Quotes about Passivity

The obsession with security at any price petrifies us, and we increase our fear by trying to eliminate risk. That is what is ridiculous about the great outcries in the media: we wake up in order to demand more passivity, a better protected life. The challenge is not only to decrease the amount of space the media devote to hazards but also to increase our ability to resist misfortunes. To augment our endurance rather than our panic.

De Caussade makes this matter of duty very simple, too, as he makes everything simple: "We have two duties to fulfill: we must actively seek to carry God's will into effect and passively accept all that his will sends us" (p. 73). That's all. That's it.

I was not an activist.

Some people worry that prayer may lead to passivity, that we will retreat to prayer as a substitute for action. Jesus saw no contradiction between the two: he spent long hours in prayer and then long hours meeting human needs.

The key here is to be direct. You don't want to be passive, because being passive communicates weakness. In this e-mail you are clearly making an offer. The formula might look like this:

As Robert Bly laments in Iron John, "Some women want a passive man if they want a man at all; the church wants a tamed man—they are called priests; the university wants a domesticated man—they are called tenure-track people; the corporation wants a . . . sanitized, hairless, shallow man.

Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within.

He did nothing, but he looked on as few other men could have done.

As soon as one is conscious of the presence of the Master, one must, in all passivity, abandon the work to Him.

I have been told that there are two human responses to the perception of chaos: naming and violence. . . There is, however, a third response to chaos, which I have not heard about, which is stillness. Such stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art.

Only one thing I'll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye: they're not hurting anyone while they're sitting in front of that Eye. But neither was Japhy….

To be one of God's lilies means an interior abandonment of the rarest kind. It means that we are to be infinitely passive, and yet infinitely active also; passive as regards self and its workings, active as regards attention and response to God. It is very hard to explain this so as to be understood But it means that we must lay down all the activity of the creature, as such, and must let only the activities of God work in us, and through us, and by us. Self must step aside, to let God work.