Top 100 Quotes About Passivity
#1. You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.
Ian McEwan
#2. Escape is the byword - forwards, backwards, or sideways - into alcohol, busyness, good works, passivity, fantasy, or even madness. For the reality of the present and the immediate future seem even more frightening today
Peter Marshall
#3. Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity
Guy Debord
#4. 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
#5. I teach you both effort and effortlessness, because unless you attain to effortless-effort, unless you attain to active passivity, unless you attain to a singing-silence - they look paradoxical - unless you attain to an unmoving dance, you have not attained.
Rajneesh
#6. One is responsible for one's own life. Passivity provides no protection.
Madeleine M. Kunin
#7. There's no such thing as passivity. You're either consciously inactive or unconsciously inactive. In both cases, you're interfering with a certain outcome and contributing to your fate.
Robin Sacredfire
#8. Whereas Hunt recommended universal charity, Keats, feeling himself 'in a Mist', relied on a knowing passivity: 'Men should bear with each other - there lives not the Man who may not be cut up, aye hashed to pieces on his weakest side'.
Nicholas Roe
#10. Emotion, which is called a passivity of the soul, is a confused idea, whereby the mind affirms concerning its body, or any part thereof, a force for existence (existendi vis) greater or less than before, and by the presence of which the mind is determined to think of one thing rather than another.
Baruch Spinoza
#11. Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug.
Caroline Knapp
#12. This magical thinking, this idea that human and personal progress is somehow inevitable, leads to political passivity. ... It has turned whole nations, such as the United States, into self-consuming machines of death.
Chris Hedges
#14. It would be bad enough if we were just restless, meandering through life, and a little cowardly. But we've spiritualized restless and meandering cowardice, making it feel like piety instead of passivity.
Kevin DeYoung
#15. The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one's self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity; each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other.
Simone De Beauvoir
#16. Nothing remains intact without effort. Repetition of formulas does not assure the transmission of thought. It is not safe to entrust a doctrinal treasure to the passivity of memory. Intelligence must play a part in its conservation, rediscovering it, so to speak, in the process.
Henri De Lubac
#17. Although in truth her passivity was calculated, because she knew passivity inflamed him. He had her, and to some extent she wanted to be had, like an animal: in a mute mutual privacy of violence.
Jonathan Franzen
#18. I said that, on the contrary, I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible.
Rachel Cusk
#20. If something possesses no capacity for activity whatever, it is nothing; it may be wholly penetrated, but it cannot be touched. Therefore passivity and reaction are everywhere equal.
Wilhelm Von Humboldt
#21. Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.
Gaston Bachelard
#22. The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action.
Herbert Schiller
#23. Between an uncontrolled escalation and passivity, there is a demanding road of responsibility that we must follow.
Dominique De Villepin
#24. Powerlessness does not mean the weakness of resignation or the passivity of an 'anything goes'. Powerlessness does not mean inability ,not having the capacity. Powerlessness means rather leaving power behind , something as disempowering.
Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback
#25. The word satyagraha implies, Gandhi's passivity was not weakness at all. It meant focusing on an ultimate goal and refusing to divert energy to unnecessary skirmishes along the way.
Susan Cain
#26. Anna loved and didn't love sex. Anna needed and didn't need it. Her relationship with sex was a convoluted partnership that rose from both her passivity and an unassailable desire to be distracted.
Jill Alexander Essbaum
#27. Overbearing mothers usually give way to one of two things in their children: rebellion or passivity. In your case, the latter.
Tarryn Fisher
#28. The peace of God is not the peace of stoicism or passivity. It is the most intense activity.
Oswald Chambers
#29. The church of Jesus needs to wake up from the exile of passivity and embrace liminality and adventure or continue to remain a religious ghetto for culturally co-opted, fearful, middle-class folk.
Alan Hirsch
#30. The majority understood that his passivity was not that of a hero taking his ease but that of a cataclysm in repose.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#31. Passivity is really a crappy substitute for manhood. But it's as common as facial hair on a hipster, or salmon-breath on a grizzly bear.
Josh Hatcher
#32. The sight of her had pierced him, making her the enterer, had she but known it, and him the entered. Perhaps she had known, on reflection. Perhaps she'd fled from his passivity, from his ease beneath the spike of her beauty. If so, he would undo her revulsion with tonight's business. Here,
Clive Barker
#33. There is a heady sense of manhood that comes from advancing from apathy to commitment, from timidity to courage, from passivity to aggressiveness. There is an intoxication that comes from standing up to the police at last.
