Quotes About Helplessness

#1. It is hardly possible to build anything if frustration, bitterness and a mood of helplessness prevail.

Lech Walesa

#2. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self-delusion.

H.L. Mencken

#3. I find a certain comfort," confesses Marinus, "in humanity's helplessness.

David Mitchell

#4. Helplessness united with faith produces prayer, for without faith there can be no prayer.

Ole Hallesby

#5. We have complete choice as individuals: the only decisions we can take are our own. And yet so many species use the state of being an individual as an excuse for inaction, helplessness and irresponsibility.No situation is so overwhelming that action is pointless.
Targassat of Surang.

Karen Traviss

#6. Never underestimate the power of helplessness!

Marilyn French

#7. No writer besides Shakespeare has created more memorable characters attached to vices and virtues. In even their least sympathetic characters, one senses a kind of helplessness to passion quivering between the poles of good and evil.

Roger Rosenblatt

#8. [U]ntil feminists work to empower femininity and pry it away from the insipid, inferior meanings that plague it - weakness, helplessness, fragility, passivity, frivolity, and artificiality - those meanings will continue to haunt every person who is female and/or feminine.

Julia Serano

#9. Lazy doesn't exist. Lazy is a symptom of something else. The person who can't get up off their butt is just a person who's depressed. It's usually a pervasive lack of self-worth, or a feeling of helplessness.

Jillian Michaels

#10. Dew. Their feet scuffed the dark sidewalks. Raymond had two moods now. Despair came with no warning, rogue waves of helplessness that sucked him out on a rippling tide. When it receded, he was left with a dry and

Edward W. Robertson

#11. A wave of frantic helplessness was building inside me, threatening to turn tidal. I didn't dare give in to panic. I had to stay calm and focused and work on moving forward however I could, even if it meant taking baby steps.

Karen Marie Moning

#12. The intellectual and constant retelling of a victim story becomes a broken record, deepening the groove of helplessness in the nervous system.

Deborah Sandella

#13. Human beings invent myth, ideology, and religion as means of denying reality and replacing death with palliative fantasies. Helplessness and death are blows to human narcissism. Human beings create illusions about themselves, lie to themselves as a means to feel secure and less vulnerable.

Jerry Piven

#14. Love is both a principle and an emotion; it is something both felt and willed. It is capable of almost infinite degrees. Love in the human heart may begin so modestly as to be hardly perceptible and go on to become a raging torrent that sweeps its possessor before it in total helplessness.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

#15. Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.

Barnett Newman

#16. There is no word for feeling nostalgic about the future, but that's what a parent's tears often are, a nostalgia for something that has not yet occurred. They are the pain of hope, the helplessness of hope, and finally, the surrender to hope.

Michael Ian Black

#17. Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.

Elizabeth Bowen

#18. Morality which depends upon the helplessness of a man or woman has not much to recommend it. Morality is rooted in the purity of our hearts.

Mahatma Gandhi

#19. 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

#20. I am no longer surprised by anything and I feel no distress at seeing my complete helplessness. On the contrary, I glory in it and every day I expect to discover fresh flaws in myself. In fact, this revelation of my nothingness does me much more good than being enlightened on matters of faith.

John Beevers

#21. Parents sometimes forget that after the child emerges from the utter physical and mental helplessness of infancy, it is becoming more and more an individual.

Prentice Mulford

#22. I know of nothing more moving, indeed semi-tragic, than the yearning helplessness in the face of a dog, who understands what is said to him, and can not answer!

Bayard Taylor

#23. Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.

Neil Gaiman

#24. In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#25. What they do not comprehend is man's helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn't it that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small ... and you will escape the jealousy of the great.

Philip K. Dick

#26. It is when we come to the Lord in our nothingness, our powerlessness and our helplessness that He then enables us to love in a way which, without Him, would be absolutely impossible.

Elisabeth Elliot

#27. There were other refugees around him experiencing the same fears and helplessness, but Litvinoff didn't find any comfort in this because there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone. Litvinoff preferred to be alone.

Nicole Krauss

#28. Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance.

Theodor W. Adorno

#29. Helplessness is a mighty power.

Mason Cooley

#30. His utter helplessness at the sight of my tears leaked through his confident voice. It was almost funny that such a great warrior as Hasani was reduced to panic at the sight of a stupid tear or two.

Courtney Cole

#31. This feeling of helplessness in us has arisen from our deliberate dismissal of God from our common affairs.

Mahatma Gandhi

#32. Grace seeks faith like a heat-seeking missile. In salvation, the act of faith is a raw admission of helplessness. It is abject humility reaching out empty hands. By exercising faith, you acknowledge your inability so that you might rest on Christ's ability.

Bill Giovannetti

#33. If nothing else, races bring people together. Even if it is through a shared sense of helplessness and loss of dignity.

Dana L. Ayers

#34. With each stride, I realize I'm not so emotionally overwhelmed anymore. A sense of purpose and fulfillment has replaced my feelings of helplessness.

