Inadequacy Quotes - Page 4

• It is a mistake to suppose that requiring the nonmathematical to take more advanced math courses will enhance their understanding and not merely exacerbate their sense of inadequacy.

  William Raspberry

  Mistake, Math, Understanding

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• For a long time I've lived with the inadequacy of that frame to tell everything I knew, and I think a lot about what is outside of the frame.

  Susan Meiselas

  Thinking, Long, Long Time

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• When the darkness is seen as a necessary prelude to the creative light, one is less likely to ascribe frustration to personal inadequacy or label it as bad.

  Daniel Goleman

  Frustration, Light, Creative

  Daniel Goleman (1993). “The Creative Spirit”, Plume Books

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• Precisely constructed models for linguistic structure can play an important role, both negative and positive, in the process of discovery itself. By pushing a precise but inadequate formulation to an unacceptable conclusion, we can often expose the exact source of this inadequacy and, consequently, gain a deep understanding of the linguistic data. More positively, a formalized theory may automatically provide solutions for many problems other than those for which it was explicitly designed.

  Noam Chomsky

  Discovery, Data, Deep Understanding

  Noam Chomsky (2002). “Syntactic Structures”, p.5, Walter de Gruyter

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• We get most upset with those we love because they are close to us and we know that they are aware of our weaknesses. . . If only we could learn to live with our inadequacies, our frailties, our vulnerabilities, we would not need to try so hard to push away those who really know us.

  Desmond Tutu

  Love Is, Upset, Trying

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• When feelings of inadequacy come creeping in, let's park our minds in God's truth.

  Lysa TerKeurst

  Feelings, Mind, Parks

  FaceBook post by Lysa TerKeurst from Mar 07, 2015

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• One of the by-products of being a perfectionist and constantly trying to improve myself are sobering feelings of low-grade anxiety and a nagging sense of inadequacy This anxiety keeps me humble.

  Anthony S. Fauci

  Humble, Anxiety, Feelings

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• Like sacrifices, prayer is intended to change man, not God. Its purpose is to cultivate a contrite heart, to promote feelings of humility and inadequacy in man, whilst encouraging reliance on Divine assistance.

  Immanuel Jakobovits, Baron Jakobovits

  Prayer, Humility, Heart

  "The Authorised Daily Prayer Book" by Immanuel Jakobovits, Centenary Edition, (p. xvi), 1990.

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• As Harvard developmental psychologist Robert Kegan, who has studied Bridgewater, says, in most work places everyone is working two jobs. The first is whatever their actual job is; the second consists of managing others' impressions of them, especially by hiding weaknesses and inadequacies - which is an enormous waste of energy.

  Ray Dalio

  Jobs, Two, Firsts

  "Ray Dalio, head of the world's largest hedge fund, explains his succession plan for Bridgewater and how its 'radically transparent' culture is misunderstood". Interview with Richard Feloni, www.businessinsider.com. March 21, 2016.

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• Twice in my life I have spent two weary and scientifically profitless years seeking evidence to corroborate dearly loved hypotheses that later proved to be groundless; times such as these are hard for scientists-days of leaden gray skies bringing with them a miserable sense of oppression and inadequacy.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Years, Sky

  Peter Brian Medawar (1979). “Advice to a young scientist”, Harpercollins Childrens Books

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• I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics...What's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating wide-spread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought...occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like...because they feel an inadequacy in classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Real, Fall, Thinking

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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• Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, he developed a method of communication--but one which in its clumsiness and thick-thumbed inadequacy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into gross and guttural signaling.

  Isaac Asimov

  Communication, Men, Mind

  Isaac Asimov (1986). “Foundation Trilogy”, Del Rey

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• Journalism is an extraordinary and terrible privilege. Not by chance, if you are aware of it, does it consume you with a hundred feelings of inadequacy. Not by chance, when I find myself going through an event or an important encounter, does it seize me like anguish, a fear of not having enough eyes and enough ears and enough brains to look and listen and understand like a worm hidden in the wood of history.

  Oriana Fallaci

  Eye, Feelings, Brain

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• Words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can relook at the world without blinkers.

