Top 100 Passively Quotes
#1. As a genre, videogames take our minds on journeys, and we can control and experience them much more interactively than passively - especially when they are well-designed.
John Maeda
#2. People are tired of just watching their TV set passively. They are playing interactive games today. They are on the Internet interacting. They want to be part of their TV set.
Bruce Nash
#3. When a man, however passively, becomes an obstacle to the fulfillment of a woman's desires, he becomes an odious thing in her eyes, - or will, given time enough.
Theodore Dreiser
#4. It is the lot of mankind to feel not only insecure but also bored. To combat that experience, people long to be passively entertained, which requires less effort than assuming responsibility for self-improvement.
Thomas Szasz
#5. The way you choose to cope with stress can change not only how you feel, but also how it transforms the brain. If you react passively or if there is simply no way out, stress can become damaging.
John J. Ratey
#6. He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#7. I think one of the reasons [Nikolai] Medtner hasn't had a chance is that his music needs very, very committed performances. If you play his works passively, the juice of his music is really not going to be extracted - it's simply not going to come out.
Marc-Andre Hamelin
#8. We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled.
Bill Watterson
#9. What eleven- to thirteen-year-old boys fear is passivity of any kind. When they do act passively we can be fairly certain that it is an act of aggression designed to torment a parent or teacher ... Mischief at best, violence at worst is the boy's proclamation of masculinity.
Louise J. Kaplan
#10. It's a piece of piss. You know what I do? I just get up and read the paper. Then people ask questions, and I just bullshit. Actively bullshit, as opposed to passively. That's the best bit. Just bullshitting. Piece of utter piss.
Neil Gaiman
#11. Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.
David Eagleman
#12. I often wish I could just passively watch people without being expected to participate myself, like television.
M.E. Thomas
#13. Is there someone who passively watches his children growing up? We constantly and maximally invest ourselves into our children to realize our vision of happiness. But not for us - for those children. It's not enough that we molest ourselves, so we have to molest the children as well ...
Ruben Papian
#14. To say a grid is limiting is to say that language is limiting, or typography is limiting. It is up to us to use these media critically or passively.
Ellen Lupton
#15. De Caussade makes this matter of duty very simple, too, as he makes everything simple: "We have two duties to fulfill: we must actively seek to carry God's will into effect and passively accept all that his will sends us" (p. 73). That's all. That's it.
Peter Kreeft
#16. The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavours to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.
Thomas Malthus
#17. To be a fully functioning moral agent, one cannot passively accept moral principles handed down by fiat. Moral principles require moral reasoning.
Michael Shermer
#18. He could not love passively; once he loved, he immediately also began to help. And
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#19. When I became a poet, the Korean literary world expected women poets to sing passively of love. Naturally, this was not written anywhere, but this rule existed nonetheless. Consequently, I received plenty of serious criticism.
Kim Hyesoon
#20. I believe the difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next.
Michael Gerber
#21. So too, in forming a constitution, or in enacting rules of procedure, or making canons, the people do not merely passively assent, but actively cooperate. They have, in all these matters, the same authority as the clergy.
Charles Hodge
#22. We were taught never to give up, never to passively accept fate, but to exhaust every last ounce of will and hope in the face of any challenge.
Edward Kennedy
#23. We can passively take our place in the negative chain, accepting the harm to ourselves and passing it on to others. Or we can break the chain and turn the energy of a destructive emotion into a constructive action.
Laura Archera Huxley
#24. The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is living fully and just existing.
Gerber Michael E.
#25. A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.
Wendell Berry
#26. he sees a place where he will passively fade away, like wallpaper that gets too much sunlight and slowly loses its color. This
Joe Hill
#27. If we stand passively by while the centre of each city becomes a hive of depravation, crime and hopelessness ... if we become two people, the suburban affluent and the urban poor, each filled with mistrust and fear for the other ... then we shall effectively cripple each generation to come.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#28. The spiritual life is a gift. It is a gift of the Holy Spirit, who lifts us up into the kingdom of God's love. But to say that being lifted up into the kingdom of love is a divine gift does not mean that we wait passively until the gift is offered to us.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#29. Happiness worth having is the warm glow that comes from investing ourselves in the world around us, come what may. It cannot be passively consumed or gulped down like a sugary drink. Happiness must be created by own ingenuity.
Nick Baylis
#30. I can use the camera to make a place or landscape; the camera to a greater extent projects rather than takes in or reproduces. The camera, or, rather, the eye, produces the impression of the place: I as a photographer am not passively taking in; I am active as a subject generating the object.
Olafur Eliasson
#31. Passively sitting around and waiting for things to happen only leaves things up to chance, which you have no control over.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
#33. So perhaps the best resource is to meet everything passively, to make yourself an inert mass, to stare at others with the eyes of an animal, to feel no compunction, with your own hand to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in you.
