“
There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us.
”
”
Marilynne Robinson (Gilead (Gilead, #1))
“
Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.
”
”
Iris Murdoch
“
For the human brain,” Edmond explained, “any answer is better than no answer. We feel enormous discomfort when faced with ‘insufficient data,’ and so our brains invent the data—offering us, at the very least, the illusion of order—creating myriad philosophies, mythologies, and religions to reassure us that there is indeed an order and structure to the unseen world.
”
”
Dan Brown (Origin (Robert Langdon, #5))
“
I feel insufficient as an adult. I look around at the office and see everyone typing, taking calls, making bookings, editing documents, and I know they’re all dealing with at least as much as I am, which only makes me feel worse about how hard everything feels to me.
”
”
Emily Henry (You and Me on Vacation)
“
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast;
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity, - let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
”
”
Edna St. Vincent Millay
“
As a friend of mine put it, “Feeling that something is wrong with me is the invisible and toxic gas I am always breathing.” When we experience our lives through this lens of personal insufficiency, we are imprisoned in what I call the trance of unworthiness. Trapped in this trance, we are unable to perceive the truth of who we really are.
”
”
Tara Brach (Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha)
“
He had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room.
”
”
Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)
“
Words were insufficient for the elevation of his [Mr Collins'] feelings; and he was obliged to walk about the room, while Elizabeth tried to unite civility and truth in a few short sentences.
”
”
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
“
as we step into our life’s work, we discover that we have been preparing for this our whole lives, even though in that very moment we feel insufficient.
”
”
Jeff Goins (The Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do)
“
We've all felt a little incompetent, insufficient, overexposed, helpless, unlovable, terrified, defective, unfit and unsung at times. And deep down, for whatever reason, you might even think you deserve to. Because why else would you be feeling that way. Like the world is laughing at you.
I promise you it's not.
”
”
Anne Clendening (Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass)
“
We focus on other people’s faults. There is a saying that the world is divided into people who think they are right. The more inadequate we feel, the more uncomfortable it is to admit our faults. Blaming others temporarily relieves us from the weight of failure. The painful truth is that all of these strategies simply reinforce the very insecurities that sustain the trance of unworthiness. The more we anxiously tell ourselves stories about how we might fail or what is wrong with us or with others, the more we deepen the grooves—the neural pathways—that generate feelings of deficiency. Every time we hide a defeat we reinforce the fear that we are insufficient. When we strive to impress or outdo others, we strengthen the underlying belief that we are not good enough as we are. This doesn’t mean that we can’t compete in a healthy way, put wholehearted effort into work or acknowledge and take pleasure in our own competence. But when our efforts are driven by the fear that we are flawed, we deepen the trance of unworthiness.
”
”
Tara Brach (Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha)
“
Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent- that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.
”
”
Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)
“
Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or
circles under the eyes. It is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise
perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor is it a trivial
inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but
(frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a “point of view”
that some people with soft skins find “ offensive. ” It is the deep
and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth
and human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from
even the possibility of wholeness or internal integrity. Inferiority
puts rightful self-love beyond reach, a dream fragmented by
insult into a perpetually recurring nightmare; inferiority creates
a person broken and humiliated inside. The fragments—
scattered pieces and sharp slivers of someone who can never
be made whole—are then taken to be the standard of what is
normal in her kind: women are like that. The insult that hurt
her—inferiority as an assault, ongoing since birth—is seen as a
consequence, not a cause, of her so-called nature, an inferior nature. In English, a graceful language, she is even called a
piece. It is likely to be her personal experience that she is insufficiently
loved. Her subjectivity itself is second-class, her experiences
and perceptions inferior in the world as she is inferior
in the world. Her experience is recast into a psychologically
pejorative judgment: she is never loved enough because she is
needy, neurotic, the insufficiency of love she feels being in and
of itself evidence of a deep-seated and natural dependency. Her
personal experiences or perceptions are never credited as having
a hard core of reality to them. She is, however, never loved
enough. In truth; in point of fact; objectively: she is never loved
enough. As Konrad Lorenz wrote: “ I doubt if it is possible to
feel real affection for anybody who is in every respect one’s inferior.
” 1 There are so many dirty names for her that one rarely
learns them all, even in one’s native language.
”
”
Andrea Dworkin (Intercourse)
“
In Paris the swaying lanterns are lit in the streets; lights shine through water, fuzzy, diffuse. Saint-Just sits by an insufficient fire, in a poor light. He is a Spartan after all, and Spartans don’t need home comforts. He has begun his report, his list of accusations; if Robespierre saw it now, he would tear it up, but in a few days’ time it will be the very thing he needs. Sometimes he stops, half-glances over his shoulder. He feels someone has come into the room behind him; but when he allows himself to look, there is nothing to see. It is my destiny, he feels, forming in the shadows of the room. It is the guardian angel I had, long ago when I was a child. It is Camille Desmoulins, looking over my shoulder, laughing at my grammar. He pauses for a moment. He thinks, there are no living ghosts. He takes hold of himself. Bends his head over his task. His pen scratches. His strange letterforms incise the paper. His handwriting is minute. He gets a lot of words to the page.
”
”
Hilary Mantel (A Place of Greater Safety)
“
I feel insufficient as an adult. I look around at the office and see everyone typing, taking calls, making bookings, editing documents, and I know they’re all dealing with at least as much as I am, which only makes me feel worse about how hard everything feels to me.
Living, being responsible for myself, seems like an insurmountable challenge lately.
Sometimes I scrape myself off my sofa, stuff a frozen meal in the microwave, and as I wait for the timer to go off, I just think, I will have to do this again tomorrow and the next day and the next day. Every day for the rest of my life, I’m going to have to figure out what to eat, and make it for myself, no matter how bad I feel or tired I am, or how horrible the pounding in my head is. Even if I have a one-hundred-and-two-degree fever, I will have to pull myself up and make a very mediocre meal to go on living.
”
”
Emily Henry (People We Meet on Vacation)
“
she makes me feel as if language is miserably insufficient. broken.
”
”
Virginia Woolf
“
To cherish secrets and to restrain emotions are psychic misdemeanours for which nature finally visits us with sickness—that is, when we do these things in private. But when they are done in communion with others they satisfy nature and may even count as useful virtues. It is only restraint practised in and for oneself that is unwholesome. It is as if man had an inalienable right to behold all that is dark, imperfect, stupid and guilty in his fellow-beings—for such of course are the things that we keep private to protect ourselves. It seems to be a sin in the eyes of nature to hide our insufficiency—just as much as to live entirely on our inferior side. There appears to be a conscience in mankind which severely punishes the man who does not somehow and at some time, at whatever cost to his pride, cease to defend and assert himself, and instead confess himself fallible and human. Until he can do this, an impenetrable wall shuts him out from the living experience of feeling himself a man among men. Here we find a key to the great significance of true, unstereotyped confession—a significance known in all the initiation and mystery cults of the ancient world, as is shown by a saying from the Greek mysteries: "Give up what thou hast, and then thou wilt receive.
”
”
C.G. Jung (Modern Man in Search of a Soul)
“
All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault.
”
”
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
“
It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her, that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to live. To appeal to her, was made hopeless by her having no sense of pity, even for herself. If she had been laid low in the streets, in any of the many encounters in which she had been engaged, she would not have pitied herself; nor, if she had been ordered to the axe to-morrow, would she have gone to it with any softer feeling than a fierce desire to change places with the man who sent her there.
”
”
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
“
Perhaps I was born a material different from my parents. I was born a hard person, harder than most people in my life, so I have only myself to blame when I cannot feel the love of others, my parents among them. Love from those who cannot damage us irreparably often feels insufficient; we may think, rightly or wrongly, that their love does not matter at all.
”
”
Yiyun Li (The Book of Goose)
“
You’re not a failure, Uncle,” he said, the words awkward and insufficient in his mouth. “It’s only that we don’t feel safe. A game has a reset button. You have infinite chances for success. Real life is awfully permanent compared to that, and a lot of religious people make it seem even more permanent—one step the wrong way, one sin too many, and it’s the fiery furnace for you. Beware. And then at the same time, you ask us to love the God who has this terrible sword hanging over our necks. It’s very confusing.” “Ah,” said Sheikh Bilal, looking melancholy, “but that’s the point. What is more terrifying than love? How can one not be overwhelmed by the majesty of a creator who gives and destroys life in equal measure, with breathtaking swiftness? You look at all the swelling rose hips in the garden that will wither and die without ever germinating and it seems a miracle that you are alive at all. What would one not do to acknowledge that miracle in some way?
”
”
G. Willow Wilson (Alif the Unseen)
“
Lydia thanks the girls, and her spoken gratitude feels entirely insufficient, because what she really needs to say is that the food, yes, but also their kindness, their humanity, their very existence, has nourished some withered, essential part of herself.
”
”
Jeanine Cummins (American Dirt)
“
He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient -- nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?
