144 Passivity Quotes
Following is our list of passivity quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about passivity is.
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Famous Passivity Quotes
Passivity is the same as defending injustice. — Deepak Chopra
The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. — Slavoj Žižek
All of us are subject to being passive to the social ills around us. It's a struggle not to become, by staying silent, an accomplice. — Mary Travers
toleration of exploitation, oppression, and injustice points to a condition lying like a pall over the whole of society; it is apathy, an unconcern that is incapable of suffering. — Dorothee Solle
At times inactivity is preferable to mindless functioning. — Jenny Holzer
Passive resistance is a sport for gentleman (and ladies)-just like the pursuit of war, a heroic enterprise for the ruling classes but a grievous burden on the rest. — Kenneth Kaunda
Inaction, letting be, neither creating nor destroying--that is my evil. And also the knower as one without desire. — Friedrich Nietzsche
I think it's interesting that the opposite of being active in yoga is not being passive. It's being receptive. — Cyndi Lee
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Patience is passion tamed. — Lyman Abbott
Passive pleasure is no pleasure at all. — Arthur Adamov
The sage acts by doing nothing. — Lao Tzu
Inaction will cause a man to sink into the slough of despond and vanish without a trace. — Farley Mowat
Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. — Julian Assange
Short Passivity Quotes
- White space is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background. — Jan Tschichold
- Our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep. — Alexander Hamilton
- Learning is more effective when it is an active rather than a passive process. — Kurt Lewin
- You’re never going to get rich renting out your time. — Naval Ravikant
- Today we did what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong. — Ronald Reagan
- It isn't enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box. — Tim Ferriss
- Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. — Naval Ravikant
- I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity. — Virginia Woolf
- It was not apathy or passiveness. For him, prayer was a display of the strongest possible activity. — Eric Metaxas
- Active Evil is better than Passive Good. — William Blake
Passivity Feeling Quotes
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood. — Susan Sontag
Give us something else; give us something new; for Heaven's sake give us something bad, so long as we feel we are alive and active and not just passive admirers of tradition! — Carl Nielsen
I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him. — Stephen King
Feeling motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything. Feeling bored and restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive. — Robert Greene
Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers. Feel motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything. Feeling bored and restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive. — Robert Greene
Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material. It finds it hard to endure the feeling that it must resign itself to passive acceptance of changes introduced from above. — Czeslaw Milosz
People who feel the need to push and control tend to keep their feelings bottled up. As a result, they get shut down or remote, and their feelings come out in twisted, unhealthy ways. They become irritable, passive-aggressive, or volatile, for example. — Judith Orloff
Feelings come to us, passively; love comes from us, actively, by our free choice. — Peter Kreeft
A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship. — W. H. Auden
...though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert. — Edith Wharton
Passivity Is Quotes
As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome. — Noam Chomsky
Happiness is not mere pleasure, not the outcome of wealth. It is the result of active work rather than passive enjoyment of pleasure. — Robert Baden-Powell
A team is not made up of isolated individuals. Always stay in the game. Don't be passive. Football is a team game. No one plays alone. Success depends on your whole team being a single unit. — Pele
In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother’s first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet and growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it for the most part spent out in the fresh air. — Charlotte Mason
Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow - that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time. — Leo Tolstoy
Hair and shoes say it all. Everything in between is forgivable as long as you keep it simple. Trying to talk with your clothes is passive-aggress ive. — Rick Owens
Between an uncontrolled escalation and passivity, there is a demanding road of responsibility that we must follow. — Dominique de Villepin
The man who is kind and who practices righteousness, who remains passive against the affairs of the world, who considers all creatures on earth as his own self, he attains the Immortal Being; the true God is ever with him. — Kabir
Faith is not simply a patience that passively suffers until the storm is past. Rather, it is a spirit that bears things - with resignations, yes, but above all, with blazing, serene hope. — Corazon Aquino
What keeps a person passive and compliant is fear of repercussions, but once you let go of your attachment to things that don’t ultimately matter – money, career, physical safety – you can overcome that fear. — Glenn Greenwald
Being Passive Quotes
Thinking gets you nowhere. It may be a fine and noble aid in academic studies, but you can't think your way out of emotional difficulties. That takes something altogether different. You have to make yourself passive then, and just listen. Re-establish contact with a slice of eternity. — Etty Hillesum