Franz Kafka
#34. And what? What's the other choice? To passively let things happen and then say: "Tut-tut, what at botch that was"? Don't we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don't we try to frame it so they'll chose as we think they should?
Orson Scott Card
#35. No ordinary effort stops the wheel.
In sleep it spins without resistance.
Passively, falling deeper, lacking the will to activate any change.
Stephen Demone
#36. You cannot bring a fresh, new word about human flourishing and expect the old, established systems of oppression and power to stand by passively. Or, as Jesus put it, "You can't put new wine into old wineskins.
Rob Bell
#37. The teacher "teaches" and the students "sit and listen" or learn passively.
Joseph Barrell
#38. We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.
George Eliot
#39. The mortal experience ... is not like a college course which we can passively audit. Instead, we are taking life's course for credit and there are no summers off - not even semester breaks.
Neal A. Maxwell
#40. The sweetest thing we ever had was, like, animal crackers in the pantry. I think my parents sort of passively made sure that we didn't have a lot of junk food at our disposal, and I think that helped me and all my siblings growing up with how to approach nutrition and eating right.
Andrew Luck
#42. We really know time, says Heidegger, because we know we are going to die. Without this passionate realization of our mortality, time would be simply a movement of the clock that we watch passively, calculating its advance - a movement devoid of human meaning.
William Barrett
#43. They were herded passively into the gas chambers. Weary of being hunted and persecuted, of living in constant fear, they dumbly awaited the hand of the sure physician, Death. For them life had lost all meaning and purpose. To prolong it would merely have prolonged their suffering.
Miklos Nyiszli
#44. To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.
Virginia Woolf
#45. When you exercise your will power you release the power of life energy - not when you merely wish passively to be able to obtain an objective.
Paramahansa Yogananda
#46. Culture shouldn't be a pacifying thing. It shouldn't be something that you just passively accept. I think it should be something that, in some ways, is quite disruptive - makes you think and question things, and actually sparks debate.
Jarvis Cocker
#47. There's a difference between listening passively and listening aggressively. To listen with your heart, you have to listen actively.
John C. Maxwell
#48. A friend in the true sense is not a person who passively nods approval of our conduct or ignores improper behavior. A friend is a person who cares.
Marvin J. Ashton
#49. To change your circumstances, first start thinking differently. Do not passively accept unsatisfactory circumstances, but form a picture in your mind of circumstances as they should be. Believe and succeed.
Norman Vincent Peale
#50. Faith is not simply a patience that passively suffers until the storm is past. Rather, it is a spirit that bears things - with resignations, yes, but above all, with blazing, serene hope.
Corazon Aquino
#51. Inspiration is not something that you sit passively and hope for. Inspiration is a lifestyle that must be practised continuously and is never completely mastered.
Mensah Oteh
#53. Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
Aldous Huxley
#54. Life is about the decisions we make to live passionately or passively.
Where's your passion?
Laura Castoro
#55. In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
Matt Taibbi
#56. My hour at last has come;
Yet not ingloriously or passively
I die, but first will do some valiant deed,
Of which mankind shall hear in after time.
Homer
#57. Sooner or later I too may passively take the print
Of the golden age--why not? I have neither hope nor trust;
May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as a flint,
Cheat and be cheated, and die: who knows? we are ashes and dust.
Alfred Tennyson
#58. The offspring of nationalist thinking too often expresses itself in exclusionary and passively-violent legal policies, and then sadly, through militarism, which becomes manifest on the endless blood-soaked borders and battlefields of humanity's great failure as a humane species.
Bryant McGill
#59. To find out what happens to a system when you interfere with it you have to interfere with it (not just passively observe it).
George E.P. Box
#60. I would rather die fighting for what is right, than live passively amidst all that is wrong.
Suzy Kassem
#61. If workers are more insecure, that's very 'healthy' for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won't ask for wages, they won't go on strike, they won't call for benefits; they'll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that's optimal for corporations' economic health.
Noam Chomsky
#62. Clearly, he now had not to be anguished, not to suffer passively, by mere reasoning about unresolvable questions, but to do something without fail, at once, quickly.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#63. No man likes to acknowledge that he has made a mistake in the choice of his profession, and every man, worthy of the name, will row long against wind and tide before he allows himself to cry out, 'I am baffled!' and submits to be floated passively back to land.
Charlotte Bronte
#64. Friendship isn't something we passively receive. Friendship is something we actively do. It's a gift we offer for free, not a demand we make with a stamping foot.
Lisa-Jo Baker
#65. Immediately after his re-election [Cameron] announced: "For too long we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens so long as you obey the law we will leave you alone." A statement so far to the right that it conceded the political centre ground to Judge Dredd.
