Quotes & Sayings About Inability To Help

What is the shocking weakness in virtually every man you know well? The whimpering like children when they're ill. The need for women to ask directions for them. Help shop for their clothes. Book appointments for their hair to be cut because they don't care to speak for themselves. The inability to pick up a phone if they want a relationship to stop. Are the weaknesses you see again and again a symptom of men in this age, or have they always been there, and women, secretly, have always known? — Nikki Gemmell

I hate that nothing can be done about the suffering of children, and that most of the world blocks out their suffering to cope with their own inability to help. The few who carry the burden, like social workers and teachers, become weary, burning out after only a few short years, forced to carry the weight that should be shared by a society. Children are vastly overlooked. Their importance underestimated by their size. — Tarryn Fisher

It pleases our heavenly Father when we acknowledge and confess to Him our inability to run our own lives. That is what we are doing when we say, "Father, help me! I need You!" — Joyce Meyer

Through the years of my life, the older I've gotten, the more sensitive I've become to the suffering of people and to my inability to really fix that. I wish that proportion was different. I wish I could help more. Unfortunately, that's not how the equation is working out here. — Caroline Myss

Fifteen years later, in 1601, Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Minde was devoted to showing man how wretched he had become through his inability to control his passions. This study, designed to help man know himself in all his depravity, emphasised sin rather than salvation, claiming that the animal passions prevented reason, rebelled against virtue and, like 'thornie briars sprung from the infected roote of original sinne', caused mental and physical ill health.20 Despite its punitive message, the book went into further editions in 1604, 1620, 1621 and 1628, suggesting that the seventeenth-century reader was a glutton for punishment. — Catharine Arnold

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 helf-help paraphernalia testify at once to the vastness of the appetite they address and their inability to satisfy it. — Thomas Lewis

Besides the simple logic involved in trying to find the next move, Go deals with shapes, so some scientists think the artistic power of our right brain is called in to help make decisions when we can't read out all the possibilities (see page 160). This sets up a possible conflict between the hemispheres so that what looks or feels good to one might not be what the other thinks. Thus, besides the sheer excitement of competition and the basic inability for humans to ever be able to completely read out long sequences, this ongoing debate between the two halves of our brain can bring our emotions into play to a high degree. — Peter Shotwell

We could say that the health of a culture is equal to the collective ability of the people who work there to feel the impacts of their actions on others. Now if you're an app developer and want to help me build a tool that tracks that, please give a call. What I've seen over and over again in my career as a business leader and leadership mentor is that this one thing - the inability of people to feel their impact on others - is the cause of cultural dysfunction. And the higher up you are on the org chart, the more problematic that weakness is in terms of what it does to the culture at large. Which is why, as a manager, the most important thing you can do - after recognizing your own impact on your team - is to help people see their impacts on each other, and to help them let go of the emotional story they're telling themselves that's keeping the pattern going. In — Jonathan Raymond

The third sign we have for ascertaining whether this dryness be the purgation of sense, is inability to meditate and make reflections, and to excite the imagination, as before, notwithstanding all the efforts we may make; for God begins now to communicate Himself, no longer through the channel of sense, as formerly, in consecutive reflections, by which we arranged and divided our knowledge, but in pure spirit, which admits not of successive reflections, and in the act of pure contemplation, to which neither the interior nor the exterior senses of our lower nature can ascend. Hence it is that the fancy and the imagination cannot help or suggest any reflections, nor use them ever afterwards. — San Juan De La Cruz

Many people are just waking to the reality that unlimited expansion, what we call progress, is not possible in this world, and maybe looking to monks (who seek to live within limitations) as well as rural Dakotans (whose limitations are forced upon them by isolation and a harsh climate) can teach us how to live more realistically. These unlikely people might also help us overcome the pathological fear of death and the inability to deal with sickness and old age that plague American society. — Kathleen Norris

Such is my desire only to see the best parts of my partner and vice-versa that I must confess to being able to remember each time I have seen someone I was in love with fall over. I cannot help but be disappointed by such a shocking inability to perform such a simple task as staying upright. — Jon Richardson

Though not necessarily aware of when we feel purpose and meaning, we are nearly always aware of the sickening feeling when we don't possess them. This isn't an intellectual misapprehension; it is a gut sense of disorientation and a loss of personal direction. Rarely are brute mental effort and self-help pep talks able to rekindle the missing feeling. For most of us, we simply wait patiently, knowing from past experience that the feeling will return in its own sweet time ... Of particular interest is [Tolstoy's] conclusion as to the inability of science and reason to provide a personal sense of meaning. — Robert A. Burton

And do you know why we have not the power to attain this Stoic ideal? It is because we refuse to believe in our power. Nay, of a surety, there is something else which plays a part: it is because we are in love with our vices; we uphold them and prefer to make excuses for them rather than shake them off. We mortals have been endowed with sufficient strength by nature, if only we use this strength, if only we concentrate our powers and rouse them all to help us or at least not to hinder us. The reason is unwillingness, the excuse, inability. — Seneca.

After graduation, due to special circumstances and perhaps also to my character, I began to travel throughout America, and I became acquainted with all of it. Except for Haiti and Santo Domingo, I have visited, to some extent, all the other Latin American countries. Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close contact with poverty, hunger and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with the stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment, to the point that a father can accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident, as occurs often in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland. And I began to realize at that time that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming famous for making a significant contribution to medical science: I wanted to help those people. — Ernesto Che Guevara

Much popular self-help literature normalizes sexism. Rather than linking habits of being, usually considered innate, to learned behavior that helps maintain and support male domination, they act as those these difference are not value laden or political but are rather inherent and mystical. In these books male inability and/or refusal to honestly express feelings is often talked about as a positive masculine virtue women should learn to accept rather than a learned habit of behavior that creates emotional isolation and alienation ... Self-help books that are anti-gender equality often present women's overinvestment in nurturance as a 'natural,' inherent quality rather than a learned approach to caregiving. Much fancy footwork takes place to make it seem that New Age mystical evocations of yin and yang, masculine and feminine androgyny, and so on, are not just the same old sexist stereotypes wrapped in more alluring and seductive packaging. — Bell Hooks

All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen. I could no longer sit in little bars near Grand Central and listen to someone complaining of his wife's inability to cope with the help while he missed another train to Connecticut. I no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received from their publishers, about plays which were having second-act trouble in Philadelphia, or about people I would like very much if only I would come out and meet them. I had already met them, always. — Joan Didion

What restricts you is your inability to think that you can do it. — Jeekeshen Chinnappen

She felt the pitiful inadequacy of this, and understood, with a sense of despair, that in her inability to express herself she must give him an impression of coldness and reluctance; but she could not help it. — Edith Wharton

There is a central flaw in contemporary culture and a corresponding and related inability to address it. Society seems somehow unable to adequately help or protect itself. Normal citizens feel powerless, isolated and disturbed. — Michael Leunig

One of two things must be done. Either surrender because you admit your inability and require a higher power to help you, or investigate the cause of misery by going to the source and merging into the Self. Either way you will be free from misery. God never forsakes one who has surrendered. — Ramana Maharshi

Keep my eyes fixed on You, Lord. Help me to stop tinkering and realize my total inability to change. I look to You to change me and give me victory as I focus on Your friendly eyes looking lovingly at me. Amen. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

One of the biggest defects in life is the inability to ask for help. — Robert Kiyosaki

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