Once we realize the extraordinary power we have to compose our lives, well move from passive, conditioned thinking to being co-creators of our fate. — Jason Silva
That's what lordship is - Christ reigning as supreme authority over our life. Making Jesus Lord of our life is not something passive. It's not a state of being, it's a state of doing. Those whom Jesus recognizes as His own are those who do the will of His Father in heaven. — Keith Green
I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities. — Seymour Papert
I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between. — Sylvia Plath
Good is towing the line, being behaved, being quiet, being passive, fitting in, being liked, and great is being messy, having a belly, speaking your mind, standing up for what you believe in, fighting for another paradigm, not letting people talk you out of what you know to be true. — Eve Ensler
As I grow older part of my emotional survival plan must be to actively seek inspiration instead of passively waiting for it to find me. — Bebe Moore Campbell
Marriage ... is still the imperfect institution it must remain while women continue to be ill-educated, passive, and subservient. — Harriet Martineau
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
To obtain financial freedom, one must be either a business owner, an investor, or both, generating passive income, particularly on a monthly basis. — Robert Kiyosaki
Active And Passive Quotes
To continue to condemn only brings condemnation, then, for self. This does not mean that self's activity should be passive, but rather being constant in prayer-knowing and taking, knowing and understanding that he that is faithful is not given a burden beyond that he is able to bear . . . — Edgar Cayce
A healthy loyalty is not passive and complacent, but active and critical. — Harold Laski
Passive righteousness tells us that God does not need our good works. Active righteousness tells us that our neighbor does. The aim and direction of good works are horizontal, not vertical. — Tullian Tchividjian
People – and I think this is particularly true of Americans – don’t like to be passive. They like to seize control. — Martha C. Nussbaum
But reading is not idleness?it is the passive, receptive side of civilization without which the active and creative world would be meaningless. It is the immortal spirit of the dead realised within the bodies of the living. It is sacramental. — Stephen Spender
The triangle pointing downward is a female symbol corresponding to the yoni and the upward pointing triangle is the male, the lingam ... When the two triangles are interlaced, it represents the union of the active and passive forces in nature; it represents the male and female elements. — Albert Mackey
Without knowledge and understanding, one tends to become a passive spectator rather than an active participant in the great decisions of our time. — Diane Ravitch
Hatred is active, and envy passive dislike; there is but one step from envy to hate. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Take action. You can either be a passive victim of circumstance or you can be the active hero of your own life. Action is the antidote to apathy and cynicism and despair. You will inevitably make mistakes but at the end of your days, you will be remembered for your gallop, not for your stumble. — Bradley Whitford
The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Passive Aggressive Quotes
My adolescent rebellions took the form of, if anything, passive-aggressively doing what was asked of me but doing it ten times more than what was asked of me, so that eventually they'd have to beg me to stop. — Robert M. Sapolsky
Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict - alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence. — Dorothy Thompson
Every time we speak, we choose and use one of four basic communication styles: assertive, aggressive, passive and passive-aggressive. — Jim Rohn
I've met a few people who were passive-aggressive, but I've never met anyone who was aggressive-passive. I don't want tacos! Maybe. — Demetri Martin
There is very little in civilized life that demands everything you got intellectually, physically, and emotionally. Driving is living. It's aggressive instead of passive living. — Janet Guthrie
I lived in Chicago for a few years and got a sense of - kind of that broad-shouldered, windy, um, stern, Midwestern, warm-slash-passive aggressive, wonderful - every adjective I can think of, very cold. — Amy Poehler
Canada has a passive-aggressive culture, with a lot of sarcasm and righteousness. That went with my weird messianic complex. The ego is a fascinating monster. I was taught from a young age that I had to serve, so that turned into me thinking I had to save the planet. — Alanis Morissette
Translation is a form of passive aggression. In doing it, a writer chooses to forgo original authorship so as to play havoc with a foreign original in a process of imitation, zigzagging between the foreign and receiving languages but in the last analysis cancelling the first in favor of the second. — Lawrence Venuti
I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm also not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. — Linus Torvalds
Everybody in life is struggling for power, and some people use morality and righteousness as a weapon, while others use different means, even passive aggression. From a distance, we are all fighting, and I am looking at this from a distance. — Robert Greene
Passive Resistance Quotes
We talk to each other in code. We said that 420 was a special number. It was a time. It was a date. It was a symbol for what we did for passive resistance. — Rick Cusick
The line of least resistance is to most people the lifeline. — Sophie Irene Loeb
Refuse to be a lazy Christian, and resist a passive, apathetic attitude. — Joyce Meyer
Passive resistance seeks to rejoin politics and religion and to test all our actions in the light of ethical principles. — Mahatma Gandhi
People resist exploitation. They resist as actively as they can, as passively as they must. — Immanuel Wallerstein