”
”
George Orwell (1984)
“
23Pyramid schemes universally flourish where desperation, spiritual confusion and feelings of insufficiency are rampant.
”
”
Robert L. Fitzpatrick (False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverance in Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes)
“
The sensation arises because of a felt absence or insufficiency of closeness, and its feeling tone ranges from discomfort to chronic, unbearable pain.
”
”
Olivia Laing (The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone)
“
Love from those who cannot damage us irreparably often feels insufficient; we may think, rightly or wrongly, that their love does not matter at all.
”
”
Yiyun Li (The Book of Goose)
“
Our sincere and innermost anxiety is not that we are insufficient. Our sincere and innermost fear is that we are prevailing and dominate. Our proficiency, not our incompetence is the misapprehension that most startles and worries us. It’s when we contemplate in retrospect that we demand of ourselves why am I extraordinary, striking, talented, and remarkable? Essentially, Why can’t you? A child of God blessed from the crown of you head to the soul of your feet. There is nonentity progressive about shrinking so individuals won't feel apprehensive around you. Every individual is predestined to shine. Humans were conceived to manifest the exaltation, magnificence, splendour, beauty or the glory of God imbedded in us . this gift is not some individual but in everyone
”
”
Archibald Gumiro
“
This shame has nothing to do with He or She. It's the being mortal--being, how shall I say it? ... insufficient. Don't you think a dream would feel shy if it were seen walking about in the waking world?
”
”
C.S. Lewis (Till We Have Faces)
“
And once again I feel, in horror, how weak, poor and flabby a substance whatever we call by the names of soul, spirit or feeling must be after all, not to mention what we describe as pain, since all this, even to the utmost degree, is insufficient to destroy the suffering flesh of the tormented body entirely—for we do survive such hours and our blood continues to pulse, instead of dying and falling like a tree struck by lightning."..
”
”
Stefan Zweig (Twenty-Four Hours in The Life of a Woman)
“
[On Love After Love by Derek Walcott]
I read this poem often, once a month at least. In the madness and mayhem of modern life, where every man seems committed to an endless search for the approval and esteem of his fellows and peers, no matter what the cost, this poem reminds me of a basic truth: that we are, as we are, "enough". Most of us are motivated deep down by a sense of insufficiency, a need to be better stronger, faster; to work harder; to be more committed, more kind, more self-sufficient, more successful. But this short poem by Derek Walcott is like a declaration of unconditional love. It's like the embrace of an old friend. He brings us to an awareness of the present moment, calm and peaceful, and to a feeling of gratitude for everything we have. I have read it to my dearest friends after dinner once, and to my family at Christmas, and they started crying, which always, unfailingly, makes me cry.
”
”
Tom Hiddleston
“
It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her, that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to live. To appeal to her, was made hopeless by her having no sense of pity, even for herself. If she had been laid low in the streets, in any of the many encounters in which she had been engaged, she would not have pitied herself; nor, if she had been ordered to the axe to- morrow, would she have gone to it with any softer feeling than a fierce desire to change places with the man who sent her there.
”
”
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
“
We should be able to time travel," he said. "Back to an age when society was kinder to the Rubenesque woman."
"Hmph." I wasn't able to say much.
"I'd love that. I love softness. Love curves. The more, the better."
"D'you really?"
"Why wouldn't I? Think of all the words associated with a bit of extra flesh. Generous. Ample. Voluptuous. Bountiful. Beautiful, sensual words. Contrast them with their opposites. Mean. Insufficient. Meager. Miserly."
I snuffled into his velvet jerkin or doublet or whatever it was and looked up at him. "You should be a professional morale booster," I told him. "You're very kind to say all this but --"
"Kind?" he burst out. "No, I'm not kind! I don't feel sorry for you. I want you.
”
”
Justine Elyot (Curvy Girls)
“
But, imbued from her childhood with a brooding sense of wrong, and an inveterate hatred of a class, opportunity had developed her into a tigress. She was absolutely without pity. If she had ever had the virtue in her, it had quite gone out of her. It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her, that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to live. To appeal to her, was made hopeless by her having no sense of pity, even for herself. If she had been laid low in the streets, in any of the many encounters in which she had been engaged, she would not have pitied herself; nor, if she had been ordered to the axe to-morrow, would she have gone to it with any softer feeling than a fierce desire to change places with the man who sent here there.
”
”
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
“
The contents of this letter threw Elizabeth into a flutter of spirits in which it was difficult to determine whether pleasure or pain bore the greatest share. The vague and unsettled suspicions which uncertainty had produced of what Mr. Darcy might have been doing to forward her sister's match which she had feared to encourage as an exertion of goodness too great to be probable and at the same time dreaded to be just from the pain of obligation were proved beyond their greatest extent to be true He had followed them purposely to town he had taken on himself all the trouble and mortification attendant on such a research in which supplication had been necessary to a woman whom he must abominate and despise and where he was reduced to meet frequently meet reason with persuade and finally bribe the man whom he always most wished to avoid and whose very name it was punishment to him to pronounce. He had done all this for a girl whom he could neither regard nor esteem. Her heart did whisper that he had done it for her. But it was a hope shortly checked by other considerations and she soon felt that even her vanity was insufficient when required to depend on his affection for her—for a woman who had already refused him—as able to overcome a sentiment so natural as abhorrence against relationship with Wickham. Brother-in-law of Wickham Every kind of pride must revolt from the connection. He had to be sure done much. She was ashamed to think how much. But he had given a reason for his interference which asked no extraordinary stretch of belief. It was reasonable that he should feel he had been wrong he had liberality and he had the means of exercising it and though she would not place herself as his principal inducement she could perhaps believe that remaining partiality for her might assist his endeavours in a cause where her peace of mind must be materially concerned. It was painful exceedingly painful to know that they were under obligations to a person who could never receive a return. They owed the restoration of Lydia her character every thing to him. Oh how heartily did she grieve over every ungracious sensation she had ever encouraged every saucy speech she had ever directed towards him. For herself she was humbled but she was proud of him. Proud that in a cause of compassion and honour he had been able to get the better of himself. She read over her aunt's commendation of him again and again. It was hardly enough but it pleased her. She was even sensible of some pleasure though mixed with regret on finding how steadfastly both she and her uncle had been persuaded that affection and confidence subsisted between Mr. Darcy and herself.
”
”
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
“
My intention is to help you realize that fear and worry are worthless—indeed, vain—emotions. If you are frightened or afraid, there is no use feeling guilty about it. What you need to do is fix your mind upon God and ask him to fill your mind with himself. And as your mind is transformed, your whole personality will be transformed, including your body and your feelings. The transformation of the self away from a life of fear and insufficiency takes place as we fix our minds upon God as he truly is.
”
”
Dallas Willard (Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23)
“
feel that way too when I say such things to others who have lost someone they loved. We all do. It feels lame because we like to think we can solve things. It feels insufficient because there is nothing we can actually do to change what’s horribly true.
”
”
Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar)
“
He told me it was for men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortune on the other, who when abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprize, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road; that these things were all either too far above me, or to far below me; that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries of hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanick part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind. He told me I might judge of the happiness of this state by this one thing, viz. that this was the state of life which all other people envied, that kings had frequently lamented the miserable consequences of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this as the just standard of true felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty or riches.
He bid me observe it, and I should always find, that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind; nay, they were so subjected to so many distempers and uneasiness, either of body or mind, as those were who, by vicious living, luxury, and extravagancies on one hand, and by hard labour, want of necessaries, and mean or insufficient diet on the other hand, bring distempers upon themselves by the natural consequences of their way of living; that the middle station of life was calculated for all kinds of vertues and all kinds of enjoyments; that peace and plenty were the hand-maids of a middle fortune; that temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable diversion, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessing attending the middle station of life; that this way men went silently and smoothly thro’ the world, and comfortably out of it, not embarrassed with the labour of their hands or of the head, not sold to the life of slavery for daily bread, or harrast with perplexed circumstances, which rob the soul of peace and the body of rest; not enraged with the passion of envy, or secret burning lust of ambition for great things; but in easy circumstances sliding gently thro’ the world, and sensibly tasting the sweets of living without the bitter, feeling that they are happy and learning by every day’s experience to know it more sensibly.
”
”
Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe)
“
You're not a failure uncle," he said, the words awkward and insufficient in his mouth. "It's only that we don't feel safe. A game has a reset button. You have infinite chances for success. Real life is awfully permanent compared to that, and a lot of religious people make it seem even more permanent-one step the wrong way, one sin too many, and it's the fiery furnace for you. Beware. And then at the same time, you ask us to love the God who has this terrible sword hanging over our necks. It's very confusing."
"Ah," said Sheikh Bilal, looking melancholy, "but that's the point. What is more terrifying than love? How can one not be overwhelmed by the majesty of a creator who gives and destroys life in equal measure, with breathtaking swiftness? You look at all the swelling rose hips in the garden that will wither and die without ever germinating and it seems a miracle that you are alive at all. What would one not do to acknowledge that miracle in some way?
