Top 100 Quotes About Helplessness
#1. Sometimes there's nothing you can do. [ ... ] Sometimes they don't have enough to fight with.
Tamora Pierce
#2. Love at first sight'some say misnaming
Discovery of twinned helplessness
Against the huge tug of procreation.
But friendship at first sight? This also
Catches fiercely at the surprised heart
So that the cheek blanches then blushes.
Robert Graves
#3. Her feelings of fear and helplessness had reached such a pitch that they were suddenly transformed into their opposites. Having overcome them, she felt corageous and self-confident enough to tackle any power on earth; more precisely, she had ceased to worry about herself.
Michael Ende
#4. Borderlines create the vicious circles they fear most. They become angry and drive the relationship to the breaking point, then switch to a posture of helplessness and contrition, beg for reconciliation. If both parties are equally enmeshed, chaos and conflict become the soul of the relationship.
Theodore Millon
#5. In fact, if there was one thing Tabitha had learned from the weekend thus far, it was that people had all sorts of facades about them, covering tucked-away bits of badness and goodness. Fear and courage. Helplessness and hope.
Jessica Lawson
#6. once your get your hopes up, your mind starts acting on its own. And when your hopes are dashed you get dissapointed, and dissapointment leads to a feeling of helplessness. You get careless and let your guard down. And right now, she though, that si the last thing I can afford.
Haruki Murakami
#7. Destroy your manuscript, but save whatever you have inscribed in the margin out of boredom, out of helplessness, and, as it were, in a dream. (The Egyptian Stamp)
Osip Mandelstam
#8. For every discouragement has been allowed to come to us in order that through it we may be cast in utter helplessness at the Saviour's feet.
Alan Redpath
#9. I wondered about her chicken-and-egg relationship with Dad. Which came first? Her helplessness or his controlling?
Justina Chen
#10. I had taken this time to fall in love instead - inn love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt inn 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 nagivating the unknown.
Alice Sebold
#11. I choose to rise up out of that storm and see that in moments of desperation, fear, and helplessness, each of us can be a rainbow of hope, doing what we can to extend ourselves in kindness and grace to one another. And I know for sure that there is no them - there's only us.
Oprah Winfrey
#12. Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.
Honore De Balzac
#13. The attractiveness that exists to man in the very helplessness of woman is scarcely realized.
Alphonse De Lamartine
#14. A child with an intense capacity for feeling can suffer to a degree that is beyond any degree of adult suffering, because imagination, ignorance, and the conviction of utter helplessness are untempered either by reason or by experience.
E.M. Delafield
#15. He will not, I think, find it logical to live with what he has done today. I have told him that you are his responsibility. While he believes that, he will continue to protect you. I tell you this, so that you will understand what is happening. He will measure his life by your helplessness.
Dorothy Dunnett
#16. In the dark you find yourself, all bones and exhaustion and helplessness. In the dark you find your basest self. In the dark you find the bottom of watery trenches the rest of the world only sees the surface of.
Jenny Lawson
#17. But if ever I try to mend, some other bodies would instantly break, would instantly be fragments.
Khadija Rupa
#18. Then you pray the prayer that is the essence of every ritual: God, I have no hope. I am torn to shreds. You are my first and my last and only refuge. Don't do daily prayers like a bird pecking, moving its head up and down. Prayer is an egg. Hatch out the total helplessness inside. - RUMI
Tim Farrington
#19. Even though it be true that the conception of God is absolute help, it is also the only help which is absolutely capable of revealing to man his own helplessness.
Soren Kierkegaard
#20. Liberals fostered the subsidies that have converted so many citizens to helplessness. They have made high taxes and big government a way of life. They have corrupted the politicians into believing that in order to be elected to office, they must dispense benefits.
James Cook
#21. I want to burn a moment of helplessness into him so he can know a fraction of what I felt, what I feel, what's followed me every moment since, so I You cover cover his her mouth mouth.
Courtney Summers
#22. Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.