David T. Dellinger
#34. Passivity is fatal to us. Our goal is to make the enemy passive.
Mao Zedong
#35. Technology teaches passivity. Absorbed in our devices - at any age - we are absorbed in someone else's perspective.
Julia Cameron
#36. He enjoys the passivity of sitting in a classroom again, listening to an instructor, being told what to do. He is reminded of being a student, of a time when his father was still alive.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#37. Do Russians believe what their government tells them? Not necessarily. But that doesn't mean they are inclined to believe anybody else either, and that works to the advantage of those already in power because it takes a lot more to motivate resistance than to maintain passivity.
Anonymous
#38. When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I'm in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn't feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting.
Christopher Hitchens
#39. True contemplation can only thrive when defended from two opposite exaggerations: quietism on the one hand, and spiritual fuss upon the other. Neither from passivity nor from anxiety has it anything to gain.
Evelyn Underhill
#40. Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.
Eric Hoffer
#41. mine is an ongoing subsection more passive than any passivity.
Erin Moure
#42. Passivity breeds anxiety. To be healthy, a person needs to be having an impact on his surroundings, uplifting those about him and bringing in more light
- Rabbi M.M. Schneerson
Rabbi M.M. Schneerson
#43. Life has been thrown into the world, light into darkness, the soul into the body. It expresses the original violence done to me in making me be where I am and what I am, the passivity of my choice-less emergence into an existing world which I did not make and whose law is not mine
Hans Jonas
#44. We cannot withdraw our cards from the game. Were we as silent and mute as stones, our very passivity would be an act.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#45. For 3,000 years the Chinese owned the concept of daxue, yet no Chinaman ever came of the idea - let alone succeeded - to elevate this word permanently into the English language. What to think of such cultural passivity?
Thorsten J. Pattberg
#46. Nonviolent action, the Negro saw, was the way to supplement, not replace, the progress of change. It was the way to divest himself of passivity without arraying himself in vindictive force.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#47. Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity, in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead.
Aldous Huxley
#48. The sooner our society admits that the Negro Revolution is no momentary outburst soon to subside into placid passivity, the easier the future will be for us all.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#49. Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, even love itself. And how much we enjoy it. Our happiest moments are spent trying to think up new varieties of victimhood ...
J.G. Ballard
#50. I have no idea of submitting tamely to injustice inflicted either on me or on the slave. I will oppose it with all the moral powers with which I am endowed. I am no advocate of passivity.
Lucretia Mott
#51. There's a place between passivity and violence. I'll meet you there.
Rivera Sun
#53. This is a fine chance to let go, to "win my life by losing it," which means not recklessness but acceptance, not passivity but nonattachment.
Peter Matthiessen
#54. Hollywood is McWorld's storyteller, and it inculcates secularism, passivity, consumerism, vicariousness, impulse buying, and an accelerated pace of life, not as a result of its overt themes and explicit story lines but by virtue of what Hollywood is and how its products are consumed.
Benjamin R. Barber
#55. Male passivity is a disease that robs a man of his purpose while it destroys marriages, ruins families, and spoils legacies. A passive man doesn't engage; he retreats. He neglects personal responsibility. At its core, passivity is cowardice.
Dennis Rainey
#56. [T]he problem was too much information. The population was being inundated with conflicting versions of increasingly complex events. People were giving up on understanding anything. The glut of information was dulling awareness, not aiding it. Overload. It encouraged passivity, not involvement.
Jerry Mander
#57. Captivating the spirit of the age is a matter of great talent; being swept away by it characterizes an average mind. The two are as different from one another as activity and passivity.
Franz Grillparzer
#58. I don't understand my own sporadic collapses into passivity. Perhaps I never will.
Helen Garner
#59. Passivity can be a provoking modus operandi;
Consider the Empire and Gandhi.
Ogden Nash
#60. Prostitution is said to be the world's oldest profession . It is, indeed, a model of all professional work: the worker relinquishes control over himself ... in exchange for money. Because of the passivity it entails, this is a difficult and, for many, a distasteful role.
Thomas Szasz
#61. The passivity of the green girl masquerades as politeness
Kate Zambreno
#62. It is all too easy as an artist to allow the shape of our career to be dictated to us by others. We can so easily wait to be chosen. Such passivity invites despair. To remain healthy and vital, artists must stay proactive in their own behalf.
Julia Cameron
#63. Many of us learned that passivity lessened the possibility of attack.