”
”
G. Willow Wilson (Alif the Unseen)
“
But even as we make these conclusions we feel our throats plugging up, because they are both true and untrue. So much has been written about the girls in the newspapers, so much has been said over backyard fences, or related over the years in psychiatrists' offices, that we are certain only of the insufficiency of explanations.
”
”
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
“
I am already living, but something is telling me with unchallengeable authority: you are not living properly. The numinous authority of form enjoys the prerogative of being able to tell me 'You must'.
It is the authority of a different life in this life. This authority touches on a subtle insufficiency within me that is older and freer than sin; it is my innermost not-yet. In my most conscious moment, I am affected by the absolute objection to my status quo: my change is the one thing that is necessary. If you do indeed subsequently change your life, what you are doing is no different from what you desire with your whole will as soon as you feel how a vertical tension that is valid for you unhinges your life.
”
”
Peter Sloterdijk (Du mußt dein Leben ändern)
“
Just as a child cries out in the dark to make a sign of its own persona, which, in its infinite fear, it senses is insufficient, so men, who in the solitude of their empty spirit feel insufficient, inadequately affirm themselves, feigning the sign of the persona they do not have, “knowledge,” as if it were already in their hands. They no longer hear the voice of things telling them, “You are,” and amidst the obscurity they do not have the courage to endure, but each seeks his companion’s hand and says, “I am, you are, we are,” so that the other might act the mirror and tell him,“you are, I am, we are”; and together they repeat, “we are, we are, because we know, because we can tell each other the words of knowledge, of free and absolute consciousness.” Thus do they stupefy one another.
”
”
Carlo Michelstaedter (Persuasion and Rhetoric)
“
What human language captures the dislocation, the acute insufficiency of being in the presence of the superorganism, the sinking, shrinking feeling at this display of industrial steel and light and might? It was as if nothing I’d ever done in my life prior to this counted. As if my past life was revealed to be a waste, a gesture in slow motion, because what I considered scarce and precious was in fact plentiful and cheap, and what I counted as rapid progress turned out to be glacially slow. The observer, that old record keeper, the chronicler of events, made his appearance in that taxi. The hands of my clock turned elastic while I imprinted these feelings in memory. You must remember this. It was all I had, all I’ve ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.
”
”
Abraham Verghese (Cutting for Stone)
“
All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based – or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven’t thought of, or demonstrates that we’ve swept key underlying assumptions under the rug – it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault.
”
”
Carl Sagan
“
Insufficient adjustment is also a source of tension between exasperated parents and teenagers who enjoy loud music in their room. Le Boeuf and Shafir note that a “well-intentioned child who turns down exceptionally loud music to meet a parent’s demand that it be played at a ‘reasonable’ volume may fail to adjust sufficiently from a high anchor, and may feel that genuine attempts at compromise are being overlooked.
”
”
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
“
All human life, we may say, consists solely of these two activities: (1) bringing one’s activities into harmony with conscience, or (2) hiding from oneself the indications of conscience in order to be able to continue to live as before.
Some do the first, others the second. To attain the first there is but one means: moral enlightenment — the increase of light in oneself and attention to what it shows. To attain the second — to hide from oneself the indications of conscience—there are two means: one external and the other internal. The external means consists in occupations that divert one’s attention from the indications given by conscience; the internal method consists in darkening conscience itself.
As a man has two ways of avoiding seeing an object that is before him: either by diverting his sight to other more striking objects, or by obstructing the sight of his own eyes—just so a man can hide from himself the indications of conscience in two ways: either by the external method of diverting his attention to various occupations, cares, amusements, or games; or by the internal method of obstructing the organ of attention itself. For people of dull, limited moral feeling, the external diversions are often quite sufficient to enable them not to perceive the indications conscience gives of the wrongness of their lives. But for morally sensitive people those means are often insufficient.
The external means do not quite divert attention from the consciousness of discord between one’s life and the demands of conscience. This consciousness hampers one’s life; and in order to be able to go on living as before, people have recourse to the reliable, internal method, which is that of darkening conscience itself by poisoning the brain with stupefying substances.
One is not living as conscience demands, yet lacks the strength to reshape one’s life in accord with its demands. The diversions which might distract attention from the consciousness of this discord are insufficient, or have become stale, and so—in order to be able to live on, disregarding the indications conscience gives of the wrongness of their life—people (by poisoning it temporarily) stop the activity of the organ through which conscience manifests itself, as a man by covering his eyes hides from himself what he does not wish to see.
”
”
Leo Tolstoy (Why do men stupefy themselves?: And other writings)
“
It is time to leave traditional marketing concepts which focus on the product and marketing experts should focus on customers’ experiences about the product.Today, since traditional marketing concepts are insufficient and firms that use the experiential marketing are getting successful as they appeal customers’ feeling and sense. Firms owners should have direct relationship with the customers, so customers can reach the firm and the product when wants to get experience.
”
”
Anonymous
“
We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because shewas a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that hersisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too. But evenas we make these conclusions we feel our throats plugging up, becausethey are both true and untrue. So much has been written about the girlsin the newspapers, so much has been said over back-yard fences, orrelated over the years in psychiatrists' offices, that we are certainonly of the insufficiency of explanations.
”
”
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
“
I am having a hard time, I think desperately a thousand times a day, and when I try to probe for more information—A hard time with what?—the voice replies, Everything.
I feel insufficient as an adult. I look around at the office and see everyone typing, taking calls, making bookings, editing documents, and I know they’re all dealing with at least as much as I am, which only makes me feel worse about how hard everything feels to me.
Living, being responsible for myself, seems like an insurmountable challenge lately.
Sometimes I scrape myself off my sofa, stuff a frozen meal in the microwave, and as I wait for the timer to go off, I just think, I will have to do this again tomorrow and the next day and the next day. Every day for the rest of my life, I’m going to have to figure out what to eat, and make it for myself, no matter how bad I feel or tired I am, or how horrible the pounding in my head is. Even if I have a one-hundred-and-two-degree fever, I will have to pull myself up and make a very mediocre meal to go on living.
”
”
Emily Henry (People We Meet on Vacation)
“
When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible only to the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that he becomes the founder of a family.
”
”
Henry David Thoreau (Walden and Other Writings)
“
On Love
You held back your love for tomorrow
Timid,shy,considerate
All your friends had
Misunderstood you
Never ending things were the reason
(you never wanted it to happen that way)
Just one glance was enough to tell everything,
Feelings, crowding your heart
Remained in your heart
You were hoping for more time
It was undesirable to utter your love in insufficient moments
You never expected the years pass this rapidly
In rushes
In your hidden gardens
You had flowers
Blossoming at night and alone
You thought they were not enough to give
Or somehow, there was not enough time
”
”
Behçet Necatigil
“
The same is true for your fiancée, Bewildered. She is your joy on wheels whose every experience is informed and altered by the fact that she lost the most essential, elemental, primal, and central person in her life too soon. I know this without knowing her. It will never be okay that she lost her mother. And the kindest, most loving thing you can do for her is to bear witness to that, to muster the strength, courage, and humility it takes to accept the enormous reality of its not okayness and be okay with it the same way she has to be. Get comfortable being the man who says Oh honey, I’m so sorry for your loss over and over again. That’s what the people who’ve consoled me the most deeply in my sorrow have done. They’ve spoken those words or something like them every time I needed to hear it; they’ve plainly acknowledged what is invisible to them, but so very real to me. I know saying those clichéd and ordinary things makes you feel squirmy and lame. I feel that way too when I say such things to others who have lost someone they loved. We all do. It feels lame because we like to think we can solve things. It feels insufficient because there is nothing we can actually do to change what’s horribly true.
”
”
Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who's Been There)
“
Ah! Gentle, gracious Dove,
And art thou grieved in me,
That sinners should restrain thy love,
And say, “It is not free:
It is not free for all:
The most, thou passest by,
And mockest with a fruitless call
Whom thou hast doomed to die.”
They think thee not sincere
In giving each his day,
“ Thou only draw’st the sinner near
To cast him quite away,
To aggravate his sin,
His sure damnation seal:
Thou show’st him heaven, and say’st, go in
And thrusts him into hell.”
O HORRIBLE DECREE
Worthy of whence it came!
Forgive their hellish blasphemy
Who charge it on the Lamb:
Whose pity him inclined
To leave his throne above,
The friend, and Saviour of mankind,
The God of grace, and love.
O gracious, loving Lord,
I feel thy bowels yearn;
For those who slight the gospel word
I share in thy concern:
How art thou grieved to be
By ransomed worms withstood!
How dost thou bleed afresh to see
Them trample on thy blood!
To limit thee they dare,
Blaspheme thee to thy face,
Deny their fellow-worms a share
In thy redeeming grace:
All for their own they take,
Thy righteousness engross,
Of none effect to most they make
The merits of thy cross.