Sandra Vischer

#35. Do you vote? If not, is it because you think it doesn't matter because things never change, or politicians are evil on both sides, or one vote in several million doesn't count? Yeah, that's learned helplessness.

David McRaney

#36. Your situation and prospects only seem hopeless because you have ideas of hope. Knock off that hope and the crippling feelings of helplessness go with it.

U.G. Krishnamurti

#37. Helplessness was a strange experience, new to her; she had never found it hard to face things and make decisions; but she was not dealing with things - this was a fog without shapes or definitions, in which something kept forming and shifting before it could be seen ...

Ayn Rand

#38. Violence is anything that denies human integrity, and leads to hopelessness and helplessness.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#39. Whenever there was a crisis, I found a man to help me take the edge off the feelings of helplessness and pain.

Susan Cheever

#40. But in the darkness of her room he was reminded that helplessness was often a portal to God, because rarely did the fragile, self-serving human pray for things in his complete control.

Rene Gutteridge

#41. A woman's greatest charm consists in a constant appeal to a man's generosity by a gracious declaration of helplessness which fills him with pride and awakens the most magnificent feelings in his heart.

Honore De Balzac

#42. Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility. Our

Michael Pollan

#43. There was a helplessness to his joy, the same kind of helplessness as in that woman's despair.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#44. O.K., helplessness is repugnant to me, as a father, as a piece of protoplasm. My parents were activists. I don't believe you can't do anything.

Marshall Brickman

#45. So the poor instead of bread made do with a picture of the bleeding scourged and nailed-up Christ and prayed to that image of their helplessness

Peter Weiss

#46. To diminish the suffering of pain, we need to make a crucial distinction between the pain of pain, and the pain we create by our thoughts about the pain. Fear, anger, guilt, loneliness and helplessness are all mental and emotional responses that can intensify pain.

Howard Cutler

#47. All we want in Christ, we shall find in Christ. If we want little, we shall find little. If we want much, we shall find much; but if, in utter helplessness, we cast our all on Christ, He will be to us the whole treasury of God.

Henry Benjamin Whipple

#48. 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

#49. Gangs are a group reaction to helplessness.

Jesse Jackson

#50. As the plane got closer to Miami, I had this terrible feeling he was dying. Maybe he was telling me that he was going. I felt anger, panic, despair and helplessness.

Robin Gibb

#51. Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes.

Mason Cooley

#52. Nothing is ever settled," says Jocelyn. "Every day is different. Isn't it better to do something because you've decided to? Rather than because you have to?" "No, it isn't," says Charmaine. "Love isn't like that. With love, you can't stop yourself." She wants the helplessness, she wants ...

Margaret Atwood

#53. Thinking of the anguish of his final days and my own helplessness in the face of it, makes everything I have done, everything I want to do, seem as unsubstantial as the little vows you make yourself as you're going to sleep, the ones you've already forgotten by the time you wake up.

Khaled Hosseini

#54. Helplessness is the real secret and the impelling power of prayer.

Ole Hallesby

#55. No, indeed!" she cried, all indignation. "I have no notion of asking people to perform services for me which I can do perfectly well for myself. I do not intend to go, in the space of one hour, from the helplessness of enchantment to another sort of helplessness!" pg. 761

Susanna Clarke

#56. God says, "I will speak to you," but Daniel cannot hear. Can we? Is it not so with us, that in this unholy turmoil and helplessness, we say, "God go away!" Yes, we know it is stupid. But if you come, then it is all over.

Edwin H. Robertson

#57. In a single, silent moment, his rage, his fear, his humiliation and helplessness, had fallen away. That morning, he believed, he was a new creation. Softly, he wept.

Laura Hillenbrand

#58. She'd burst if she didn't tell him, die painfully if he let her go. Emotion clogged her throat. Helplessness ached in her stomach.

Kelly Moran

#59. Healing begins when, in the face of our own darkness, we recognize our helplessness and surrender our need for control ... we face what is, and we ask for mercy.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

#60. 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

#61. Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.

Doris Lessing

#62. My own work on depression demonstrated that men and women often have different symptoms, with males often becoming more irritable, angry, and aggressive when they are depressed, while women show the more inward symptoms such as sadness, helplessness, and hopelessness.

Jed Diamond

#63. These were the companions who justified my principles, who gave me the strength to continue against any foe, real or imagined. These were the companions who fought the helplessness, the rage, and frustration.
These were the friends who gave me my life.

R.A. Salvatore

#64. He knew, for the moment, that he felt affection for Roark; an affection that held pain, astonishment and helplessness.

Ayn Rand

#65. Helplessness is your best prayer. It calls from your heart to the heart of God with greater effect than all your uttered pleas.

Ole Hallesby

#66. The moment a man falls into sin, divine life ceases to flow, and his life becomes one of helplessness.

Smith Wigglesworth

#67. Do the things you think you cannot do. Do all the good you can, by all the means available, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, all the times you can, for as long as ever you can. Our own feelings of helplessness are our own worst enemy.

