Impotent Quotes & Sayings

After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write. Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow. the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind. — Ali Shaw

Donald Lydecker: Alcoholism is not a disease, it's a failing. You've turned it into a church. You worship the altar of self-pity. I come to these rooms for one reason, to remember what I don't want to become ... helpless, impotent, and weak. — James Cameron

The consulships were not the only ornamental offices in Roman society: the Eternal City was filled with the comings and goings of impotent men - senators, magistrates, bustling administrators of all kinds - performing meaningless duties. — Thomas Cahill

Finally, spurred by the appetite to which he was indifferent, he took any one, read the printing on the parti-colored label of paper. He held the soup can like a skull; and at once he did not want it. The soup was made from celery. Mr. Lecky put it back. He stood in mild misery, harassed again by the plague of a will impotent in its restored freedom.
If the mind cannot direct, it can be cunning to protect its ease. Mr. Lecky now proposed a fantastic pact to himself. He shut his eyes. He reached again and took a can. Eyes still shut, he ripped the label from it, crumpled and threw away the paper. Now he could not tell what he had until he opened it. — James Gould Cozzens

And now fear spread over the countryside. People no longer knew against whom
to direct their impotent rage. — Patrick Suskind

Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world. Other beliefs are pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of life. — Sophia Lyon Fahs

His constant, despairing prayer was to be let alone. By the blue waters and rustling palms of his own mind he was happy and harmless as a Polynesian; only when the big ship dropped anchor beyond the coral reef, and the cutter beached in the lagoon, and, up the slope that had never known the print of a boot, there trod the grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary, and tourist - only then was it time to disinter the archaic weapons of the tribe and sound the drums in the hills; or, more easily, to turn from the sunlit door and lie alone in the darkness, where the impotent, painted deities paraded the walls in vain, and cough his heart out among the rum bottles. And — Evelyn Waugh

Cocaine for me was a place to hide. Most people get hyper on coke. It slowed me down. Sometimes it made me paranoid and impotent, but mostly it just made me withdrawn. — Robin Williams

But the works of man are impotent against the assaults of nature ... — Edward Gibbon

Decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. — Winston S. Churchill

The old men from the charity hospital next door would come jerking past our rooms, making useless, disjointed leaps. They'd go from room to room, spitting out gossip between their decayed teeth, purveying scraps of malignant worn-out slander. Cloistered in their official misery as in an oozing dungeon, those aged workers ruminated the layer of shit that long years of servitude deposit on men's souls. Impotent hatreds grown rancid in the pissy idleness of dormitories. They employed their last quavering energies in hurting each other a little more. In destroying what little pleasure they had left.
Their last remaining pleasure! Their shriveled carcasses contained not one solitary atom that was not absolutely vicious! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities. — Dee Hock

We priests are sneered at and always shall be - the accusation is such an easy one - as deeply envious, hypocritical haters of virility. Yet whosoever has experienced sin must know that lust, with its parasitic growth, is for ever threatening to stifle virility as well as intelligence. Impotent to create, it can only contaminate in the germ the frail promise of humanity; it is probably at the very source, the primal cause of all human blemishes; and when amid the windings of this huge jungle whose paths are unknown, we encounter Lust, just as she is, as she emerged forth from the hands of the Master of Prodigies, the cry from our hearts is not only terror but imprecation: 'You, you alone have set death loose upon the world! — Georges Bernanos

We must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and aesthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent. — Lewis Mumford

Lf the attribute of popular government in peace is virtue, the attribute of popular government in revolution is at one and the same time virtue and terror, virtue without which terror is fatal, terror without which virtue is impotent. The terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue. — Maximilien Robespierre

Guns are the crutches of the impotent. — Arthur C. Clarke

There are some things which happen to us which the intelligence and the senses refuse just as the stomach sometimes refuses what the palate has accepted but which digestion cannot compass _occurences which stop us dead as though by some impalpable intervention, like a sheet of glass through which we watch all subsequent events transpire as though in a soundless vacuum, and fade, vanish; are gone, leaving us immobile, impotent, helpless; fixed, until we can die. — William Faulkner