Sinners, abhor the fiend:
His other gospel hear—
“The God of truth did not intend
The thing his words declare,
He offers grace to all,
Which most cannot embrace,
Mocked with an ineffectual call
And insufficient grace.
“The righteous God consigned
Them over to their doom,
And sent the Saviour of mankind
To damn them from the womb;
To damn for falling short,
“Of what they could not do,
For not believing the report
Of that which was not true.
“The God of love passed by
The most of those that fell,
Ordained poor reprobates to die,
And forced them into hell.”
“He did not do the deed”
(Some have more mildly raved)
“He did not damn them—but decreed
They never should be saved.
“He did not them bereave
Of life, or stop their breath,
His grace he only would not give,
And starved their souls to death.”
Satanic sophistry!
But still, all-gracious God,
They charge the sinner’s death on thee,
Who bought’st him with thy blood.
They think with shrieks and cries
To please the Lord of hosts,
And offer thee, in sacrifice
Millions of slaughtered ghosts:
With newborn babes they fill
The dire infernal shade,
“For such,” they say, “was thy great will,
Before the world was made.”
How long, O God, how long
Shall Satan’s rage proceed!
Wilt thou not soon avenge the wrong,
And crush the serpent’s head?
Surely thou shalt at last
Bruise him beneath our feet:
The devil and his doctrine cast
Into the burning pit.
Arise, O God, arise,
Thy glorious truth maintain,
Hold forth the bloody sacrifice,
For every sinner slain!
Defend thy mercy’s cause,
Thy grace divinely free,
Lift up the standard of thy cross,
Draw all men unto thee.
O vindicate thy grace,
Which every soul may prove,
Us in thy arms of love embrace,
Of everlasting love.
Give the pure gospel word,
Thy preachers multiply,
Let all confess their common Lord,
And dare for him to die.
My life I here present,
My heart’s last drop of blood,
O let it all be freely spent
In proof that thou art good,
Art good to all that breathe,
Who all may pardon have:
Thou willest not the sinner’s death,
But all the world wouldst save.
O take me at my word,
But arm me with thy power,
Then call me forth to suffer, Lord,
To meet the fiery hour:
In death will I proclaim
That all may hear thy call,
And clap my hands amidst the flame,
And shout,—HE DIED FOR ALL
”
”
Charles Wesley
“
I do not write to trigger victims. I write to comfort them, and I've found that victims identify more with pain than platitudes. When I write about weakness, about how I am barely getting through this, my hope is that they feel better, because it aligns with the truth they are living. If I were to say I was healed and redeemed, I worry a victim would feel insufficient, as if they have not tried hard enough to cross some nonexistent finish line. I write to stand beside them in their suffering. I write because the most healing words I have been given are It's okay not to be okay. It's okay to fall apart, because that's what happens when you are broken, but I want victims to know they will not be left there, that we will be alongside them as they rebuild.
”
”
Chanel Miller (Know My Name)
“
I no longer felt fifteen. Thirty-five, forty-five ; these numbers came, in turn, to feel somehow insufficient. Not even sixty-five, no, nor seventy-five, seemed to encompass what I was.
I wasn't JeongDae any more, the runt of the year. I wasn't Park JeongDae, whose ideas of love and fear were both bound up in the figure of his sister. A strange violence welled up within me, not spurred by the fact of my death, but simply because of the thoughts that wouldn't stop tearing through me, the things I needed to know. Who killed me, who killed my sister, and why. The more of myself I devoted to these questions, the firmer this new strength within me became.
The ceaseless flow of blood, blood that flowed from a place without eyes or cheeks, darkened, thickened, into a vicious treacle ooze.
”
”
Han Kang (Human Acts)
“
Dream House as Fantasy
Fantasy is, I think, the defining cliché of female queerness. No wonder we joke about U-Hauls on the second date. To find desire, love, everyday joy without men’s accompanying bullshit is a pretty decent working definition of paradise.
The literature of queer domestic abuse is lousy with references to this(27) punctured(28) dream(29), which proves to be as much a violation as a black eye, a sprained wrist. Even the enduring symbol of queerness—the rainbow—is a promise not to repeat an act of supreme violence by a capricious and rageful god: I won’t flood the whole world again. It was a one-time thing, I swear. Do you trust me? (And, later, a threat: the next time, motherfuckers,
it’ll be fire.) Acknowledging the insufficiency of this idealism is nearly as painful as acknowledging that we’re the same as straight folks in this regard: we’re in the muck like everyone else. All of this fantasy is an act of supreme optimism, or, if you’re feeling less charitable, arrogance.
Maybe this will change someday. Maybe, when queerness is so normal and accepted that finding it will feel less like entering paradise and more like the claiming of your own body: imperfect, but yours.
---
27. “I go to sleep at night in the arms of my lover dreaming of lesbian paradise. What a nightmare, then, to open my eyes to the reality of lesbian battering. It feels like a nightmare trying to talk about it, like a fog that tightens the chest and closes the throat…. We are so good at celebrating our love. It is so hard for us to hear that some lesbians live, not in paradise, but in a hell of fear and violence” (Lisa Shapiro, commentary in Off Our Backs, 1991).
28. “What will it do to our utopian dyke dreams to admit the existence of this violence?” (Amy Edgington, from an account of the first Lesbian Battering Conference held in Little Rock, AR, in 1988).
29. From a review of Behind the Curtains, a 1987 play about lesbian abuse: “By writing the play [and] by portraying both joy and pain in our lives, [Margaret Nash rejects the] almost reflex assumption that lesbians have surpassed the society from which we were born and, having come out, now exist in some mystical utopia” (Tracey MacDonald, Off Our Backs, 1987).
”
”
Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House)
“
Our freedom does not lie outside us, but within us. One can be bound outside, and yet one will still feel free since one has burst inner bonds. One can certainly gain outer freedom through powerful actions, but one creates inner freedom only through the symbol.
The symbol is the word that goes out of the mouth, that one does not simply speak, but that rises out of the depths of the self as a word of power and great need and places itself unexpectedly on the tongue. It is an astonishing and perhaps seemingly irrational word, but one recognizes it as a symbol since it is alien to the conscious mind. If one accepts the symbol, it is as if a door opens leading into a new room whose existence one previously did not know. But if one does not accept the symbol, it is as if one carelessly went past this door; and since this was the only door leading to the inner chambers, one must pass outside into the streets again, exposed to everything external. But the soul suffers great need, since outer freedom is of no use to it. Salvation is a long road that leads through many gates. These gates are symbols. Each new gate is at first invisible; indeed, it seems at first that it must be created, for it exists only if one has dug up the spring’s root.
To find the mandrake, one needs the black dog, since good and bad must always be united first if the symbol is to be created. The symbol can be neither thought up nor found: it becomes. Its becoming is like the becoming of human life in the womb. Pregnancy comes about through voluntary copulation. It goes on through willing attention. But if the depths have conceived, then the symbol grows out of itself and is born from the mind, as befits a God. But in the same way a mother would like to throw herself on the child like a monster and devour it again.
In the morning, when the new sun rises, the word steps out of my mouth, but is murdered lovelessly, since I did not know that it was the saviour. The newborn child grows quickly, if I accept it. And immediately it becomes my charioteer. The word is the guide, the middle way which easily oscillates like the needle on the scales. The word is the God that rises out of the waters each morning and proclaims the guiding law to the people. Outer laws and outer wisdom are eternally insufficient, since there is only one law and one wisdom, namely my daily law, my daily wisdom. The God renews himself each night.
”
”
C.G. Jung (The Red Book: Liber Novus)
“
To get the idea, take a sheet of paper and draw a 2½-inch line going up, starting at the bottom of the page—without a ruler. Now take another sheet, and start at the top and draw a line going down until it is 2½ inches from the bottom. Compare the lines. There is a good chance that your first estimate of 2½ inches was shorter than the second. The reason is that you do not know exactly what such a line looks like; there is a range of uncertainty. You stop near the bottom of the region of uncertainty when you start from the bottom of the page and near the top of the region when you start from the top. Robyn Le Boeuf and Shafir found many examples of that mechanism in daily experience. Insufficient adjustment neatly explains why you are likely to drive too fast when you come off the highway onto city streets—especially if you are talking with someone as you drive. Insufficient adjustment is also a source of tension between exasperated parents and teenagers who enjoy loud music in their room. Le Boeuf and Shafir note that a “well-intentioned child who turns down exceptionally loud music to meet a parent’s demand that it be played at a ‘reasonable’ volume may fail to adjust sufficiently from a high anchor, and may feel that genuine attempts at compromise are being overlooked.” The driver and the child both deliberately adjust down, and both fail to adjust enough.
”
”
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
“
Daniel could feel ir,like a layer of skin was lifting off his bones. His past self's body was slowly cleaving from his own.The venom of separation coursed through him,threading deep into the fibers of his wings.The pain was so raw it was nauseating, roiling deep inside him with great tidal swells. His vision clouded; ringing filled his ears.The starshot in his hand tumbled to the ground.Then,all at once, he felt a great shove and a sharp,cold breath of air.There was a long grunt and two thuds,and then-
His vision cleared.The ringing ceased. He felt lightness, simplicity.