Blaise Pascal
#23. I had the feeling deep in my gut that there'd been lines I should have spoken, gestures I should have made, that would have made things better. But looking back, I didn't know what they were. As a friend, I was pretty much useless, apparently.
Megan Crewe
#24. It felt somehow comforting to return to the sparkling lake tucked into the mountains on Portal Prime. But why, when everything about Mesme made her the antithesis of comfortable?
Because here was where desperation had become hope. Where helplessness had become purpose.
G.S. Jennsen
#25. Love is not instant. Infatuation is instant. Love is a thing that begins with the most shallow of roots that reach the depths of our souls only after we've given ourselves up to the helplessness of it. And when it's true love, we are truly helpless.
Inglath Cooper
#26. How does it feel to be helpless, Led?
To depend on something that fails you?
There's no more running from who you are; no one to hold you together anymore.
You're alone now--
The ghost of Tokyo has come for you all.
Rick Remender
#27. Men will not give up their privilege of helplessness without a struggle.
Crystal Eastman
#28. Effective Peer Coaches emphasize inquiry over advocacy. Too much advocacy can produce learned helplessness. Inquiry builds capacity to improve teaching and learning by helping teachers to be more effective at designing and implementing learning activities that meet the needs of their students.
Lester Joseph Foltos
#29. When we resort to screaming at someone, we are revealing weakness and a sense of helplessness. If we can't seem to get our message or feelings across any other way, then we get angry, and we get loud!
Cathy Burnham Martin
#30. The answer to helplessness is not so very complicated,
Pablo Casals
#31. He reminded them of the Three Plagues, of the fact that people in nursing homes are dying of boredom, loneliness, and helplessness and that they wanted to find the cure for these afflictions.
Anonymous
#32. In fact, the mothers of all her girl friends impressed on their daughters the necessity of being helpless, clinging, doe-eyed creatures. Really, it took a
lot of sense to cultivate and hold such a pose.
Margaret Mitchell
#33. In America idea of freedom isn't actually about freedom. That's about power. The point of an artist is to find out what are the flavors that I must work with. Finding one's freedom is about surrendering to your helplessness.
Chris Martin
#34. Sometimes when I am photographing a major news event, I am suddenly overwhelmed by helplessness.
Lynsey Addario
#35. Throughout the play everything possible was done to show the virtue, innocence and helplessness of the poor, and the abandoned cruelty, the heartless self-indulgence of the rich.
Joyce Cary
#36. People will help, they just want to check 'How good are you without them?'. Just Show Them.
Prerak Trivedi
#37. Animals are our younger brothers and sisters, also on the ladder of evolution but a few rungs lower. It is an important part of our responsibilities to help them in their ascent, and not to retard their development by cruel exploitation of their helplessness.
Hugh Dowding, 1st Baron Dowding
#38. Everything I do in its essence is about helplessness. That's the story I want to tell all the time. It's the story I wanted to live - somebody who appears to be, or is, weak becoming stronger.
Joss Whedon
#39. I dislike helplessness in other people and in myself, and this is by far my greatest fear of illness.
John Steinbeck
#40. If you are sure that you are about to fail, then this strange and serene calmness can come over you or the most abject fear and panic and feeling of helplessness.
Peter Gallagher
#41. And in the end... Not even that old familiar sensation of emptiness. Just a hint of helplessness, a frustration for a lost time from a result prematurely injured and failed.
Irina Sopas
#42. The utter helplessness of a conquered people is perhaps the most tragic feature of a civil war or any other sort of war.
Rebecca Latimer Felton
#43. I hate cages. For most folks, they're built from fear and they do it to themselves. Not me. Mine were forged of helplessness. Most kids' are.
Karen Marie Moning
#44. I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to my grief. It felt better, somehow, to be helpless. I didn't feel ashamed.
S.J. Watson
#45. Lovemaking surely must be, for human beings at our present state of development, one of the more private enterprises. Who would want a witness to that entire self-abandonment and helplessness?