One thing being crowned a queen in Wonderland has taught me: Power is impotent unless it's cultivated with risks. — A.G. Howard

Any love is condemned to suffer a murderous persecution. We are impotent of feeling and do not forgive other people's love. So don't let anyone know that you love. — Nelson Rodrigues

The boys went off to fight with swords while girls had to learn dog barks and owl hoots. No wonder princesses were so impotent in fairy tales, she thought. If all they could do was smile, stand straight, and speak to squirrels, then what choice did they have but to wait for a boy to rescue them? — Soman Chainani

If grief could burn out
Like a sunken coal,
The heart would rest quiet,
The unrent soul
Be still as a veil;
But I have watched all night

The fire grow silent,
The grey ash soft:
And I stir the stubborn flint
The flames have left,
And grief stirs, and the deft
Heart lies impotent. — Philip Larkin

Meeting one another they spoke about the factory and the machines, had their fling against their foreman, conversed and thought only of matters closely and manifestly connected with their work. Only rarely, and then but faintly, did solitary sparks of impotent thought glimmer in the wearisome monotony of their talk. — Maxim Gorky

Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. I learned about these qualities during my bouts with depression. In that deadly darkness, the faculties I had always depended on collapsed. My intellect was useless; my emotions were dead; my will was impotent; my ego was shattered. But from time to time, deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive even when the rest of me wanted to die. That something was my tough and tenacious soul. — Parker J. Palmer

It was probably indecent to think of a corpse as impotent. But he was, very likely. That would be why his wife had taken up with the prize-fighter Red Evans Williams of Castell Goch. — Ford Madox Ford

Listen, I traipse no I run no I sprint--a fat, impotent ghoul sprung straight from the cellar of my childhood home--past the pregnant girl with five skeletal children and the nun and the synagogue with its windows stoned through and I'm headed directly for my daughter, Sylvia, at her school where she's stationed with classmates of wannabe punks and black boys with their heads shaved and every one of them, apes, gushing out their hormones as I sprint to the edge of the Earth where Sylvia studies the canon of our national literature that I'm desperately trying to forget. — Leland Pitts-Gonzalez

Some people will say, "Oh, but women have the real power, bottom power." And for non-Nigerians, "bottom power" is an expression in which I suppose means something like a woman who uses her sexuality to get favors from men. But "bottom power" is not power at all. Bottom power means that a woman simply has a good root to tap into, from time to time, somebody else's power. And then of course we have to wonder when that somebody else is in a bad mood, or sick, or impotent. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

But each one of us is guilty insofar as he remained inactive. The guilt of passivity is different. Impotence excuses; no moral law demands a spectacular death. Plato already deemed it a matter of course to go into hiding in desperate times of calamity, and to survive. But passivity knows itself morally guilty of every failure, every neglect to act whenever possible, to shield the imperiled, to relieve wrong, to countervail. Impotent submission always left a margin of activity which, though not without risk, could still be cautiously effective. Its anxious omission weighs upon the individual as moral guilt. Blindness for the misfortune of others, lack of imagination of the heart, inner differences toward the witnessed evil
that is moral guilt. — Karl Jaspers

When I was seventeen I went to college to escape my father's impotent rage and my mother's infinite capacity for forgiveness. — Christina Baker Kline

Mystified by the change in their formerly awkward relationship, Christopher asked Bennett what had happened to alter it.
"I told her I was impotent from old war wounds," Bennett said. "That calmed her nerves considerably."
Taken aback, Christopher had brought himself to ask gingerly, "Are you?"
"Hell no," came Bennett's indignant reply. "I only said it because she was so skittish around me. And it worked."
Christopher had given him a sardonic glance. "Are you ever going to tell Audrey the truth?"
A mischievous smile had played at the corners of Bennett's lips. "I may let her cure me soon," he admitted. — Lisa Kleypas

The deer hovered by the trees beyond as the sounds of the ravening wolves came to them across the grass, their own senses almost frozen in impotent horror. — David Clement-Davies

As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies - but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am, unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied ... In spite of everything I survive. — Aldous Huxley

Regrets ... Regrets are bootless. A vain trick of the mind. An impotent raging against what cannot be changed anyway. A distraction from the moment. — Andrew Ashling

