Inability Quotes - Page 4

• The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.

  Lewis Mumford

  Ideas, Justice, Diversity

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• In opposition to the plenary ability taught by the Pelagians, the gracious ability of the Arminians, and the natural ability of the New School theologians, the Scriptures declare the total inability of the sinner to turn himself to God or to do that which is truly good in God's sight

  Augustus Hopkins Strong

  School, Sight, Scripture

  Augustus Hopkins Strong (2014). “Systematic Theology : Volume II (Illustrated)”, p.481, Lulu Press, Inc

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• Envy and jealousy stem from the fundamental inability to rejoice at someone else's happiness or success

  Matthieu Ricard

  Buddhism, Envy, Suffering

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• 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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• Why is geometry often described as cold and dry? One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline or a tree.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Nature, Lying, Science

  "Benoît Mandelbrot obituary' by Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, www.theguardian.com. October 17, 2010.

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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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• Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.

  Daniel Gilbert

  Riches, Poverty, Wealth

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• The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.

  Michael Lewis

  Jobs, Class, Luxury

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• I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.

  William Faulkner

  Advice, Fool, Knows

  William Faulkner (1985). “Novels, 1930-1935”, Library of America

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• Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art.

  Emile Zola

  Art, Boundaries, Incapacity

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• Your cowardly self-delusions about “love” when you know as well as I do that there’s never been anything between us but contempt and distrust and a terrible sickly dependence on each other’s weakness- that’s why. That’s why I couldn’t stop laughing about the Inability to Love, and that’s why I can’t stand to let you touch me, and that’s why I’ll never again believe in anything you think, let alone anything you say

  Richard Yates

  Believe, Thinking, Self

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• And we'd look at each other the way you do when you see someone on the street you think you recognize, but not quite. Someone you wish with all your heart were there but who is actually just a stranger. And you feel a kind of deep longing that hurts like a huge gash and your inability to fix it leaves you frustrated and angry and bone-deep lonely.

  Michele Jaffe

  Lonely, Hurt, Heart

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• As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give glory to God

  Karl Barth

  Giving, Recognition, Speak

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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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• 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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• 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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• Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.

  Richard Yates

  Inability To Love, Insane, Definitions

  Richard Yates (2010). “Revolutionary Road”, p.290, Random House

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• The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.

  Alain de Botton

  Memories, Lying, Leaving

  Alain de Botton (2006). “On Love: A Novel”, p.126, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.

  David Foster Wallace

  Sadness, Hatred, My Love For You

  David Foster Wallace (2004). “The Broom of the System: A Novel”, p.187, Penguin

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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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• 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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• 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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