Katherine Anne Porter
#46. A person moving in zero gravity feels a pitiful helplessness. One wrong move and you find yourself spinning wildly. Everyone becomes a baby again in outer space, laboriously learning how to walk.
Ulrich Walter
#47. Something that is supposed to typify or stand for something else. Many symbols are mere "survivals" - as funereal urns carved on memorial monuments. We cannot stop making them, but we can give them a name that conceals our helplessness.
Ambrose Bierce
#48. You have no control [over natural disaster]. That's what's scary about it. You're helpless. That feeling of helplessness is really scary.
R.L. Stine
#49. 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
#50. Helplessness is such a rotten feeling. There's nothing you can do about it. Being helpless is like being paralyzed. It's sickness. The cure calls for a monumental effort to stand up and start walking somewhere, anywhere. But that takes some doing.
Chuck Barris
#51. Subjugation requires vigilance; if you relax your brutality even for a moment, the people you're oppressing will revolt at the first sign of weakness. That's why dictatorial regimes are always a slippery slope of cruelty doomed to end in failure.
Nenia Campbell
#52. You're people, in short, who must be stupid, insane, or evil to continue arguing in the face of indisputable facts and irrefutable logic that others must be forced into a state of helplessness and victimized by individual criminals or the state. Stupid, insane, or evil.
L. Neil Smith
#53. Life is a tragic mystery. We are pierced and driven by laws we only half understand, we find that the lesson we learn again and again is that of accepting heroic helplessness.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
#54. On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors.
Martin Seligman
#55. There is a vast difference between having some coin and no coin. There is a feeling of helplessness that comes from an empty purse.
Patrick Rothfuss
#56. Helplessness is a place of power if you're helpless before God. Ask God for help in everything you do.
Joyce Meyer
#57. Sickness, doctors, that scares me, not violence
helplessness. That's why I turn to violent stories.
Warren Zevon
#58. His silence hadn't been helplessness - it hadn't even been love. It had been pity.
Mary Karr
#59. Don't you see? The catastrophe is me. My very existence is an affront to everything that is natural and good.
K.J. Wignall
#60. Prayer is helplessness casting itself on Power, infirmity leaning on Strength, misery reaching to Mercy, and a prisoner clamoring for Relief.
Fulton J. Sheen
#61. I scorned the insinuation of helplessness and distraction, shook off his hand, and began to walk about again.
Charlotte Bronte
#62. The exile is a singular, whereas refugees tend to be thought of in the mass ... What is implied in these nuances of social standing is the respect we pay to choice. The exile appears to have made a decision, while the refugee is the very image of helplessness.
Mary McCarthy
#63. Charlie Chaplin said something to the effect that humor is an act of defiance, that we must laugh in the face of our helplessness in the forces of nature or go insane. And where is he now? Dead.
Doug Stanhope
#64. You suggested, Jonas, that perhaps she wasn't brave enough? I don't know about bravery: what it is, what it means. I do know that I sat here numb with horror. Wretched with helplessness. And I listened as Rosemary told them that she would prefer to inject herself.
Lois Lowry
#65. Prayer may be a placebo for the disease of helplessness, but placebos can make you feel better.
David Mitchell
#66. Breaking, in modern psychology, 'learned helplessness.' This is where you crush an animal's desire to fight. Why is it that we believe broken things are tamed possessions?
Rebecca K. O'Connor
#67. What makes or breaks us ultimately is our attitude toward the things we can't control.
Marty Rubin
#68. Adulthood is supposed to be about "a disciplining of a developmentally appropriate insanity". "Adolescents, and their parents who were once adolescents, are simply experiencing two kinds of helplessness. Helplessness born of experience and the helplessness born of lack of experience".
Phillips
#70. Prayer and helplessness are inseparable. Only he who is helpless can truly pray. Your helplessness is your best. prayer.
Ole Hallesby
#71. With the eeriness of the pounding I couldn't help but think about my nonphysical traits ones known only by me. Much to my relief they rarely appeared. When they did the instability of their power and my helplessness to control them frightened me down to my core.