No one thinks to make the goddess a cup of tea; they just ply her with useless perfumed oils and impotent carved fetishes. — Jade Chang

The changeover from one medium to another presents both opportunities and challenges. New technologies empower us, to be sure; but never without some cost which we universally fail to anticipate. We must avoid celebrating the advantages too enthusiastically, lest we miss the meaning of the challenges. For once the changeover is complete, the opportunities and challenges fully assimilated, we will certainly be impotent to undo them. — Peter K. Fallon

He who has once stood beside the grave, to look back upon the companionship which has been forever closed, feeling how impotent there are the wild love, or the keen sorrow, to give one instant's pleasure to the pulseless heart, or atone in the lowest measure to the departed spirit for the hour of unkindness, will scarcely for the future incur that debt to the heart which can only be discharged to the dust. — John Ruskin

What nobody seems to understand is that love can only be one-sided, that no other love exists, that in any other form it is not love. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love. It is impotent; for the moment it is nothing. — Andrei Tarkovsky

I look upon paradoxes as the impotent efforts of men who, not having capacity to draw attention and celebrity from good sense, fly to eccentricities to make themselves noted. — Horace Walpole

What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and the impotent, are my masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey? — Ayn Rand

smouldering away in a fit of impotent rage — Annabel Crabb

I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. — Ronald Reagan

We? 'Twas me who found the marks, not you, not any of you Aegean fools. And your king is the biggest fool of all, for if he'd deigned to unbind me before he sent us here to die, I could have listened for what we seek and followed it that way. Now I am as impotent as you.
If considerably less ugly and stupid. — Rachel Haimowitz

Power seems to confer on its possessor a mantle of superiority, specialness, and sexual potency, which the envious person desperately wants because he feels himself on some level to be inferior, unimportant, and impotent. — Alexander Lowen

No wonder princesses were so impotent in fairy tales, she thought. If all they could do was smile, stand straight, and speak to squirrels, then what choice did they have but to wait for a boy to rescue them? Princess — Soman Chainani

If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort. — Mark Fisher

The bottle, with its impotent message, was gone out to sea, and the problem that it had provoked was reduced to a simple sum in addition - one and one make two, by the rule of arithmetic; one by the rule of romance. — O. Henry

Let us, at the very commencement of our meditations, admit that there is nothing so natural to man, nothing so insidious and hidden from our sight, nothing so difficult and dangerous, as pride. Let us feel that [as if] nothing but a very determined and persevering waiting on God and Christ will discover [show] how lacking we are in the grace of humility, and how impotent to obtain what we seek. Let us study the character of Christ until our souls are filled with the love and admiration of his lowliness. And let us believe that, when we are broken down under a sense of our pride, and our impotence to cast it out, Jesus Christ himself will come in to impart this grace too, as a part of his wondrous life within us. — Andrew Murray

Correct or not, he felt himself to be a useless pensioner, an impotent object of charity. — Robert A. Heinlein

In her world, husbands were omnipotent, never impotent. — Rabih Alameddine

And the two essential and indispensable things are first of all intelligence in the right most sense of that word and goodwill or the old fashion word charity/love, I mean these two things have to go hand in hand. Intelligence and knowledge without charity or goodwill would perhaps be inhuman and goodwill or charity undirected by intelligence or knowledge would be either impotent or misguided, the two have to go together. — Aldous Huxley

Lenz likes him, and there's always this slight hangnail of fear, like clinging, whenever he likes somebody. It's like something terrible could happen at any time. Less fear than a kind of tension in the region of stomach and ass, an all-body wince. Deciding to go ahead and think somebody's a stand-up guy: it's like you drop something, you give up all of your power over it: you have to stand there impotent waiting for it to hit the ground: all you can do is brace and wince. It kind of enrages Lenz to like somebody. — David Foster Wallace

Without a conscious life-purpose a man is totally lost, drifting, adapting to events rather than creating events. Without knowing his life-purpose a man lives a weakend, impotent existence, perhaps even becoming even sexually impotent or prone to mechanical and disinterested sex. — David Deida