Mia Farrow

#68. Good-bye, Christian, she says, and her voice falters, as if she's trying not to cry. Shit. My whole mood shifts from irritation and concern for her well-being to helplessness as her car roars off up the street. I don't know if I'll see her again.

E.L. James

#69. You can't forge a relationship with learned helplessness, you can only force one and it will always be tenuous. There is always the possibility the peregrine will rediscover the strength of his heart.

Rebecca K. O'Connor

#70. You win some, you lose some, and your losses are never made up to you. She will simply have to do without; like it or not, she must face her losses and her helplessness to undo them.

Sheldon B. Kopp

#71. They called it the Great War, but that implied worthiness and grandeur, not violence and helplessness and the utter waste and devastation our country, our city, our people endured.

M.J. Rose

#72. What would any man do with a soggy girl who can't assert herself, who has a weak voice, and whose main personality component is helplessness?

Steve Martin

#73. The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.

Don DeLillo

#74. When the individual is relieved of the obligation of self-respect, he acquires the habits of helplessness; he is inclined to retreat to the security of the prenatal state. The more he is taken care of the more he wants care.

Frank Chodorov

#75. In case anyone in America had missed the utter helplessness of their government, 4,000 British troops captured and burned Washington DC. The Presidential mansion, where the decision for war had been taken, was one of the public buildings to be torched.

Andrew D. Lambert

#76. The drive to resist compulsion is more important in wild animals than sex, food, or water ... The drive for competence or to resist compulsion is a drive to avoid helplessness.

Martin Seligman

#77. Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war.

B.H. Liddell Hart

#78. Instinct is a makeshift, an admission of helplessness before the problem of reality.

Leo Frobenius

#79. Through Jesus we don't need perfect righteousness, just repentant helplessness, to access the presence of God.

Timothy Keller

#80. Your defeat is not only a reality, which has been historically proven time and again. It can also be seen in your helplessness and your inability to suppress the movement, in your desperate conduct when faced with our guerrillas and the vanguard of the people.

Ashraf Dehghani

#81. To get Swaraj is to get rid of our helplessness.

Mahatma Gandhi

#82. The risks of liberty we must let everyone take; but the risks of ignorance and self-helplessness are another matter.

George Bernard Shaw

#83. As long as you feel your own weakness and helplessness, you will find help from above.

John Wesley

#84. A fear is a reaction to a specific danger, to which the individual can make a specific adjustment. But what characterizes anxiety is the feeling of diffuseness and uncertainty and the experience of helplessness toward the threat.

Rollo May

#85. The desolation and terror of, for the first time, realizing that the mother can lose you, or you her, and your own abysmal loneliness and helplessness without her.

Francis Thompson

#86. The President faced the microphone with a look of utter helplessness, like a man reading My Pet Goat to a group of pre-schoolers as a major terrorist attack happens elsewhere.

Mike Resnick

#87. She lay dying, wrapped in invisible robes of martyrdom, presenting her helplessness and passivity to him like adornments, and his dominant feeling was distaste.

Robert Galbraith

#88. To pray is to open the door unto Jesus and admit Him into your distress. Your helplessness is the very thing which opens wide the door unto Him and gives Him access to all your needs.

Ole Hallesby

#89. Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation.

Martin Seligman

#90. I refuse to live in ignorance and helplessness.

Amber Argyle

#91. To condemn someone to death is to surrender; it proves that you failed. You are not able to change him, to change her; you have to kill him or her. You surrender ... You only demonstrate your lack of capacity, your helplessness. This is failure.

Nhat Hanh

#92. There is
in world affairs
a steady course to be followed between an assertion of strength that is truculent and a confession of helplessness that is cowardly.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#93. It felt as though they were the only people in the world, two young women about to bury the symbol of their helplessness, as if that's all it would take to make them whole again.

Sarah Addison Allen

#94. Helplessness becomes prayer the moment that you go to Jesus and speak candidly and confidently with him about your needs. This is to believe.

Ole Hallesby

#95. The main trouble with despair is that it is self-fulfilling. People who fear the worst tend to invite it. Heads that are down can't scan the horizon for new openings. Bursts of energy do not spring from a spirit of defeat. Ultimately, helplessness leads to hopelessness.

Norman Cousins

#96. Jacky, who had read and admired Mary Wollstonecraft, and despised the fashion of fluttery helplessness in women, felt, to her own annoyance, close to fainting.

Tim Powers

#97. The defense against childish helplessness is what lends its characteristic features to the adult's reaction to the helplessness which he has to acknowledge - a reaction which is precisely the formation of religion.

Sigmund Freud

#98. It was the helplessness that scared the both of us.

Lois Lowry

#99. In the culture people talk about trauma as an event that happened a long time ago. But what trauma is, is the imprints that event has left on your mind and in your sensations... the discomfort you feel and the agitation you feel and the rage and the helplessness you feel right now.

Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

#100. Realizing all over again how important sunlight is to human beings, I appreciate each second of that precious light. The intense loneliness and helplessness I felt under those millions of stars has vanished

Haruki Murakami