Misplaced Energy Quotes

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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
Zadie Smith (On Beauty)
We ourselves are the substance we withdraw to, not from, as we pull our overextended and misplaced creative energy back into our own core.
Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
The only love story I know, is the one I happen to live inside everyday. Your path towards certainty, if that's even what you're after, will look different from mine. Just as your conception of home and who belongs there with you, will always be unique to you. Only slowly do most of us figure out what we need in intimate relationships and what we're able to give to them. We practice, we learn, we mess up. We sometimes acquire tools that don't actually serve us. ...we obsess, overthink and misplace our energy...we retreat when hurt, we armor up when scared, we might attack when provoked, or yield when ashamed.
Michelle Obama (The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times)
The prescience, he realized, was an illumination that incorporated the limits of what it revealed- at once a source of accuracy and meaningful error. A kind of Heisenberg indeterminacy intervened: the expenditure of energy that revealed what he saw, changed what he saw. And what he saw was a time nexus within this cave, a boiling of possibilities focused here, wherein the most minute action - the wink of an eye, a careless word, a misplaced grain of sand - moved a gigantic lever across the known universe. He saw violence with the outcome subject to so many variables that his slightest movement created vast shiftings in the patterns. The vision made him want to freeze into immobility, but this, too was action with its consequences.
Frank Herbert (Dune (Dune, #1))
War, which is to say misplaced sexual energy, which we consider to be a larger factor than the economic, racial, and religious causes often cited. Contagious diseases, especially sexually transmitted ones. Overpopulation, leading – as we’ve seen in spades – to environmental degradation and poor nutrition.
Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1))
So many feelings misplaced, so many pieces lost. You have been misled into a broken maze with your own well. Excuses like the walls were everything you needed, and stupidity because you knew it was a dead end. Write about roads interwining and being off track you are sugarcoating a road accident by a drunk man. Spend time, energy, and sanity like it was worth it, get lost and bleed emotions like it's the price you pay to get out You disappointed your own self and it's hard to forget, your brain unattended and your heart took the hit, got knocked out and woke up on the wrong side of the bed, on the Wrong side of my head. Now you are left with a scar and a mind full of words said, a voice i can't forget and a smile that hurts me still.
Mennah al Refaey (Daily thoughts)
Permanent Revolution THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OPENED up new ways to convert energy and to produce goods, largely liberating humankind from its dependence on the surrounding ecosystem. Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre. Today, the earth’s continents are home to billions of Sapiens. If you took all these people and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our domesticated farmyard animals – cows, pigs, sheep and chickens – and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million tons. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals – from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales – is less than 100 million tons. Our children’s books, our iconography and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimpanzees – in contrast to billions of humans. Humankind really has taken over the world.1 Ecological degradation is not the same as resource scarcity. As we saw in the previous chapter, the resources available to humankind are constantly increasing, and are likely to continue to do so. That’s why doomsday prophesies of resource scarcity are probably misplaced. In contrast, the fear of ecological degradation is only too well founded. The future may see Sapiens gaining control of a cornucopia of new materials and energy sources, while simultaneously destroying what remains of the natural habitat and driving most other species to extinction. In fact, ecological turmoil might endanger the survival of Homo sapiens itself. Global warming, rising oceans and widespread pollution could make the earth less hospitable to our kind, and the future might consequently see a spiralling race between human power and human-induced natural disasters. As humans use their power to counter the forces of nature and subjugate the ecosystem to their needs and whims, they might cause more and more unanticipated and dangerous side effects. These are likely to be controllable only by even more drastic manipulations of the ecosystem, which would result in even worse chaos. Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature’. But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but in so doing opened the way forward for mammals. Today, humankind is driving many species into extinction and might even annihilate itself. But other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid. Still, the rumours of our own extinction are premature. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world’s human population has burgeoned as never before. In 1700 the world was home to some 700 million humans. In 1800 there were 950 million of us. By 1900 we almost doubled our numbers to 1.6 billion. And by 2000 that quadrupled to 6 billion. Today there are just shy of 7 billion Sapiens.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Granted, anger can be misplaced and is often destructive, but anger generates passion, and that energy, if used correctly, can be highly constructive.
