Sapped Out Quotes & Sayings

As she went on with her labour, she became aware that she had Schubert's Erl-King going around in her head. It wasn't the ideal music for the job. Normally, Pannonique programmed her brain to play symphonies that have her the energy indispensable for such physical labour-Saint-Saens, Dvorak-but now that heart-rending Lied stuck in her skull and sapped her strength. — Amelie Nothomb

Don't be sad that one day or another you met someone who undermined your capabilities and sapped your energy, what that person did could be the strongest crucible that forged a great leader — Ahmed Elkadi

Will you live over there?" Phury asked.
"Live over where?" Butch cut in. "You mean you won't be able to fight with us? Or, like ... hang?"
"No, I made that a condition of the deal."
As Butch exhaled in relief, V tried not to get sapped out that his roommate cared about seeing him as
much as he cared about being seen. — J.R. Ward

Have you ever suffered through a bad relationship, the kind of relationship where the pressures of each day sapped your energy and made you a stranger to yourself? If you can stand to, think back to how you felt during that relationship and remember: A bad relationship is rarely one where your partner didn't know you very well. Most often, a bad relationship is one where your partner came to know you very well indeed ... and wished you weren't that way. Perhaps your partner wanted to perfect you. Perhaps you were simply incompatible and your weaknesses grated on each other. Perhaps your partner was a person who simply enjoyed pointing out other people's failings. Whatever the cause, you ended up feeling as though you were being defined by those things you did not do rather than those things you did. And that felt awful. — Marcus Buckingham

Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. — J.D. Vance

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments. — Susan Sontag

The moon taught me that only madness is pure. Once I'd made a start without it, my life was trodden territory, never really mine. At first I found this depressing, a sense of loss I could barely feel but which sapped me. In time I grew used to the feeling, which made it possible to bring more feet into my impure mind to track things up. If I couldn't go back, I might as well go forward. I — Catherine Ryan Hyde

An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world. — Aldous Huxley

Remember civil and religious liberty always go together: if the foundation of the one be sapped, the other will fall of course. — Alexander Hamilton

The midday heat sapped her strength, and the sluggishness reached through to her thoughts — Steven Erikson

The anxious heart, in its flailings, loses its hold on whatever grace God has bestowed upon it, and is sapped of the strength to resist the temptations of the Evil One, who is all the more ready to fish ... in troubled waters. — Lauren F. Winner

Nothing sapped morale like the fear of being attacked from behind. — Conn Iggulden

I hated longing. I hated it almost as much as I hated pining. It sapped the mind of good judgment, filled the heart with achiness, and distracted the vagina from other potential conquests. — Penny Reid

My first sparring session with him saw him bullying me around the ring, so I thought fuck this, and when he came back in close, I threw the boxing code of conduct out of the window and hit him with a cracking right hand in to the balls! That sapped the energy out of him and that was the end of that. In the end, I could take anything he threw at me and then I'd come back with mine, which he didn't like and people would comment on how much I'd 'come on'. — Stephen Richards

A man's moral character may be completely sapped; that is the dreadful part of it. — Henrik Ibsen

Pain, Rhuan decided, did not simply hurt. Pain also exhausted a person, sapped his soul, thinned his spirit. Worse, pain was tedious. — Jennifer Roberson

When the goals of the Self are the only goals a culture makes available, spirited men and women will address them with the energy that they would have applied to the aspirations of the Soul. The result is lives that are massively frustrating and not a little ridiculous. People become heroically dedicated to middle-class ends - getting a promotion, getting a raise, taking immeasurably interesting vacations, getting their children into the right colleges, finding the best retirement spot, fattening their portfolios. Lives without courage, contemplation, compassion, and imagination are lives sapped of significant meaning. In such lives, the Self cannot transcend itself. — Mark Edmundson

I think my political transformation began with my exposure to the business-as-usual attitude of many civil service bureaucrats during the war; then came the attempted Communist take-over of the picture business, which a lot of my liberal friends refused to admit ever happened; next, I had a brief experience living in a country that promised the kind of womb-to-tomb utopian benevolence a lot of these liberal friends wanted to bring to America. In 1949, I spent four months in England filming The Hasty Heart while the Labor Party was in power. I saw firsthand how the welfare state sapped incentive to work from many people in a wonderful and dynamic country. — Ronald Reagan