Bell Hooks
#64. A large segment of the public willingly resigns itself to political passivity in a world in which it cannot expect to make well-founded judgments.
Richard Hofstadter
#66. Mediocrity is the companion of passivity and will not heed the call of great things. Courage is the companion of sacrifice and cannot help but heed the call of great things. And we are left of our own accord to choose one or the other.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#67. In using the style of the erotic/pornographic story, I am interested in dismantling stereotypes of an essential feminine identity, particularly one of exclusive tenderness and passivity.
Barbara Degenevieve
#68. Do not turn the superior eye of critical passivity upon these efforts ... We must not be ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint-box.
Winston Churchill
#69. Will is based on activity, whim on passivity.
Erich Fromm
#70. [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
#71. The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.
W. H. Auden
#72. The public must be reduced to passivity in the political realm, but for submissiveness to become a reliable trait, it must be entrenched in the realm of belief as well.
Noam Chomsky
#73. Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives are lived with passivity toward death - it's something that happens to you and those around you.
Paul Kalanithi
#74. Jesus abhors both passivity and violence as responses to evil.
Walter Wink
#75. Too often in the past, U.S. leaders have forced Israel to pay the price for American strategic interests in the Middle East - through concessions in the peace process as well as passivity in the face of Iraqi attacks.
Ron Silver
#76. Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism.
Dorothy Thompson
#77. The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity.
Rollo May
#78. Nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#79. Though the passivity of woman's role weighs on me, suffocates me. Rather than wait for his pleasure, I would like to take it, to run wild. Is it that which pushes me into lesbianism? [...] Do women act thus?
Anais Nin
#80. Remember that our Spanish conquerors, for their own benefit, deliberately created an oppressed underclass whose collective psyche became rooted in passivity and underachievement.
Lionel Sosa
#81. What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being.
Wendell Berry
#82. Worshiping someone requires complete passivity. To turn the principle of immobility into a rule.
Unica Zurn
#83. It must take the most incredible self-control, that stillness, that passivity; it must be exhausting.
Paula Hawkins
#84. 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
#85. Passivity is the dragon every woman has to murder in her quest for independence.
Jill Johnston
#86. People are so familiar with the show that I think they're perfectly happy to let it go by without asking any questions. There's a passivity to how we experience 'The Sound of Music.'
Jack O'Brien
#87. The longer I live the more I believe that the greatest enemy of a victorious Christian life is passivity.
Charles R. Swindoll
#88. Would have. Could have. Should have. This is the language of condemnation underscored by the passivity of regret. It's a dead language. The thing is, you can't un-sin. You can only repent.
Steven Furtick
#89. Any belief system that is based on fear, encourages weakness, sanctions intolerance threatens vengeance, promotes passivity and requires you to relinquish your personal power is doing you a disservice.
Walt F.J. Goodridge
#90. Acceptance is not passivity. It is a courageous step in the process of transformation.
Jack Kornfield
#91. Spirituality promotes passivity when the domain of spirit is defined as outside the world. When this world is the terrain of spirit, we ourselves become actors in the story, and this world becomes the realm in which the sacred must be honored and freedom created.
Starhawk
#92. One of my moments of coming to writing, of needing to write to attempt to create myself, to attempt to absolve and understand my past passivity, came when a girl I loved very much, who I had been estranged from for some time, killed herself.
Kate Zambreno
#93. As people become more dependent on God, their capacity for ambition and action increases. Dependency doesn't breed passivity; it breeds energy and accomplishment.
David Brooks
#94. Pessimistic labels lead to passivity, whereas optimistic ones lead to attempts to change.
Martin E.P. Seligman
#95. Passivity may be the easy course, but it is hardly the honorable one.
Noam Chomsky
#96. Inside the family, you can go from hate to passivity to extreme love within the same hour.
Claire Denis
#97. The desperate resilience,the annoyed flamboyance;his personable passivity and his phobic aggressiveness; all trapped in the clever wrinkles of his fingers, the hard unsociable cast of his knuckles, the safe hopelessness of the pads.
Brandon Shire
#98. As soon as one is conscious of the presence of the Master, one must, in all passivity, abandon the work to Him.
Thomas Merton
#99. passivity means waiting for an opportunity,
Sun Tzu
#100. Take the so-called standard of living. What do most people mean by "living"? They don't mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science, in its finite but unbounded wisdom, has succeeded in selling their wives.
E. E. Cummings