Free.
Miles lay on the ground below him, chest heaving. The starshot in Daniel's hand disappeared. Daniel spun around to find a specter of his past self standing behind him,his skin gray and his body wraithlike,his eyes and teeth coal-black,the starshot grasped in his hand. His profile wobbled in the hot wind,like the picture on a shorted-out television.
"I'm sorry," Daniel said,reaching forward and clutching his past self at the base of his wings.When Daniel lifted the shadow of himself off the ground, his body felt scant and insufficient.His fingers found the graying portal of the Announcer through which both Daniels had traveled just before it fell apart. "Your day will come," he said.
Then he pitched his past self back into the Announcer.
He watched the void fading in the hot sun. The body made a drawn-out whistling sound as it tumbled into time, as if it were falling off a cliff. The Announcer split into infinitesimal traces,and was gone.
”
”
Lauren Kate (Passion (Fallen, #3))
“
Cassius’s irritability is explained by the fact that he identifies with his mother and therefore behaves exactly like a woman, as his speech demonstrates to perfection.33 His womanish yearning for love and his despairing self-abasement under the proud masculine will of Brutus fully justify the latter’s remark that Cassius is “yoked with a lamb,” in other words, has something feckless in his character, which is inherited from his mother. This can be taken as proof of an infantile disposition, which is as always characterized by a predominance of the parental imago, in this case that of the mother. An individual is infantile because he has freed himself insufficiently, or not at all, from his childish environment and his adaptation to his parents, with the result that he has a false reaction to the world: on the one hand he reacts as a child towards his parents, always demanding love and immediate emotional rewards, while on the other hand he is so identified with his parents through his close ties with them that he behaves like his father or his mother. He is incapable of living his own life and finding the character that belongs to him. Therefore Brutus correctly surmises that “the mother chides” in Cassius, not he himself. The psychologically valuable fact to be elicited here is that Cassius is infantile and identified with the mother. His hysterical behaviour is due to the circumstance that he is still, in part, a “lamb,” an innocent and harmless child. So far as his emotional life is concerned, he has not yet caught up with himself, as is often the case with people who are apparently so masterful towards life and their fellows, but who have remained infantile in regard to the demands of feeling.
”
”
C.G. Jung (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung))
“
As you know, the public conversation about the connection between Islamic ideology and Muslim intolerance and violence has been stifled by political correctness. In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed, it would seem, to protect Muslims from having to grapple with the kinds of facts we’ve been talking about. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars—deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields—who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take Islamists and jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations. When one asks what the motivations of Islamists and jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion. Needless to say, the West is to blame for all the mayhem we see in Muslim societies. After all, how would we feel if outside powers and their mapmakers had divided our lands and stolen our oil? These beleaguered people just want what everyone else wants out of life. They want economic and political security. They want good schools for their kids. They want to be free to flourish in ways that would be fully compatible with a global civil society. Liberals imagine that jihadists and Islamists are acting as anyone else would given a similar history of unhappy encounters with the West. And they totally discount the role that religious beliefs play in inspiring a group like the Islamic State—to the point where it would be impossible for a jihadist to prove that he was doing anything for religious reasons. Apparently, it’s not enough for an educated person with economic opportunities to devote himself to the most extreme and austere version of Islam, to articulate his religious reasons for doing so ad nauseam, and even to go so far as to confess his certainty about martyrdom on video before blowing himself up in a crowd. Such demonstrations of religious fanaticism are somehow considered rhetorically insufficient to prove that he really believed what he said he believed. Of course, if he said he did these things because he was filled with despair and felt nothing but revulsion for humanity, or because he was determined to sacrifice himself to rid his nation of tyranny, such a psychological or political motive would be accepted at face value. This double standard is guaranteed to exonerate religion every time. The game is rigged.
”
”
Sam Harris (Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue)
“
The textbooks of history prepared for the public schools are marked by a rather naive parochialism and chauvinism. There is no need to dwell on such futilities. But it must be admitted that even for the most conscientious historian abstention from judgments of value may offer certain difficulties.
As a man and as a citizen the historian takes sides in many feuds and controversies of his age. It is not easy to combine scientific aloofness in historical studies with partisanship in mundane interests. But that can and has been achieved by outstanding historians. The historian's world view may color his work. His representation of events may be interlarded with remarks that betray his feelings and wishes and divulge his party affiliation. However, the postulate of scientific history's abstention from value judgments is not infringed by occasional remarks expressing the preferences of the historian if the general purport of the study is not affected. If the writer, speaking of an inept commander of the forces of his own nation or party, says "unfortunately" the general was not equal to his task, he has not failed in his duty as a historian. The historian is free to lament the destruction of the masterpieces of Greek art provided his regret does not influence his report of the events that brought about this destruction.
The problem of Wertfreíheit must also be clearly distinguished from that of the choice of theories resorted to for the interpretation of facts. In dealing with the data available, the historian needs ali the knowledge provided by the other disciplines, by logic, mathematics, praxeology, and the natural sciences. If what these disciplines teach is insufficient or if the historian chooses an erroneous theory out of several conflicting theories held by the specialists, his effort is misled and his performance is abortive. It may be that he chose an untenable theory because he was biased and this theory best suited his party spirit. But the acceptance of a faulty doctrine may often be merely the outcome of ignorance or of the fact that it enjoys greater popularity than more correct doctrines.
The main source of dissent among historians is divergence in regard to the teachings of ali the other branches of knowledge upon which they base their presentation. To a historian of earlier days who believed in witchcraft, magic, and the devil's interference with human affairs, things hàd a different aspect than they have for an agnostic historian. The neomercantilist doctrines of the balance of payments and of the dollar shortage give an image of presentday world conditions very different from that provided by an examination of the situation from the point of view of modern subjectivist economics.
”
”
Ludwig von Mises (Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution)
“
Between concentric pavement ripples glide errant echoes originating from beyond the Puddled Metropolis. Windowless blocks and pickle-shaped monuments demarcate the boundaries of patternistic cycles from those wilds kissed neither by starlight nor moonlight. Lethal underbrush of razor-like excrescence pierces at the skins of night, crawls with hyperactive sprouts and verminous vines that howl with contempt for the wicked fortunes of Marshland Organizers armed with scythes and hoes and flaming torches who have only succeeded in crafting their own folly where once stood something of glorious and generous integrity. There are familiar whispers under leaves perched upon by flapping moths. They implore the spirit again to heed the warnings of the vines and to not be swayed by the hubris of these organizing opportunists. One is to stop moving at frantic zigzags through gridlocked streets, stop climbing ladders altogether, stop relying on drainage pipes where floods should prevail, stop tapping one’s feet in waiting rooms expecting to be seen and examined and acknowledged. Rather, one is to eschew unseemly fabrications and conceal oneself beneath the surface of leaves—perhaps even inside the droplets of dew—one is, after all, to feel shameful of the form, of all forms, and seek instead to merge with whispers which do not shun or excoriate, for they are otherwise occupied in the act of designating meaning. Yet, what meaning stands beyond the rectitude of angles and symmetry, but rather in wilds among agitated insects and resplendent bogs and malicious spiders and rippling mosses pronouncing doom upon their surroundings? One is said to find only the same degree of opportunism, and nothing greatly edifying that could serve to extend beyond the banalities of self-preservation. But no, surely there is something more than this—there absolutely must be something more, and it is to be found! Forget what is said about ‘opportunism’—this is just a word and, thusly, a distraction. The key issue is that there are many such campaigns of contrivance mounted by the taxonomic self-interest of categories and frameworks ‘who’ only seek primacy and authority over their consumers. The ascription of ‘this’ may thusly be ascribed also with that of ‘this other’ and so it cannot be ‘that precisely’ because ‘this’ contradicts another ‘that other’ with which ‘this other’ surely claims affiliation. Certainly, in view of such limiting factors, there is a frustration that one is bound to feel that the answers available are constrained and formulaic and insufficient and that one is simply to accept the way of things as though they are defined by the highest of mathematics and do not beget anything higher. One is, thusly, to cease in one’s quest for unexplored possibility. The lines have been drawn, the contradictions defined and so one cannot expect to go very far with these mathematical rules and boundaries in place. There are ways out: one might assume the value of an imaginary unit and bounce out of any restrictive quadrant as with the errant echoes against the rippling pavement of this Puddled Metropolis. One will then experience something akin to a bounding and rebounding leap—iterative, but with all subleaps constituting a more sweeping trajectory—outward to other landscapes and null landscapes, inward through corridors and toward the centroid of circumcentric chamber clusters, into crevices and trenches between paradigms and over those mountain peaks of abstruse calculation.
”
”
Ashim Shanker (Inward and Toward (Migrations, #3))
“
I hated feelings of insufficiency, and I ached with the knowledge that daily I was sacrificing—my time, my work, my friendships, and my personal ease—only to see no good result. Even worse, it seemed the more love I poured out, the more I was ignored.
