

  "Getting Faster With Age: Sam Shepard’s New Velocity". Interview with Patrick Healy, www.nytimes.com. February 12, 2010.

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• The gospel proceeds on the basis of universal depravity; the gospel assimilates all varieties of human nature into one common experience of guilt and need and helplessness; and this is just what you do not like about it.

  William Morley Punshon

  Guilt, Needs, Common Experience

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 189, 1895.

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• At times to think of one's outer helplessness is good, but to think always of one's inner strength is infinitely better.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Strength, Thinking, Time To Think

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• In the case of 'Ocean at the End of the Lane,' it's a book about helplessness. It's a book about family, it's a book about being 7 in a world of people who are bigger than you, and more dangerous, and stepping into territory that you don't entirely understand.

  Neil Gaiman

  Ocean, Book, People

  "Gaiman's New 'Ocean' Is No Kiddie Pool". Interview with Scott Simon, www.wwno.org. June 15, 2013.

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• I enjoyed the innocence of unhappiness and of helplessness; could I blame myself for a sin which attracted me, which flooded me with pleasure precisely to the extent it brought me to despair?

  Georges Bataille

  Despair, Innocence, Blame

  Georges Bataille (1972). “My mother”, Jonathan Cape

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• Pushing through fear is less frightening than living with the fear which comes from the feeling of helplessness.

  Susan Jeffers

  Inspirational, Life, Pushing Through

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• I have been repeating over and over again that he who cannot protect himself or his nearest and dearest or their honour by non-violently facing death may and ought to do so by violently dealing with the oppressor. He who can do neither of the two is a burden. He has no business to be the head of a family. He must either hide himself, or must rest content to live for ever in helplessness and be prepared to crawl like a worm at the bidding of a bully.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Two, Bully, Bidding

  Mahatma Gandhi, U. R. Rao (1963). “The Way to Communal Harmony”, Ahmedabad, [India] : Navajivan Publishing House

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• If you become so frightened of realities that are not your own, if you take upon yourselves tragedies that do not exist in your reality, in your moment, then you weaken your position and weaken the position, of those you think you are helping. You look about you and you see only hopelessness and helplessness. You organize your reality according to the tragedies of the newspapers!

  Seth

  Reality, Thinking, Tragedy

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• The price of these failures has been a loss of moral consensus, a greater sense of helplessness about the human condition. ... The intellectual solution to the first dilemma can be achieved by a deeper and more courageous examination of human nature that combines the findings of biology with those of the social sciences.

  E. O. Wilson

  Loss, Science, Intellectual

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• Man is unconquerable because he can make even his helplessness so entertaining. His motto seems to be "Even though He slay me, yet will I make fun of Him!

  Christopher Morley

  Fun, Men, Motto

  Christopher Morley (2013). “The Haunted Bookshop”, p.130, Melville House

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• The Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal will take care of themselves. Look after the courts of the poor, who stand most in need of justice. The security of the republic will be found in the treatment of the poor and the ignorant. In indifference to their misery and helplessness lies disaster.

  Charles Evans Hughes

  Lying, Justice, Ignorant

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• The challenge of preventing any further proliferation of nuclear weapons is just such a trial in the quest for world peace, one that cannot be achieved if we are defeated by a sense of helplessness. The crucial element is to ensure that any struggle against evil is rooted firmly in a consciousness of the unity of the human family, something only gained through the mastery of our own inner contradictions.

  Daisaku Ikeda

  Struggle, Evil, Challenges

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• We are hurtling towards self-destruction at an alarming rate thanks chiefly to an advertising and propaganda system that goads people from infancy towards apathy, isolation, passivity, helplessness and separation.

  Noam Chomsky

  Self, People, Apathy

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• A lot of the despair we feel watching the news every day flows from our sense of helplessness, and as a fiction writer you get to control things, if only on the page. You get to run the show. You can right wrongs, bring departed loved ones back to life, even take vengeance on God, if that's your thing.

  Ron Currie Jr.

  Running, Departed, Despair

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• Americans across our country are feeling a sense of helplessness, of uncertainty and of fear. These feelings are understandable and they are justified. But the answer must not be violence. The answer is never violence. Rather, the answer - our answer, all our answer - must be action. Calm, peaceful, collaborative and determined action. We must continue working to build trust between communities and law enforcement. We must continue working to guarantee every person in this country equal justice under the law.

  Loretta Lynch

  Country, Justice, Community

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• My helpless friend, your helplessness is the most powerful plea which rises up to the tender father-heart of God. You think that everything is closed to you because you cannot pray. My friend, your helplessness is the very essence of prayer.

  Ole Hallesby

  Friends, Powerful, Prayer

  Ole Hallesby (1975). “Prayer”, Augsburg Fortress Publishing

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• Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women--the quality of shifting from child to woman, theseeming helplessness one moment and the utter self-reliance the next that baffle us, that seem most difficult to understand. These are the qualities that make her a mystery, the qualities that provoked Freud to complain, "What does a woman want?

  Lillian B. Rubin

  Children, Often Is, Self

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• I myself, for instance, am not especially gifted, and am shy by nature, but my gracious and merciful God and Father inclined Himself to me, and when I was weak in faith He strengthened me while I was still young. He taught me in my helplessness to rest on Him, and to pray even about little things in which another might have felt able to help himself.

  Hudson Taylor

  Father, Shy, Littles

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• Through this feeling of helplessness suddenly burst a piercing nostalgia for the lost world of childhood. The way it came right up against the heart, that world, and against the face. No indoors or outdoors, only everything touching us, and the grown-ups lumbering past overhead like constellations.

  Denis Johnson

  Heart, Past, Childhood

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• If outer events bring him to a position where he can bear them no longer and force him to cry out to the higher power in helplessness for relief, or if inner feelings bring humiliation and recognition of his dependence on that power, this crushing of the ego may open the door to grace.

  Paul Brunton

  Crush, Doors, Grace

  Paul Brunton (1988). “The Notebooks of Paul Brunton: The religious urge. The reverential life”

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• Freud, Jung thought, had been a great discoverer of facts about the mind, but far too inclined to leave the solid ground of "critical reason and common sense." Freud for his part criticized Jung for being gullible about occult phenomena and infatuated with Oriental religions; he viewed with sardonic and unmitigated skepticism Jung's defense of religious feelings as an integral element in mental health. For Freud, religion was a psychological need projected onto culture, the child's feeling of helplessness surviving in adults, to be analyzed rather than admired.

  Peter Gay

  Religious, Children, Psychological Needs

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• But I know I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead — in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death — the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human — feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light - all of it part of navigating the unknown.

  Alice Sebold

  Falling In Love, Taken, Dark

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