We were talking briefly about cocaine ... yeah. Anything that makes you paranoid and impotent, give me more of that! — Robin Williams

Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent. — Frantz Fanon

People are not lazy, they simply have impotent goals..that is..goals that do not inspire them. — Anthony Robbins

An ad that pretends to be art is
at absolute best
like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair. — David Foster Wallace

People rely on intelligence to solve problems, and they are naturally baffled when comprehension proves impotent to effect emotional change. To the neocortical brain, rich in the power of abstractions, understanding makes all the difference, but it doesn't count for much in the neural systems that evolved before understanding existed. Ideas bounce like so many peas off the sturdy incomprehension of the limbic and reptilian brains. The dogged implicitness of emotional knowledge, its relentless unreasoning force, prevents logic from granting salvation just as it precludes self-help books from helping. The sheer volume and variety of self-help paraphernalia testify at once to the vastness of the appetite they address and their inability to satisfy it. (118) — Thomas Lewis

Elisabetta Gonzaga de Montefeltro, Duchess of Urbino, was one of the most celebrat women of her age. . . She was much praised for her saintliness in enduring a sexless marriage to Guidobaldo who was both impotent and for much of his life crippled by what was described as 'gout' but was probably rheumatoid arthritis, which deformed his body from a young age. According to the archivist Luzio, despite his impotence Guidobaldo was extremely erotically inclined, so that Elisabetta was in a state of suspense every day in case he might fall upon her and have a relapse. — Sarah Bradford

Transportation is the center of the world! It is the glue of our daily lives. When it goes well, we don't see it. When it goes wrong, it negatively colors our day, makes us feel angry and impotent, curtails our possibilities. — Robin Chase

The crowd, in fact, is composed of individuals; it must therefore be in every man's power to become what he is, an individual. From becoming an individual no one, no one at all, is excluded, except he who excludes himself by becoming a crowd. To become a crowd, to collect a crowd about one, is on the contrary to affirm the distinctions of human life. The most well-meaning person who talks about these distinctions can easily offend an individual. But then it is not the crowd which possesses power, influence, repute, and mastery over men, but it is the invidious distinctions of human life which despotically ignore the single individual as the weak and impotent, which in a temporal and worldly interest ignore the eternal truth- the single individual. — Soren Kierkegaard

I dip my forefinger in the watery blood of your impotent mad redeemer, and write over his thorn-torn brow: The true prince of evil- the king of the slaves! — Anton Szandor LaVey

And whereas many men, by accident unevitable, become unable to maintain themselves by their labour; they ought not to be left to the Charity of private persons; but to be provided for, (as far-forth as the necessities of Nature require,) by the Lawes of the Common-wealth. For as it is Unchariablenesse in any man, to neglect the impotent; so it is in the Soveraign of a Common-wealth, to expose them to the hazard of such uncertain Charity. — Thomas Hobbes

Satisfied he had made his point, he left me there to cough up blood and bile and impotent rage. And fear. — Nenia Campbell

Age has no pleasures, wrinkles have no influence, revenge itself dies away in impotent curses. Then comes remorse, with all its vipers, mixed with vain regrets for the past, and despair for the future! - Then, when all other strong impulses have ceased, we become like the fiends in hell, who may feel remorse, but never repentance. - But thy — Walter Scott

The reason they don't explain this to us is because they know that if we find out the extraordinary lengths that they're going to to fuck us over, we will overthrow the current system and replace it with something fair. That's why all this important stuff is made to seem inaccessible, boring, and abstract. That is why our participation in politics has been sanded down into an impotent nub. Stick your "X" into this box and congratulate yourself on being free. — Russell Brand

I have no ideas, myself! Not a one! there's nothing more vulgar, more common, more disgusting than ideas! libraries are loaded with them! and every sidewalk cafe! ... the impotent are bloated with ideas! ... they dazzle youth with ideas! they play the pimp! ... and youth is ever ready, as you know, Professor, to gobble up anything, to go OOH! and AAH! by the numbers! How those pimps have an easy job of it! the passionate years of youth are spent getting a hard on and gargling ideeaas! ... philosophies, if you prefer! ... yes sir, philosophies! youth loves sham just as young dogs love those sticks, like bones, that we throw and they run after! they race forward, yipping away, wasting their time, that's the main thing! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Man searches constantly for identity, he thought as he trotted along the gravel path. He has no real proof of this existence except for the reaction of other people to that fact. So he listens very closely to what people say to one another about him, whether it's good or bad, because it indicates that he lives in the same world they do, and that all his fears about being invisible, impotent, lacking some mysterious dimension that other people have, are groundless. — Peter S. Beagle