”
”
Tricia Goyer (Calming Angry Kids: Help and Hope for Parents in the Whirlwind)
“
Though he was a newcomer and had arrived only a short while before the crisis, he proved to be a most industrious and loyal servant, and was appalled by the way the other servants were taking advantage of their masters. He had insufficient status among the domestic staff to dare voice his feelings to the offenders, and could only eat his evening meal and take his indignation to bed.
”
”
Cao Xueqin (The Story of the Stone: The Dreamer Wakes (Volume V))
“
What is a tremendous, unspeakable honor may feel insufficient for those who are used to being god of their own blogs and Twitter accounts. It feels insignificant to those who have erected their own shrines on Facebook and Instagram, filled with beautiful pictures of themselves. Herein lies the danger of clamoring for attention: we don’t realize that true joy comes from the opposite. Joy comes as we stand among those Jesus has redeemed and get lost in a sea of worship, becoming fully a part of something sacred.
”
”
Francis Chan (We Are Church)
“
Sometimes it feels like there just aren’t enough hours in a day to get everything done. So instead of trying to make your day longer, why not make your life longer by an extra two years? That’s about how long your life span may be increased by eating nuts regularly—one handful (or about 30 grams) five or more days a week.1 Just that one simple and delicious act alone may extend your life. The Global Burden of Disease Study calculated that not eating enough nuts and seeds was the third-leading dietary risk factor for death and disability in the world, killing more people than processed meat consumption. Insufficient nut and seed intake is thought to lead to the deaths of millions of people every year, fifteen times more than all those who die from overdoses of heroin, crack cocaine, and all other illicit drugs combined.2
”
”
Michael Greger (How Not To Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
“
This I am not enough idea is not unique to people who are shy or socially anxious. In fact, most people in our culture struggle with feelings of inadequacy. This is part of growing up in a media-saturated environment full of messages implying we are somehow insufficient. The difference between someone who has social anxiety and someone who does not can be distilled down to one thing: those with the anxiety believe more completely, and more frequently, that they are not enough. That is the crux of social anxiety.
”
”
Aziz Gazipura (The Solution To Social Anxiety: Break Free From The Shyness That Holds You Back)
“
Truly, with such facts as these before us, we might well faint for fear did we not know that there is a mightier Power above all the hosts of the Prince of Darkness, One Who regards us with feelings of wondrous love, Who is not only able, but yearning, to shield us from the destroyer now, and Who purposes shortly to deliver us altogether from the anxiety, the terror, and the danger, of his assaults. For although the Lord has not yet formally deposed the rebel, and arranged a new government, He does not leave the world entirely to Satan’s mercy. Angels of God penetrate the realms of air, encamp round about them that fear Him, and protect them from the malignant foes to whom they would otherwise fall an easy prey.[72] Nor are their numbers insufficient: the servant of Elisha beheld the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire round about his master.[
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G.H. Pember (Earth's Earliest Ages and Their Connection with Modern Spiritualism and Theosophy)
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The major function of social work is concerned with helping people perform their normal life tasks by providing information and knowledge, social support, social skills, and social opportunities; it is also concerned with helping people deal with interference and abuse from other individuals and groups, with physical and mental disabilities, and with overburdening responsibilities they have for others. Most important, social work’s objective is to strengthen the community’s capacities to solve problems through development of groups and organizations, community education, and community systems of governance and control over systems of social care. The concern of psychotherapy is with helping people to deal with feelings, perceptions, and emotions that prevent them from performing their normal life tasks because of impairment or insufficient development of emotional and cognitive functions that are intimately related to the self. Social workers help people make use of and develop community and social resources to build connections with others and reduce alienation and isolation; psychotherapists help people to alter, reconstruct, and improve the self.
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Harry Specht (Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission)
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I have little use for religion as it is practiced, or for astrology, or for belief in witchcraft or omens of good or ill-luck. I think they all stem from some insufficiency in men’s minds, perhaps from a lack of a willingness to feel themselves utterly alone. But now and then I feel that there is something beyond the material world, something we all feel intimations of but cannot explain. Underneath the religious vision there is the harsh fundamental reality of all our lives, because we know we must live and die as the animals we are. But sometimes I suspect that under that harsh reality there is a further vision, still deeper based, that comes nearer to true reality than the reality we know.
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Winston Graham (The Black Moon (Poldark, #5))
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They behave towards their therapists as they perceive themselves to have been treated by their absent parents. They make their therapists feel very fully what it is like to be discarded, ignored, despised, helpless or even unreal and non-existent. (...) What needs to be understood in such situations is not that the child is perceiving the therapist as the insufficiently caring parent of his past experiences and revenging himself. Beyond this the child is also reversing the original situation. This time the child is identifying himself as the cruel, rejecting but powerful person and it is the therapist who is to feel rejected, hurt, helpless and…to feel the pangs of betrayal of trust and affection. In such situations the therapist cannot become genuinely trustworthy in the child’s eyes until experience has shown that he has the strength to contain the projections of the feelings that the child finds intolerable.
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Ved P. Varma (Stress in Psychotherapists)
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Recognizing that parental responsibility is insufficient for successful child-rearing, but still not conscious of the role of attachment, many experts assume the problem must be in the parenting know-how. If parenting is not going well, it is because parents are not doing things right. According to this way of thinking, it is not enough to don the role; a parent needs some skill to be effective. The parental role has to be supplemented with all kinds of parenting techniques — or so many experts seem to believe. Many parents, too, reason something like this: if others can get their children to do what they want them to do but I can't, it must be because I lack the requisite skills.
Their questions all presume a simple lack of knowledge, to be corrected by “how to” types of advice for every conceivable problem situation: How do I get my child to listen? How can I get my child to do his homework? What do I need to do to get my child to clean his room? What is the secret to getting a child to do her chores? How do I get my child to sit at the table? Our predecessors would probably have been embarrassed to ask such questions or, for that matter, to show their face in a parenting course.
It seems much easier for parents today to confess incompetence rather than impotence, especially when our lack of skill can be conveniently blamed on a lack of training or a lack of appropriate models in our own childhood. The result has been a multibillion-dollar industry of parental advice-giving, from experts advocating timeouts or reward points on the fridge to all the how-to books on effective parenting. Child-rearing experts and the publishing industry give parents what they ask for instead of the insight they so desperately need. The sheer volume of the advice offered tends to reinforce the feelings of inadequacy and the sense of being unprepared for the job. The fact that these methodologies fail to work has not slowed the torrent of skill teaching.
Once we perceive parenting as a set of skills to be learned, it is difficult for us to see the process any other way. Whenever trouble is encountered the assumption is that there must be another book to be read, another course to be taken, another skill to be mastered. Meanwhile, our supporting cast continues to assume that we have the power to do the job. Teachers act as if we can still get our children to do homework. Neighbors expect us to keep our children in line. Our own parents chide us to take a firmer stand. The experts assume that compliance is just another skill away. The courts hold us responsible for our child's behavior. Nobody seems to get the fact that our hold on our children is slipping.
The reasoning behind parenting as a set of skills seemed logical enough, but in hindsight has been a dreadful mistake. It has led to an artificial reliance on experts, robbed parents of their natural confidence, and often leaves them feeling dumb and inadequate. We are quick to assume that our children don't listen because we don't know how to make them listen, that our children are not compliant because we have not yet learned the right tricks, that children are not respectful enough of authority because we, the parents, have not taught them to be respectful. We miss the essential point that what matters is not the skill of the parents but the relationship of the child to the adult who is assuming responsibility.
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Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
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If you feel as though you could fall asleep easily midmorning, you are very likely not getting enough sleep, or the quality of your sleep is insufficient.) The distance between the curved lines above will be a direct reflection of your desire to sleep. The larger the distance between the two, the greater your sleep desire.
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Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams)
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He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient — nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one’s body aged, was it not a sign that this was NOT the natural order of things, if one’s heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one’s socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?
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George Orwell (1984 & Animal Farm)
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Feeling that something is wrong with me is the invisible and toxic gas I am always breathing.” When we experience our lives through this lens of personal insufficiency, we are imprisoned in what I call the trance of unworthiness. Trapped in this trance, we are unable to perceive the truth of who we really are.
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Tara Brach (Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha)
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For example, if you feel loneliness and insufficiency within your heart, it’s not because you haven’t found a special relationship. That did not cause the problem. That relationship is your attempt to solve the problem. All you’re doing is trying to see if a relationship will appease your inner disturbance. If it doesn’t, you’ll try something else.
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Michael A. Singer (The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself)
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I do not write to trigger victims. I write to comfort them, and I’ve found that victims identify more with pain than platitudes. When I write about weakness, about how I am barely getting through this, my hope is that they feel better, because it aligns with the truth they are living. If I were to say I was healed and redeemed, I worry a victim would feel insufficient, as if they have not tried hard enough to cross some nonexistent finish line. I write to stand beside them in their suffering.