David Walton Earle
Designers need to recognize that, though their goal is to influence consumers, the effect upon individuals and society must be considered. They must decide whether to use their creative energies and the power of symbol to present something that benefits society or to use it in a way that is false but personally advantageous. Today the pharmaceutical industry is a multibillion dollar business driven by the consumer's misplaced fear, ignorance, desire and hope. Take the example of antidepressants being administered to teens to treat behavior problems rooted in patterns that could be changed instead with structure, discipline, motivation and diet. Pharmaceutical drugs can certainly be a useful and effective treatment, but the industry sometimes creates a false need for the sake of profit. Symbolic
Maggie Macnab (Decoding Design: Understanding and Using Symbols in Visual Communication)
They want you to be the solution. Whoever is waiting in there for you—interviewer, examiner, casting agent—is hoping you are the answer to their search. Our fear or self-doubt can persuade us that those waiting in the room want us to fail, but that means you carry that closed or victim energy in. People get into the negative habit of preempting the worst-case scenario as a misplaced way of protecting themselves. Try to walk in instead with an ‘I can be the solution to your problem’ attitude. Not arrogant, just open. The rest is out of your hands, but the positivity in itself is empowering.
Kate White (I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know)
I can see you’re frustrated,” he said. “I’m sure it’s unsettling not to remember what happened, but medically speaking …” He glanced over at Sienna for confirmation and then continued. “I strongly recommend you not expend energy trying to recall specifics you can’t remember. With amnesia victims, it’s best just to let the forgotten past remain forgotten.” “Let it be?!” Langdon felt his anger rising. “The hell with that! I need some answers! Your organization brought me to Italy, where I was shot and lost several days of my life! I want to know how it happened!” “Robert,” Sienna intervened, speaking softly in a clear attempt to calm him down. “Dr. Ferris is right. It definitely would not be healthy for you to be overwhelmed by a deluge of information all at once. Think about the tiny snippets you do remember—the silver-haired woman, ‘seek and find,’ the writhing bodies from La Mappa—those images flooded into your mind in a series of jumbled, uncontrollable flashbacks that left you nearly incapacitated. If Dr. Ferris starts recounting the past few days, he will almost certainly dislodge other memories, and your hallucinations could start all over again. Retrograde amnesia is a serious condition. Triggering misplaced memories can be extremely disruptive to the psyche.” The thought had not occurred to Langdon. “You must feel quite disoriented,” Ferris added, “but at the moment we need your psyche intact so we can move forward. It’s imperative that we figure out what this mask is trying to tell us.” Sienna nodded. The doctors, Langdon noted silently, seemed to agree. Langdon sat quietly, trying to overcome his feelings of uncertainty. It was a strange sensation to meet a total stranger and realize you had actually known him for several days. Then again, Langdon thought, there is something vaguely familiar about his eyes. “Professor,” Ferris said sympathetically, “I can see that you’re not sure you trust me, and this is understandable considering all you’ve been through. One of the common side effects of amnesia is mild paranoia and distrust.” That makes sense, Langdon thought, considering I can’t even trust my own mind.
Dan Brown (Inferno (Robert Langdon, #4))
For any coach, the success of the athletes must be the top priority by a significant margin—any interest on the coach’s part in public recognition, appreciation or fame is misplaced energy and focus that diminishes his or her ability to manage the lifter. Coaches who consistently produces exemplary weightlifters will receive their due credit and recognition eventually without actively seeking it.
Greg Everett (Olympic Weightlifting: A Complete Guide for Athletes & Coaches)
Suzanne took a deep breath. The breadth and depth of her mother’s false assumptions, misplaced energy, and outright lies were staggering. Suzanne stacked the arguments up in her mind, straightened the edges, and prepared to take her mother’s illogic and self-aggrandizing nonsense to pieces. But what would be the point? Tinsley was nothing if not consistent. Suzanne had gotten one thing right over the years: she had not wasted energy in attempting to change her mother.
Sonja Yoerg (True Places)
Many of us find that we have squandered our own creative energies by investing disproportionately in the lives, hopes, dreams, and plans of others. Their lives have obscured and detoured our own. As we consolidate a core through our withdrawal process, we become more able to articulate our own boundaries, dreams, and authentic goals. Our personal flexibility increases while our malleability to the whims of others decreases. We experience a heightened sense of autonomy and possibility. Ordinarily, when we speak of withdrawal, we think of having a substance removed from us. We give up alcohol, drugs, sugar, fats, caffeine, nicotine—and we suffer a withdrawal. It’s useful to view creative withdrawal a little differently. We ourselves are the substance we withdraw to, not from, as we pull our overextended and misplaced creative energy back into our own core. We begin to excavate our buried dreams. This is a tricky process. Some of our dreams are very volatile, and the mere act of brushing them off sends an enormous surge of energy bolting through our denial system. Such grief! Such loss! Such pain! It is at this point in the recovery process that we make what Robert Bly calls a “descent into ashes.” We mourn the self we abandoned. We greet this self as we might greet a lover at the end of a long and costly war.
Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)