Frankie Boyle
#66. The overload makes users less productive and more stressed; thus, there's a need for some solution. Passively ignoring the problem won't work, since bits are still heavy, even if we pretend not to notice.
Mark Hurst
#67. I don't want to be the passively alert vegetable in the corner that takes in everything but can't communicate, which I think would suck a lot of life out of my family without giving very much to me.
Tony Judt
#68. We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#70. Facts have proved that prosperity at the expense of the environment is only delaying disaster. We cannot passively protect our environment by simply stopping economic development.
Zhou Shengxian
#71. But at a certain point in our lives, we cannot passively allow our upbringing to define us. We must choose it or choose other.
Jon Skovron
#72. Every day, every hour, the parents are either passively or actively forming those habits in their children upon which, more than upon anything else, future character and conduct depend ...
Charlotte Mason
#73. Conformity - the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.
Mark Twain
#74. But the reality of being American requires that a commitment to our founding principles must be renewed by personal discovery with each generation - actively, not passively - if the country is to remain true to its stated goals.
Adrian Brooks
#75. It is a struggle; for though the black man fights passively, he nevertheless fights; and his passive resistance is more effective at present than active resistance could possibly be. He bears the fury of the storm as does the willow tree.
James Weldon Johnson
#76. To passively get up and play a bunch of old songs wouldn't have really motivated us. So we are bringing the new material into the set and it goes down really well.
Andy Taylor
#77. Thinking is a tiring process; it is much easier to accept beliefs passively than to think them out, rigorously questioning their grounds by asking what are the consequences that follow from them.
L. Susan Stebbing
#78. I don't want to be expected to fall in passively someone else's plans for me. That's what I don't want. I don't want it assumed that I simply don't have any personal goals or wishes of my own. Or any basic competence of my own. That's what I don't want!
Nora Roberts
#79. Since changes are going on anyway, the great thing is to learn enough about them so that we will be able to lay hold of them and turn them in the direction of our desires. Conditions and events are neither to be fled from nor passively acquiesced in; they are to be utilized and directed.
John Dewey
#80. Evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of any relationship is your responsibility. You do not have to passively accept what is brought to you. You can choose.
Deborah Day
#81. As I grow older part of my emotional survival plan must be to actively seek inspiration instead of passively waiting for it to find me.
Bebe Moore Campbell
#82. A man who is really earnest must begin with himself, he must be passively aware of all his thoughts, feelings and actions.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#83. The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
Friedrich Engels
#84. A hint of - dare I say? - animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the laws.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#85. Our beliefs do not sit passively in our brains waiting to be confirmed or contradicted by incoming information. Instead, they play a key role in shaping how we see the world.
Richard Wiseman
#86. Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other, seemingly more appropriate, time of your life. Vagabonding is about taking control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate.
Rolf Potts
#87. Feelings come to us, passively; love comes from us, actively, by our free choice.
Peter Kreeft
#88. I still like to get carried away - but passively.
Robert Plant
#89. Properly measured, the average actively managed dollar must underperform the average passively managed dollar, net of costs. Empirical analyses that appear to refute this principle are guilty of improper measurement.
William Forsyth Sharpe
#90. Acting requires a creative and compassionate attitude. It must aim to lift life up to a higher level of meaning and not tear it down or demean it. The actor's search is a generous quest for that larger meaning. That's why acting is never to be done passively.
Stella Adler
#91. The sun of quality does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has CREATED them. They are subordinate to IT.
Robert M. Pirsig
#92. The fear of being alone, or of being unloved, had caused women of all races to passively accept sexism and sexist oppression.
Bell Hooks
#93. Every social need, such as the need for friendship, must be a party to its own satisfaction: I cannot passively find my friend as a ready-made friend; a ready-made human being he may be, but his friendship for me I must help to create by my own active resolve.
William Ernest Hocking
#94. Arbitrary government operating by force, by terror, must destroy the best, the boldest dissenters in sheer self-defence; soon it finds itself destroying all who, on the one hand, do not actively assist it or, on the other, do not passively submit.
Edward Crankshaw
#95. A postsexist environment is not something that animal liberationists need passively await, in the meantime deferring to present sexism in the manner of our presentation.
Brian Luke
#96. For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.
David Cameron
#97. Alyosha's heart could not bear uncertainty, for the nature of his love was always active. He could not love passively; once he loved, he immediately also began to help.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#98. Before I knew escape, life was something to be endured, passively. Now I hunger for it.
Kristin Halbrook
#99. Mastery means responsibility, ability to respond in real time to the need of the moment. Intuitive or inspired living means not just passively hearing the voice, but acting on it.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
#100. Whether in the workplace or in personal relationships, success belongs to those who are willing to take responsibility for attaining their desires-those who respond to life actively rather than passively.
Nathaniel Branden
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