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Chanel Miller (Know My Name: A Memoir)
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It feels lame because we’d like to think we can solve things, it feels insufficient because there’s nothing we can actually do to change what’s horribly true. But compassion isn’t about solution. It’s about giving all the love you’ve got. So give it.
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Cheryl Strayed;
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Love cannot last without a rational foundation: just as positive emotions are insufficient for lasting happiness (the hedonist cannot sustain happiness because there is no meaning in his life), so strong feelings, in and of themselves, are insufficient to sustain love. When a man falls in love with a woman, he does so for certain conscious or unconscious reasons. He may feel that he just loves her "for who she is" but not be sure what he means by that; when asked to articulate why he loves her, he might respond, "I don't know, I just do." We are taught that falling in love with someone is about following our heart, not our mind—that love, by definition, is inexplicable, mystical, beyond reason. However, if it really is love that we feel, we do feel it for a reason. These reasons might not be conscious and accessible, but they nevertheless exist. If, then, there are actual reasons for loving someone, if there are certain conditions under which we fall in love, can there be such a thing as unconditional love? Or is the idea of unconditional love fundamentally unreasonable? It depends on whether or not the characteristics we love in someone are manifestations of that person's core self.
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Tal Ben-Shahar (Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment)
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I don’t like feeling insufficiently informed about things.
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Alice Slater (Death of a Bookseller)
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In the early twentieth century, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski ventured to the Trobriand Islands, part of present-day Papau New Guinea, in order to study the region's practice of gift exchange. People of the islands would travel great distances to offer one another symbolic, seemingly worthless necklaces and armbands. Malinowski believed he was observing a kind of soft power. Gift exchange was not a form of altruism, since there was the expectation of reciprocity. And it wasn't random, since the flow of gifts followed discernible patterns. Instead, he argued that this act of giving and receiving bound everyone in a political process. The expansion of these exchanges across the islands represented an expansion of political authority.
The sociologist Marcel Mauss found Malinowski's explanation insufficient. He felt that Malinowski placed too much emphasis on transaction, rather than how feelings of indebtedness actually work. In 1923, he published "Essay on the Gift," which placed Malinowski's island networks in conversation with gifting practices in other societies, like indigenous traditions in the Americas, systems of communal ownership in China. Mauss introduced the idea of delayed reciprocity. You give expecting to receive. Yet we often give and receive according to intermittent, sometimes random intervals. That time lag is where a relationship emerges. Perhaps gifts serve political ends. But Mauss believed that they strengthened the bonds between people and communities. Your obligation isn't just to repay the gift according to a one-to-one ratio. You're beholden to the "spirit of the gift", a kind of shared faith. Every gesture carries a desire for connection, expanding one's ring of associations.
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Hua Hsu (Stay True)
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When beginning a new routine of vitamins and minerals for the body's health, it is important to read the recommended daily allowance (RDA) on each package, then consider multiplying the dosage by two, three, or four, depending on the product and what you’d like to achieve. The RDA is often for healthy maintenance guidelines and is oftentimes insufficient to achieve a noticeable difference. After taking the increased dose for three to four weeks, see if you feel a difference. If you feel a difference, lower the dose by one for another two to three weeks, after which you can either lower it again or follow the recommended amount. You get to choose. Note: If you’re familiar with muscle testing, that may be a good guide to help select dosage. Instead of taking all of your supplements in the morning, consider incorporating them into shakes and titrating them into your system throughout your day. Some supplements will tell you if they are more effective when taken on an empty stomach. Getting maximum benefit from your supplements is key. Immune System and Fighting the Common Cold
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Ron Baron (Confronting Radiation Fibrosis: A Cancer Survivor's Handbook (A Basic Understanding))
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Insufficient hope. Please deposit more faith to make a withdrawal.
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Those dark feelings might not be so dark. They might actually mean something. They may be a flashing red warning: “Do that other thing.” Or “Don’t settle here forever.”
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It’s okay to take a risk on your own, and dream big.
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God endorses your dissatisfaction with the world’s self-concept package: “Large, with a side of self-doubt and a sprinkle of guilt".
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Find the fire. Our twenties can be an anesthesia — they can numb us to pain and motivation. If we can stop the morphine drip of despondency, we will find that our unbearable existential angst is not a doom — it is the pain of depressurization, rising out of the depths.
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God does not expect you to be a Wall Street executive. God does not wish you were making six figures. God does not wish you had a happy-go-lucky personality. God does not wish you would just “Get yourself together already!” You can depend on Him for love, affirmation, affection, correction, a guiding hand, and His never-forsaking care. Breathe.
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The possibilities for embarrassment and greatness exist in the same space.
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Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live. Appreciate the moment, every loved one. here now.
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Anonymous
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Less than one percent. That’s how many we saved. But the arithmetic, though severe, is important. During the liquidation of the ghetto, 5,000 to 8,000 Jews were taken every day to Treblinka and murdered. During the entire war – more than five years – we saved only 2,500 children. The mathematics of rescue was also severe. To save one Jewish child, ten Poles and two Jews had to risk death. To betray that same child and the family that hid him required only one informer or, worse still, one blackmailer. The risk of being caught by the SS was not prison, but death – death for the entire family. “We all have to ask ourselves, ‘What would I have done?’ But understanding does not erase the regret I feel for my own insufficient efforts. Less than one percent. I agree with Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, one of the organizers of ZEGOTA, who said, ‘Only the dead have done enough.
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Jack Mayer (Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project)
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When the psalmist saw the transgression of the wicked his heart told him how it could be. ”There is no fear of God before his eyes,” he explained, and in so saying revealed to us the psychology of sin. When men no longer fear God, they transgress His laws without hesitation. The fear of consequences is not deterrent when the fear of God is gone. In olden days men of faith were said to ”walk in the fear of God” and to ”serve the Lord with fear.” However intimate their communion with God, however bold their prayers, at the base of their religious life was the conception of God as awesome and dreadful. This idea of God transcendent rims through the whole Bible and gives color and tone to the character of the saints. This fear of God was more than a natural apprehension of danger; it was a nonrational dread, an acute feeling of personal insufficiency in the presence of God the Almighty. Wherever God appeared to men in Bible times the results were the same - an overwhelming sense of terror and dismay, a wrenching sensation of sinfulness and guilt. When God spoke, Abram stretched himself upon the ground to listen. When Moses saw the Lord in the burning bush, he hid his face in fear to look upon God. Isalah’s vision of God wrung from him the cry, ”Woe is me!” and the confession, ”I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips.” Daniel’s encounter with God was probably the most dreadful and wonderful of them all. The prophet lifted up his eyes and saw One whose ”body also was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in colour to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude.” ”I Daniel alone saw the vision” he afterwards wrote, ”for the men that were with me saw not the vision; but a great quaking fell upon them, so that they fled to hide themselves. Therefore I was left alone, and saw this great vision, and there remained no strength in me: for my comeliness was turned in me into corruption, and I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep on my face, and my face toward the ground.” These experiences show that a vision of the divine transcendence soon ends all controversy between the man and his God. The fight goes out of the man and he is ready with the conquered Saul to ask meekly, ”Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” Conversely, the self-assurance of modern Christians, the basic levity present in so many of our religious gatherings, the shocking disrespect shown for the Person of God, are evidence enough of deep blindness of heart. Many call themselves by the name of Christ, talk much about God, and pray to Him sometimes, but evidently do not know who He is. ”The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life,” but this healing fear is today hardly found among Christian men.
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A.W. Tozer (The Knowledge of the Holy (Annotated))
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EXPERIMENT That our beliefs about the capability of others have a direct impact on their performance has been adequately demonstrated in a number of experiments from the field of education. In these tests teachers are told, wrongly, that a group of average pupils are either scholarship candidates or have learning difficulties. They teach a set curriculum to the group for a period of time. Subsequent academic tests show that the pupils’ results invariably reflect the false beliefs of their teachers about their ability. It is equally true that the performance of employees will reflect the beliefs of their managers. For example, Fred sees himself as having limited potential. He feels safe only when he operates well within his prescribed limit. This is like his shell. His manager will only trust him with tasks within that shell. The manager will give him task A, because he trusts Fred to do it and Fred is able to do it. The manager will not give him task B, because he sees this as beyond Fred’s capability. He sees only Fred’s performance, not his potential. If he gives the task to the more experienced Jane instead, which is expedient and understandable, the manager reinforces or validates Fred’s shell and increases its strength and thickness. He needs to do the opposite, to help Fred venture outside his shell, to support or coach him to success with task B. To use coaching successfully we have to adopt a far more optimistic view than usual of the dormant capability of all people. Pretending we are optimistic is insufficient because our genuine beliefs are conveyed in many subtle ways of which we are not aware.