Myron was playing Mr. Bureaucrat to the hilt; nothing made a person feel more impotent. There is no darker pit than the blank stare of a bureaucrat. — Harlan Coben

Delay leads impotent and snail-paced beggary. — William Shakespeare

If a dog on a leash does not run off, no one will regard him as a loyal companion on the basis of this fact alone. No reasonable individual will speak of love if a man sleeps with a defenseless woman who is virtually chained hand and feet. No one, unless he is a real scoundrel, will be proud of a woman's love gained by financial support or by power. No decent person will accept love that is not given voluntarily. The compulsory morality of marital obligations and familial authority is a morality of cowards and impotent people who are afraid of life, people who are incapable of experiencing, through the power of natural love, what they try to produce for themselves with the help of marital laws and the police. — Wilhelm Reich

Our impotent condemnation of weeds will not stop this revolution. We aren't getting the revolution we want: we're getting the one that we triggered. The — Hope Jahren

People don't love each other at our age, Marthe - they please each other, that's all. Later on, when you're old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That's all it is. — Albert Camus

Telling teenagers about the health risks of smoking - It will make you wrinkled! It will make you impotent! It will make you dead! - is useless," Harris concludes. "This is adult propaganda; these are adult arguments. It is because adults don't approve of smoking - because there is something dangerous and disreputable about it - that teenagers want to do it. — Malcolm Gladwell

Don't waste your time hating me; you can't change me. Instead, hate your impotent life; THAT you can change. — Steve Maraboli

There is a difference between our wisdom and nature's simplicity. That reflects the burden of a complex intelligence. A complex intelligence like ours is impotent compared to the intelligence of a monarch butterfly migrating from Canada to Mexico, or the intelligence of hummingbirds that have co-evolved with the flowers all along their migration route. That seems so simple; it just happens, it just unfolds. — Alison Hawthorne Deming

Nurses on transplant wards often remarked that male transplant patients show renewed interest in sex. One reported that a patient asked her to wear something other than "that shapeless scrub" so he could see her breasts. A post-op who had been impotent for seven years before the operation was found holding his penis and demonstrating an erection. Another nurse spoke of a man who left the fly of his pajamas unfastened to show her his penis. Conclude Tabler and Frierson, "this irrational but common belief that the recipient will somehow develop characteristics of the donor is generally transitory but may alter sexual patterns.' Let us hope that the man with the chicken heart was blessed with a patient and open-minded spouse. — Mary Roach

Idealism without pragmatism is impotent. Pragmatism without idealism is meaningless. The key to effective leadership is pragmatic idealism. — Richard M. Nixon

All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last. — Aldous Huxley

All creatures are united to God alone in an immediate union. They depend essentially and directly upon Him. Being all alike equally impotent, they cannot be in reciprocal dependence upon one another. — Nicolas Malebranche

What am I to call it? Diffidence? The fear of ridicule? Inverted vanity? What matters names, if it has brought me to this? I could never bear to be bustling about nothing; I was ashamed of this toy kingdom from the first; I could not tolerate that people should fancy I believed in a thing so patently absurd! I would do nothing that cannot be done smiling. I have a sense of humour, forsooth! I must know better than my Maker. And it was the same thing in my marriage," he added more hoarsely. "I did not believe this girl could care for me; I must not intrude; I must preserve the foppery of my indifference. What an impotent picture!"
"Ay, we have the same blood," moralised Gotthold. "You are drawing, with fine strokes, the character of the born sceptic."
"Sceptic? - coward!" cried Otto. "Coward is the word. A springless, putty-hearted, cowering coward! — Robert Louis Stevenson

