A star, however willing, cannot help the moon.
Category Archives: POWERLESSNESS
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” ― Elie Wiesel
When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Out of Solitude
Success consists of going from potato to potato without loss of enthusiasm.” — Winston Potatohill
You have not line nor rope: with which to land a sea-monster.
Huna mshipi, hu nangwe: kuomoa tenga na nini?
Said of somebody who undertakes an impossible task.
http://swahiliproverbs.afrst.illinois.edu/ambition.html
Time langa dan rope.
Time is longer than a rope.
Meaning: Things will change eventually.
every team needs its water carriers
Como el burro del aguador, cargado de agua y muerto de sed
Like the donkey of the water-carrier, loaded with water and dying of thirst
This is said about someone who cannot benefit from the abundance he is surrounded with, either because he cannot see how or because it is not his.
Stone is heavy and sand a burden, but provocation by a fool is heavier than both
http://www.saidwhat.co.uk/proverb/viewall.php
“I ask not for a lighter burden, but for broader shoulders.
Jewish.
A fly that dances carelessly in front of a spider’s web, risks the wrath of the spider’s teeth.
(African Proverb)
http://www.inspirationalstories.com/proverbs/t/about-spider/
In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled.
~Paul Eldridge
Depend on the rabbit’s foot if you will,but remember it didn’t work for the rabbit.”
― R E. Shay british author
“”Never underestimate the power of the rabbit hole.”
― L.M. Fields, Project Hourglass
I try to convince myself that it’s the alcohol talking. But alcohol can’t talk. It just sits there. It can’t even get itself out of the bottle.” ―
David Levithan, The Lover’s Dictionary
Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass.
-William Lowndes
He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.
Anais Nin
“The mentality and behaviour of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help, they have no hope.”
― Russell Brand
“Stick ’em wiv arrers’. Stick ’em with knives. ‘an swords, and spears. Stick ’em quick and stick ’em where it ‘urts. But most of all, stick ’em when they’s looking in the other way.”
Gorduz Backstabber, Hobgoblin Chieftain
“There was a goblin, or a trickster or a warrior. A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. Nothing could stop it or hold it or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world…”
― Steve Moffat
You can’t stop your heart from loving, really – it’s like standing out there in the ocean yelling at the waves to stop.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Mermaid Chair
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” — Martin Luther King, Jr
In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country.
– Aldous Huxley
“…for the first time in my life, a voice went off in my head:’You have no power over what happens in your life. Drugs dictate exactly what you’re going to do. You’ve taken your hands off the steering wheel, and you’re going wherever the drug world takes you.’
That had never changed. The feeling would well up inside of me, and no matter how much I loved my girl or my band or my friends or my family, when that siren song ‘Go get high now’ started playing in my head, I was off.”
― Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue
There is still hope.
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.
-Henri Nouwen
It all goes back and back,” Tyrion thought, “to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance in our steads.
George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords
“Bottom line is, even if you see ’em coming, you’re not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can’t help that. It’s what you do afterwards that counts. That’s when you find out who you are.”
― Joss Whedon
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
“I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn’t dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren’t thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women
It doesn’t matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
“We have an obligation to one another, responsibilities and trusts. That does not mean we must be pigeons, that we must be exploited. But it does mean that we should look out for one another when and as much as we can; and that we have a personal responsibility for our behaviour; and that our behaviour has consequences of a very real and profound nature. We are not powerless. We have tremendous potential for good or ill. How we choose to use that power is up to us; but first we must choose to use it. We’re told every day, “You can’t change the world.” But the world is changing every day. Only question is…who’s doing it? You or somebody else?”
― J. Michael Straczynski
Issun no mushi ni mo, gobu no tamashii. Even a worm an inch long has a soul half-an-inch long.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/shi/igj/igj12.htm
A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.
Dogen Zenji
“Maybe nobody knows how. Sometimes it’s easier to pretend nothing is wrong than to face the fact that everything is wrong, but you’re powerless to do anything about it.”
― Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility
“It’s that sense of powerlessness that destroyed my soul. I cannot be as good as I would like to be.nor as bad as I think I need to be. think you have the same doubts that your goodness was not rewarded”
― Paulo Coelho
Use your enemy’s hand to catch a snake. Persian.
“Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake.”
Edgar Wallace – The Clue of the Twisted Candle (1916)
Dammit, that yodel of triumph of yours was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“I tried to utter, but could not. The tongue had got all tangled up with the uvula, and the brain seemed paralyzed. I was feeling the same stunned feeling which, I imagine, Chichester Clam must have felt as the door of the potting shed slammed and he heard Boko starting to yodel without — a nightmare sensation of being but a helpless pawn in the hands of Fate.”
― P.G. Wodehouse
He didn’t know what was defeating him, but he sensed it was something he could not cope with, something that was far beyond his power to control or even at this point in time comprehend.
Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream
“I feel just, you know, defeated. ”
Nic Sheff, Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines
THE first glass for thirst, the second for nourishment, the third for pleasure, and the fourth for madness.
so many gifts and talents,
birds soaring into their dreams,
and the sea, the sea,
suspended
aroma,
chorus of rich, resonant salt,
and meanwhile,
we men,
touch the water,
struggling
and hoping,
we touch the sea,
hoping.
And the waves tell the firm coast,
"Everything will be fulfilled."
Read more at Suite101: Pablo Neruda’s Ode to Hope http://www.suite101.com/content/pablo-nerudas-ode-to-hope-a246953#ixzz1BGWbikIn
Emerson once said in justification of conversation on the subject of the weather: We are pensioners of the wind. The weathercock is the wisest man. All our prosperity, enterprise, temper, come and go with the fickle air.
Curiosities in Proverbs
Though the sky of this tear-stained world is overcast with clouds, the light of truth shines in the heart. (Japanese).
Only A Passing Cloud
When darkness hides the sun from view and shadows move across the blue -never let it worry you.
It is only a passing cloud.Don’t let people spoil your day by what they do and what they say, it doesn’t matter anyway,
they are only passing clouds.And if a big blow should descend do not think that it’s the end.
You’ll see when once you’re round the bendIt was only a passing cloud.
© Wayne Rickard 2011
foto – raleigh nsw jan 2011 the year of the brisbane floods
A clean hand wants no washing. Vietnam.
Feb 2006 Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerless and the powerful means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. – Paulo Freire.
THE OLD PROVERBIAL RECOVERY 