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John Whitmore (Coaching for Performance Fifth Edition: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership UPDATED 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION)
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Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient – nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one’s body aged, was it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one’s heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one’s socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different? He
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George Orwell (1984)
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These things I continually see and feel, and am afflicted and oppressed with, yet the wisdom of God doth order them for my good; 1. They make me abhor myself; 2. They keep me from trusting my heart; 3. They convince me of the insufficiency of all inherent righteousness; 4. They show me the necessity of flying to Jesus; 5. They press me to pray unto God; 6. They show me the need I have to watch and be sober; 7. And provoke me to pray unto God, through Christ, to help me, and carry me through this world.
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John Bunyan (Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners)
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By six o’clock that evening, however, even the glow of having successfully asked out Cho Chang was insufficient to lighten the ominous feelings that intensified with every step Harry took toward Snape’s office.
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5))
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God recognizes and respects our independent will and the choices all of us make. He does not force us to seek His Love, but waits until we, by our own experience, learn that what we once thought was sufficient for our happiness is not sufficient. Realizing this insufficiency, we become dissatisfied, and with such dissatisfaction comes the wish and yearning to learn about the great unknown, which causes us to feel a dependence upon a source of happiness and love not coming from within our own self. This is the scary thing for most people on the spiritual path today, which teaches self-reliance, not God Reliance. The great advantage in striving to enter the Divine Love Spheres and Divine Heavens is that you not only gain your soul’s development, which is eternal and permanent, but also the development of your mind and moral nature. And so you understand: ‘Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all other things shall be added unto you.
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Padma Aon Prakasha (Dimensions of Love: 7 Steps to God)
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In the earliest study by Walter Gmelch, first published in 1984 and reproduced in 1993, the top ten self-reported stressors, in order of rank, are (1) “imposing excessively high self-expectations”; (2) “securing financial support for my research”; (3) “having insufficient time to keep abreast of current developments in my field”; (4) “receiving inadequate salary to meet financial needs”; (5) “preparing a manuscript for publication”; (6) “feeling that I have too heavy a workload, one that I cannot possibly finish during the normal working day”; (7) “having job demands which interfere with other personal activities (recreation, family, and other interests)”; (8) “believing that progress in my career is not what it should or could be”; (9) “being interrupted frequently by telephone calls and drop-in visitors”; (10) “attending meetings which take up too much time” (Gmelch 21–4). At
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Maggie Berg (The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy)
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As the twentieth century draws to a close it has become obvious that material yardsticks alone cannot serve as an adequate measure of human well-being. Even as basic an issue as poverty has to be re-examined to take into account the psychological sense of deprivation that makes people feel poor. Such a ‘modern’ concept of poverty is nothing new to the Burmese, who have always used the word hsinye to indicate not only an insufficiency of material goods but also physical discomfort and distress of mind: to be poor is to suffer from a paucity of those mental and spiritual, as well as material, resources which make a human being feel fulfilled and give life a meaning beyond mere existence. It follows as a matter of course that chantha, the converse of hsinye, denotes not only material prosperity but also bodily ease and general felicity. One speaks of chantha of the mind and of the body and one would wish to be possessed of both. It
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Suu Kyi, Aung San (Freedom from Fear: And Other Writings)
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Addison’s is just the tip of a very large iceberg of people who have a milder version of adrenal insufficiency. Common symptoms include low blood pressure; low blood sugar, causing mood and energy shifts after eating; exaggerated responses to stress; severe difficulty getting going in the morning; and extreme irritability.
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Richard L. Shames (Feeling Fat, Fuzzy, or Frazzled?: A 3-Step Program to: Restore Thyroid, Adrenal, and Reproductive Balance, Beat Ho rmone Havoc, and Feel Better Fast!)
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Nearly all diseases that have baffled the medical profession may be traced to some deficiency in our diet, and it may be truthfully said, that at least ninety per cent of human ailments are traceable to inadequate and faulty nutrition. Yet in no part of study and observation has medical need been more insufficiently met than in that of rational dietetics, both in relation to the maintenance of health, and in the treatment and prevention of disease. By far the most detrimental effect of faulty nutrition is the result of habitual errors of one kind or another, which are not sufficiently grave to command immediate attention. For instance, we may abuse our pancreas and kidneys for years, without the feeling of pain, until these organs are finally injured beyond repair. It is the gradual operation of more or less constant, but unperceived causes, rather than of accidental exposures to abnormal conditions, which in most cases are responsible for undermining the health of the individual
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Anonymous
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REPORTING PEOPLE - an epidemic in Poland? (as usual, just a topic to be discussed on a lesson)
The topic of reporting people, an activity still widespread in post-Communist Poland, has cropped up during yesterday's family gathering at my place.
Real-life examples of reporting on people:
- one person works for a government agency. Someone has recently (2017) called their supervisor to report her, saying that her workload was insufficient,
- some person was a lecturer at a university. He then set up his own private practice and started earning significantly more money than his university colleagues. He started being frequently called to come and present all his financial statements at the Revenue. Spending a significant amount of time there, he made friends with the investigator, who informed him those were his work colleagues who continually reported him,
- when my Dad bought his first 'real' car after the fall of Communism, someone from the area called the Revenue to inform them of this fact. He had to demonstrate how he had paid for it,
- in the past, I gave classes at a language school in Poznań. It seemed to me I had a great contact with the students and that they were satisfied with the course (always smiling, laughing and talking a lot...). I quit the language school, because I took up another course at the uni and the hours overlapped. After a while, some woman contacted me via social media, telling me that the students had been dissatisfied with my teaching, saying I covered the material in too slow a manner. I was 21 years old, the woman approximately 10-15 years older (so you'd expect some more maturity). It came as a shock to me, as I had really not noticed any dissatisfaction and I really cared a lot about the students' satisfaction with the course. Fortunately, I later met a woman who had been one of the students at the course, and it turned out the students had actually been dissatisfied with HER teaching, saying her pace was too FAST. (It was a beginner's course for older people who had had no contact with English...). She invited me for a coffee and explained to me a few things. For example people's capacity for lying. She was a manager at a government agency, so she must have had some experience.
- some coffee has also become a subject of me being reported recently.
Thank you for your attention ;)
feel free to disagree
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krystyna
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Feelings of apathy as they relate to our relationships often stem from insufficiently paying attention to those around us.
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Sharon Salzberg (Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection)
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God's word feels boring and familiar to us, so we turn to shiny entertainment, putting off eternal things until a more pressing time. The Bible seems too demanding or confusing, so we walk away from it, perpetually discouraged. Its words seem insufficient and sometimes irrelevant, so we look elsewhere to hear from Jesus. We fear falling into a legalistic mindset, so we major on grace and minor on obedience.
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Kristen Wetherell (Help for the Hungry Soul: Eight Encouragements to Grow Your Appetite for God's Word)
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Want is such an insufficient word for what you mean to me. You're not just a want. You're not even a need. You are a compulsion. You consume my every thought. My every step. My every moment. When I'm with you, I never feel alone. When I'm with you, I'm home. When I'm with you, I'm at peace.
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Ivy Wild (Prince of Sin (Boston Bloodlines #3))
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The following behaviors describe insufficient self-esteem. When you hear any of these behaviors, it’s very likely your client has a self-esteem theme. They believe they don’t deserve or are not good enough. They wind up believing the “inner voice” — the one that keeps telling them, “You aren’t good enough”; “You don’t know enough”; “That’s for other people, not for you”; “You couldn’t possibly succeed at that”; “You have no luck — don’t even bother trying.” A corresponding metaphor: It seems like everyone else has gone to the party while you’ve chosen to stay home wishing you had gone. They overcompensate. They take excessive measures, attempting to correct or make amends for an error, weakness, or problem. For example, one parent believes the other is too strict or too lenient and goes too far the other way to make up for it. They do things for other people to make themselves feel better. While it’s always nice to do things for other people, sometimes the motive is wanting to feel better about oneself versus simply helping someone else. They compromise on things they shouldn’t. They might let go of or give up on an idea or value to please someone else. They get into or stay in toxic relationships. Relationships — whether with those at work, with friends, or with romantic partners — can be damaging to our self-esteem. Yet because they devalue themselves, they rationalize and justify that it’s okay. They tolerate unacceptable behavior. Because they believe they aren’t good enough, they allow people to say and do mean or inappropriate things to them. When they stay stuck in the way they allow others to take advantage of them, it’s usually because there’s a subtle, underlying reason they want to keep the pain and anguish with them. They might think that they will get attention or feel important, or maybe feeling sorry or sad is more familiar and comfortable. They don’t believe they deserve to be treated well.
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Marion Franklin (The HeART of Laser-Focused Coaching: A Revolutionary Approach to Masterful Coaching)
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and worry are worthless—indeed, vain—emotions. If you are frightened or afraid, there is no use feeling guilty about it. What you need to do is fix your mind upon God and ask him to fill your mind with himself. And as your mind is transformed, your whole personality will be transformed, including your body and your feelings. The transformation of the self away from a life of fear and insufficiency takes place as we fix our minds upon God as he truly is.
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Dallas Willard (Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23)