Fear is impotent when you challenge it. — Matshona Dhliwayo

It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it. Going down the stairs when you had worked well, and that needed luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris. — Ernest Hemingway,

How impotent my anger was, a surge with no place to land, and how familiar that was: my feelings strangled inside me, like little half-formed children, bitter and bristling. — Emma Cline

There are three powers, three powers alone, able to conquer and to hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness-those forces are miracle, mystery and authority. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If a patient wants to live, doctors are impotent. — Faina Ranevskaya

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent. — Mark Rothko

Everybody loves to play this game - the game of hide-and-seek, the game of scaring oneself with uncertainty. It is human. It is why we go to the theater or movies and why we read novels. And our so-called real life, seen from the position of the mystic, is a version of the same thing. The mystic is the person who has realized that the game is a game. It is hide-and-seek, and everything associated with the "hide" side of it is connected to those places within us where we as individuals feel lonely, impotent, put down, and so on - the negative side of existence. — Alan W. Watts

Though completely armed with knowledge and endowed with power, we are blind and impotent in a world we have equipped and organized-a world of which we now fear the inextricable complexity. — Paul Valery

Love is like liquor, the drunker and more impotent you are, the stronger and smarter you think yourself and the surer you are of your rights. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The New Testament never uses the expression 'help' of the grace of God in the soul. We have absolutely no power - God is not to help us, because we are weak: no, He is to give His life and His power in us as entirely impotent. He that discerns this aright will learn to live by faith alone. — Andrew Murray

In science, law is not a rule imposed from without, but an expression of an intrinsic process. The laws of the lawgiver are impotent beside the laws of human nature, as to his disillusion many a lawgiver has discovered. — Clifford Allbutt

I'm dead, not impotent. Nasty rumors like that must be squashed before they gain momentum. Feel free to emphasize how very functional I am. — Rachel Vincent

If you love without calling forth love, that is, if your love as such does not produce love, if by means of an expression of life as a loving person you do not make of yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent, a misfortune. — Erich Fromm

Anger can be borne - it can even be satisfying - if it can gather into words and explode in a storm, or a rapier-sharp attack. But without these means of ventilation, it only turns back inward, building and swirling like a head of stream - building to an impotent, murderous rage. — Eva Hoffman

In my father's last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent. — Cormac McCarthy

When we understand the character of God, when we grasp something of His holiness, then we begin to understand the radical character of our sin and hopelessness. Helpless sinners can survive only by grace. Our strength is futile in itself; we are spiritually impotent without the assistance of a merciful God. We may dislike giving our attention to God's wrath and justice, but until we incline ourselves to these aspects of God's nature, we will never appreciate what has been wrought for us by grace. Even Edwards's sermon on sinners in God's hands was not designed to stress the flames of hell. The resounding accent falls not on the fiery pit but on the hands of the God who holds us and rescues us from it. The hands of God are gracious hands. They alone have the power to rescue us from certain destruction. — R.C. Sproul

I did this to stay alive. Because you are a vicious, stupid, impotent man. - Shira, to Kadir — Alwyn Hamilton

I'm really impotent against the overwhelming bleakness of the universe and the only thing I can do is my little gift [filmmaking] and do it the best I can, which is cold comfort. — Woody Allen

What would you think of an engineer who expounded the art of flying without revealing the secrets of the engine and propeller? That's what you do, you engineer of the human soul. Just that. You're a coward. You want the raisins out of my cake but you don't want the thorns of my roses. Haven't you too, little psychiatrist, been cracking silly jokes about me? Haven't you ridiculed me as "the prophet of bigger and better orgasms"? Have you never heard the whimpering of a young wife whose body has been desecrated by an impotent husband? Or the anguished cry of an adolescent bursting with unfulfilled love? Does your security still mean more to you than your patient? How long will you go on valuing your respectability above your medical mission? How long will you refuse to see that your pussyfooting procrastination is costing millions their lives? — Wilhelm Reich

Are you in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is stable, firm, absolute - and knowable? Or are you in an incomprehensible chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux, which your mind is impotent to grasp? The nature of your actions - and of your ambition - will be different, according to which set of answers you come to accept. — Ayn Rand