What is it that had caught your interest so and makes you lag behind?' My master [Virgil] asked, 'What do you care of they are whispering? Keep up with mr and let those people talk! Be like a solid tower, whose brave height remains unmoved by the winds that blow: the man who lets his thoughts be turned aside by one thing or another will lose sight of his true goal, his mind sapped of it's strength. — Dante Alighieri

If you're immortal, you can imagine being sad or grieving if a lover leaves you. But if everyone were immortal, then that leaving isn't necessarily forever. There's always a chance that you get them back somewhere down the road - you know, in 5, 10, 20,000 years. So I think that the urgency of the moment gets sapped. — Todd May

Never give up the freeness of your soul. Live your duty to mankind, nurture creatures of this world as a true mother of the earth, but never shut your imagination off from those desires that distinguish you from the ordinary. Never allow yourself to be sapped of that extraordinary energy that is the necessary ingredient for creating something new and progressive. — Janvier Chouteu-Chando

The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained. — William Styron

Indeed, as Peter Whittle recounts, during World War II efforts to solve the question so sapped the energies and minds of Allied analysts ... that the suggestion was made that the problem be dropped over Germany, as the ultimate instrument of intellectual sabotage. — Brian Christian

Like other systems in decay, the Roman Empire continued to function for several generations after its vitality was sapped. For nearly a hundred years our Island was one of the scenes of conflict between a dying civilisation and lusty, famishing barbarism. — Winston Churchill

It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher. — Alain De Botton

This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story, I became ugly and unhappy and just yelled at people. The cruel thing with depression is that it's such a self-centered illness - Dostoevsky shows that pretty good in his "Notes from Underground". The depression is painful, you're sapped/consumed by yourself; the worse the depression, the more you just think about yourself and the stranger and repellent you appear to others. — David Foster Wallace

The energy it sapped from him, not being able to protect her. You wouldn't think that something you couldn't do and were not doing would take any energy, but it did. — Lionel Shriver

There is no doubt that the reason for my awful oversight was over-confidence that sapped my sense of danger. So that is where to look for the cause of bad blunders - in the exulting feeling of self-congratulation. — Alexander Kotov

We are too near the scene of tragedy to realize that this canker or untouchability has traveled far beyond its prescribed limits and has sapped the very foundation of the whole nation. — Mahatma Gandhi

She had been defeated by herself alone, and the sadness of it left a dark shadow in her heart. It further sapped her confidence and left her ever more withdrawn, ever more capable of suppressing her feelings. Like her roughened hands, her sensitivity was slowly being hardened, and she drew relief from the numbness creeping through her. — Yo Yo

These tasks weren't urgent (which was the reason they didn't get done), but because they weighed on my mind, they sapped my energy. — Gretchen Rubin

I have always been a great dreamer. In dreams I have always been more active than in my real life, and these shadows sapped me of my health and energy. — Hermann Hesse

Fate slew him, but he did not drop;
She felled
he did not fall
Impaled him on her fiercest stakes
He neutralized them all.
She stung him, sapped his firm advance,
But, when her worst was done,
And he, unmoved, regarded her,
Acknowledge him a man. — Emily Dickinson

Wilson argued that "the wealth of America" lay in its small businesses, its towns and villages. "Its vitality does not lie in New York, nor in Chicago," he asserted; "it will not be sapped by anything that happens in St. Louis. The vitality of America lies in the brains, the energies, the enterprise of the people throughout the land; in the efficiency of their factories and in the richness of the fields that stretch beyond the borders of the town. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Now, more than ever, I realize just how illusory my undeserved success has been. I still hold out some hope of doing better, but age and unhappiness have sapped my strength. — Claude Monet

So this was betrayal. It was like being left alone in the desert at dusk without water or warmth. It left your mouth dry and will broken. It sapped your tears and made you hollow. — Anna Godbersen

But being ruined by taxes is not the worst you have to fear. What security would you have for your lives? How can any of you be sure you would have the free enjoyment of your religion long? Would you put your religion in the power of any set of men living? Remember civil and religious liberty always go together: if the foundation of the one be sapped, the other will fail of course. — Alexander Hamilton

The evils which sapped the nation's strength had all been wrought in the name of religion. — Mustafa Kemal Ataturk