  J. L. Austin

  World, Littles, Facts

  "Philosophical Papers". Book by J. L. Austin, edited by James Opie Urmson, Geoffrey James Warnock, p. 182, 1979.

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• Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria or your own unfeminine inadequacy. Women have learned to submit to pain by hearing authority figures - doctors, priests, psychiatrists - tell us that what we feel is not pain.

  Naomi Wolf

  Pain, Real, Believe

  "The Beauty Myth". Book by Naomi Wolf, 1990.

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• In our 'don't just sit there, do something' culture, when we get sick we are supposed to become characters in a heroic medical narrative that conceals the remorselessness of pathology, the intractable fact of human vulnerability, and the inevitable inadequacies of medicine. To many of the participants in the medical drama, aggressive treatment - even when it fails - represents a quasi-religious quest for immortality and meaning.

  Suzanne Gordon

  Religious, Drama, Character

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• We must now turn from considering the necessary struggle with language arising, as it were, from its very nature and the nature of the society it serves to the more ominous threat to its integrity brought about neither by its innate inadequacy nor yet by the incompetence and carelessness of its ordinary users, but rather engineered deliberately by those who will manipulate words for their own ends.

  Chinua Achebe

  Integrity, Struggle, Ordinary

  Chinua Achebe (2012). “Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays”, p.169, Penguin

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• In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings - about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes - and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.

  Saul Bellow

  Emotional, People, Feelings

  Saul Bellow (2016). “It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future”, p.138, Odyssey Editions

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• I was a weak kid, not good at what all the boys at school were good at and I found that by acting, by being other people, I could liberate myself from those inadequacies.

  Antony Sher

  School, Kids, Boys

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• trouble is not a sign of inadequacy, stupidity or inferiority, but rather an inescapable part of life - proof that you are a card-carrying member of the human race.

  Ann Landers

  Race, Stupidity, Cards

  Ann Landers (1981). “Ann Lander's Encyclopedia, A to Z: Improve Your Life Emotionally, Medically, Sexually, Socially, Spiritually”, Ballantine Books

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• When we pray, we must begin by conceiving God in full and vigorous images, but we must go on to acknowledge the inadequacy of them and to adhere nakedly to the imageless truth of God.

  Austin Farrer

  Goes On, Praying, Invisible

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• I am encouraged as I look at some of those who have listened to their "different drum": Einstein was hopeless at school math and commented wryly on his inadequacy in human relations. Winston Churchill was an abysmal failure in his early school years. Byron, that revolutionary student, had to compensate for a club foot; Demosthenes for a stutter; and Homer was blind. Socrates couldn't manage his wife, and infuriated his countrymen. And what about Jesus, if we need an ultimate example of failure with one's peers? Or an ultimate example of love?

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Love, Jesus, School

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “A Circle of Quiet”, p.36, Open Road Media

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• In spite of the haze of speculation, it is still something of a shock to find myself here, coming to terms with an enormous trust placed in my hands and with the inevitable sense of inadequacy that goes with that.

  Rowan Williams

  Trust, Fog, Hands

  "I don't come to it with a fixed agenda". www.theguardian.com. July 23, 2002.

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• The (capital punishment) controversy passes the anarch by. For him, the linking of death and punishment is absurd. In this respect, he is closer to the wrongdoer than to the judge, for the high-ranking culprit who is condemned to death is not prepared to acknowledge his sentence as atonement; rather, he sees his guilt in his own inadequacy. Thus, he recognizes himself not as a moral but as a tragic person.

  Ernst Junger

  Punishment, Judging, Guilt

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• Big mountains are a completely different world: snow, ice, rocks, sky, and thin air. You cannot conquer them, only rise to their height for a short time; and for that they demand a great deal. The struggle is not with the enemy, or a competitor like in sports, but with yourself, with the feelings of weakness and inadequacy. That struggle appeals to me. It is why I became a mountaineer.

  Anatoli Boukreev

  Sports, Struggle, Rocks

  Anatoli Boukreev (2015). “Above the Clouds: The Diaries of a High-Altitude Mountaineer”, p.4, St. Martin's Griffin

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