T.R. Graves
#72. The preacher's work is to throw sinners down into utter helplessness that they may be compelled to look up to Him Who alone can help them.
Charles Spurgeon
#73. 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
#74. Outrage, combining as it does shock, anger, reproach, and helplessness, is perhaps the most unmanageable, the most demoralizing of all the emotions.
Margery Allingham
#75. She felt an odd, light-hearted indifference, as if she suddenly wanted nothing but the comfort of surrendering to helplessness.
Ayn Rand
#76. 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
#77. Of all men's miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.
Herodotus
#78. And there was in her, even in her helplessness, a sense of power.
A.N. Roquelaure
#79. Every obstacle is unique to each of us. But the responses they elicit are the same: Fear. Frustration. Confusion. Helplessness. Depression. Anger.
Ryan Holiday
#80. Helplessness in the face of a child's suffering is the curse of parenthood.
Nancy Atherton
#81. Smart people admit unarmed helplessness is not only irresponsible, but, statistically, such carelessness is asking for trouble.
Mark Walters
#82. She stood beside him, sagging in his arms, abandoning herself to anything he wished, in open acknowledgment of his power to reduce her to helplessness by the pleasure he had the power to give her.
Ayn Rand
#83. Linked to frustration.
I SAW
Linked to unfairness.
WHAT YOU
Linked to guilt.
TO
Linked to helplessness.
HER
Hate.
Hate.
Hate.
DID
Linked to anger.
David Levithan
#84. Helplessness was the one true fountain of youth.
Lydia Millet
#85. Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn't matter.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
#86. I believe that God wants to put His hand upon us so that we may reach ideal definitions of humility, of human helplessness, of human insufficiency, until we will rest no more upon human plans, but have God's thoughts, God's voice, and the Holy Spirit to speak to us.
Smith Wigglesworth
#87. Only by maintaining positive thoughts, by dispelling doubt and negativity, will you impress your desires upon the universe, making it bend to your will.
Stephen Richards
#88. When the apple ripens it falls, it doesn't know what else to do.
Marty Rubin
#89. The God of freedom, the true God, is ... not recognized by his power and glory in the history of the world, but through his helplessness and his death on the scandal of the cross of Jesus
Jurgen Moltmann
#90. I can feel my face growing warm, and I hope I'm not flushing in my terror. The feeling of helplessness and fear hits me hard, and once my mind validates the emotion, the physical fear of being maimed and eaten hits my skin as goose bumps in the heat.
Lindsay Anderson
#91. If everybody takes up the solemn responsibility, within his all her means as far as possible and with all tenacity, of helping somebody, somebody will always get help from somebody
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#92. Psychologists call it "learned helplessness" when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life.
J.D. Vance
#93. The true signature and perhaps even the miracle of human love is helplessness, and all the more miraculous because it is a helplessness which we wittingly or unwittingly choose; in our love of a child, a partner, a work, or a road we have to take against the odds.
David Whyte
#94. To be commanded by one so very young," she said, "is to feel one's helplessness.
A.N. Roquelaure
#95. The basis of tragedy is man's helplessness against disease, war and death; the basis of comedy is man's helplessness against vanity (the vanity of love, greed, lust, power).
Dawn Powell
#96. Interior design is a travesty of the architectural process and a frightening condemnation of the credulity, helplessness and gullibility of the most formidable consumers - the rich.
Stephen Bayley
#97. All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
Noam Chomsky
#98. I opened up a bit and explained that I have a type I'm drawn to naturally, but that I've found that the women I've ended up loving the most have never been what I've thought of as my type, maybe because part of love is being helpless, being out of control of your own emotions.
B.J. Novak
#99. As far as I can see, prayer has been ordained only for the helpless. . . . Prayer and helplessness are inseparable. Only he who is helpless can truly pray.
Timothy Keller
#100. He began to understand why some people feared the dark so much. The sheer helplessness of not knowing what was right in front of you was terrifying.
Matthew Reilly