Passive resistance is a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the reverse of resistance by arms. — Mahatma Gandhi
I think leaders are incapable of the strength that passive resistance entails. — Meshell Ndegeocello
Dr. King used Gandhi's commitment to non-violence and to passive resistance. — Al Sharpton
His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand—passive resistance and open displays of contempt. — Kurt Vonnegut
Firstly, as a Buddhist monk, I hold that violence is not good. Secondly, I am a firm believer in the Gandian ethic of passive resistance. And thirdly, in reality, violence is not our strength. — Dalai Lama
Passive Income Quotes
The key to financial freedom and great wealth is a person's ability or skill to convert earned income into passive income and/or portfolio income. — Robert Kiyosaki
My rich dad taught me to focus on passive income and spend my time acquiring the assets that provide passive or long term residual income...passive income from capital gains, dividends, residual income from business, rental income from real estate, and royalties. — Robert Kiyosaki
You become financially free when your passive income exceeds your expenses. — T. Harv Eker
The moment you make passive income and portfolio income a part of your life, your life will change. Those words will become flesh. — Robert Kiyosaki
Our beliefs do not sit passively in our brains waiting to be confirmed or contradicted by incoming information. Instead, they play a key role in shaping how we see the world. — Richard Wiseman
Passive Voice Quotes
Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. And don't start a sentence with a conjugation. — William Safire
Some of the worst writing around suffers from inert verbs and the unintended use of the passive voice. Yet the passive voice remains an important arrow in the rhetorical quiver. After all, it exists for a reason. — Constance Hale
Each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister. — Sonia Sotomayor
Using the passive voice is always very helpful. Mind you, a lot of that propaganda English emanates from here. The British establishment has always used the passive voice. It's been a weapon of discourse so those who committed terrible acts in the old empire could not be identified. — John Pilger
The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding. — Benjamin Lee Whorf
Objectivity is the subject subjugating the object. That is how you assert yourself. You make yourself the active voice and the object is the passive no-voice. — Emily Levine
We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice--that is, until we have stopped saying It got lost, and say, I lost it. — Sydney J. Harris
Mastery means responsibility, ability to respond in real time to the need of the moment. Intuitive or inspired living means not just passively hearing the voice, but acting on it. — Stephen Nachmanovitch
Live in the active voice, rather than passive. Think more about what you happen than what is happening to you. — William DeWitt Hyde
People Writing About Passivity
More Passivity Quotes
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
In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female…In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness — Laura Mulvey
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
Americans of good-will, the nice decent church people, the well-meaning liberals, the good hearted souls who themselves wouldn't lynch anyone, must begin to realize that they have to be more than passively good-hearted, more than church goingly Christian, and much more than word-of-mouth in the liberalism. — Langston Hughes
A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance. — Hunter S. Thompson
People who soar are those who refuse to sit back, sigh and wish things would change. They neither complain of their lot nor passively dream of some distant ship coming in. Rather, they visualize in their minds that they are not quitters; they will not allow life's circumstances to push them down and hold them under. — Charles R. Swindoll
If you vibrate the electromagnetic field just right, cars passively awash in the radiation for a while will suddenly drive better. — Andrej Karpathy
In this very real world, good doesn't drive out evil. Evil doesn't drive out good. But the energetic displaces the passive. — William Bernbach
We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. — Bill Watterson
Bureaucratic solutions to problems of practice will always fail because effective teaching is not routine, students are not passive, and questions of practice are not simple, predictable, or standardized. Consequently, instructional decisions cannot be formulated on high then packaged and handed down to teachers. — Linda Darling-Hammond
I didn’t want a completely passive viewer. Art means too much to me. To be able to articulate something visually is really an important thing. I wanted to make work where the viewer wouldn’t walk away; he would giggle nervously, get pulled into history, into fiction, into something totally demeaning and possibly very beautiful — Kara Walker
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
Psychosynthesis is a method of psychological development and self realization for those who refuse to remain the slave of their own inner phantasms or of external influences, who refuse to submit passively to the play of psychological forces which is going on within them, and who are determined to become the master of their own lives. — Roberto Assagioli
Heroes are Ordinary People whose social action is Extra-Ordinary/ who ACT when others are passive, who give up EGO-centrism for SOCIO-centrism. — Philip Zimbardo
Contrary to popular opinion, listening is not a passive activity. It is the most active thing you can do. — Chris Voss
All genuine learning is active, not passive. It involves the use of the mind, not just the memory. It is a process of discovery, in which the student is the main agent, not the teacher. — Mortimer Adler
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