Dependence Quotes

“A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself. Even with the means, she will find her courage wanting.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“My mother used to tell me that when push comes to shove, you always know who to turn to. That being a family isn't a social construct but an instinct.”
― Jodi Picoult, Keeping Faith

“Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.”
― Voltaire

“It was good to be hugged. Even by a monster.”
― Holly Black, The Wicked King

“A person is wise if he listens to millions of advice and doesn't implement any of it.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Like a butterfly stuck in a chrysalis, waiting for the perfect moment, I was waiting for the day I could burst forth and fly away and find my home.”
― Emme Rollins, Dear Rockstar

“An encouraged person will eventually get his drive from encouragement; he becomes more dependent. A person that never really receives encouragement learns to move out of spite; he becomes more independent.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Maybe the truly handicapped people are the ones that don't need God as much.”
― Joni Eareckson Tada, The God I Love: A Lifetime of Walking with Jesus

“God has made us so that we must be mutually dependent. We may ignore our own dependence, or refuse to acknowledge that others depend upon us in more respects than the payment of weekly wages; but the thing must be, nevertheless. Neither you nor any other master can help yourselves. The most proudly independent man depends on those around him for their insensible influence on his character - his life.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“And I ask myself what it is about me that makes this wonderful, beautiful woman return. Is it because I'm pathetic, helpless in my current state, completely dependent on her? Or is it my sense of humour, my willingness to tease her, to joke my way into painful, secret places? Do I help her understand herself? Do I make her happy? Do I do something for her that her husband and son can't do? Has she fallen in love with me?

As the days pass and I continue to heal, my body knitting itself back together, I begin to allow myself to think that she has.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Moth Smoke

“The weather is nature's disruptor of human plans and busybodies. Of all the things on earth, nature's disruption is what we know we can depend on, as it is essentially uncontrolled by men.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Humility is simply the disposition which prepares the soul for living on trust.”
― Andrew Murray, Humility: The Journey Toward Holiness

“Is the height of my chara joy dependent on the depths of my eucharisteo thanks?”
― Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

“Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Though I myself am an atheist, I openly profess religion in the sense just mentioned, that is, a nature religion. I hate the idealism that wrenches man out of nature; I am not ashamed of my dependency on nature; I openly confess that the workings of nature affect not only my surface, my skin, my body, but also my core, my innermost being, that the air I breathe in bright weather has a salutary effect not only on my lungs but also on my mind, that the light of the sun illumines not only my eyes but also my spirit and my heart. And I do not, like a Christian, believe that such dependency is contrary to my true being or hope to be delivered from it. I know further that I am a finite moral being, that I shall one day cease to be. But I find thisvery naturaland am therefore perfectly reconciled to the thought.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion

“Listen, Harriet. I do unterstand. I know you don't want either to give or to take... You don't want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person."

"That's true. That's the truest thing you ever said."

"All right. I can respect that. Only you've got to play the game. Don't force an emotional situation and then blame me for it."

"But I don't want any situation. I want to be left in peace.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Have His Carcase

“In the human heart there is a built-in obsolescence factor. It does not matter how powerful and influential you are, how much education you have, how selfcontrolled or holy you consider yourself—your heart, if you do not guard it, will break down.”
― K.P. Yohannan, Living in the Light of Eternity: Discovering God's Design for Your Life

“We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God’s feet; before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God’s share in it is felt as a tribute which we must pay out of ‘our own’ pocket, a deduction from the time which ought, we feel, to be ‘our own’. A man starts a new job with a sense of vocation and, perhaps, for the first week still keeps the discharge of the vocation as his end, taking the pleasures and pains from God’s hand, as they came, as ‘accidents’. But in the second week he is beginning to ‘know the ropes’: by the third, he has quarried out of the total job his own plan for himself within that job, and when he can pursue this he feels that he is getting no more than his rights, and when he cannot, that he is being interfered.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“Becoming aware of our inner man and woman means to discover the roots and creative potential of both the male and female aspect within ourselves. Becoming aware of the inner man and woman means to understand that they have different visions of life. It means to understand that they have different perspectives and views of life. The inner man and woman are our two wings of love and freedom. Through awareness, acceptance and understanding, we can allow our two wings to develop in a deep and natural harmony. In the world today, a one-sided development of the male side leads to destructivity. A one-sided development of the male side leads to ego, struggle, exhaustion and a separation from life. A one-sided development of the female side leads to passivity and dependence.”
― Swami Dhyan Giten, Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being

“The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble is that, psychologically at least, it’s hard. Our culture teaches none of its false lessons more carefully than that one should never be dependent. Hence the novice or still unsuccessful writer, who has enough trouble believing in himself, has the added burden of shame. It’s hard to be a good writer and a guilty person; a lack of self-respect creeps into one’s prose.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is any thing but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact, there could be no doubt; and, examining myself and others, I was led to conclusions in reference to the effect of public office on the character, not very favorable to the mode of life in question. In some other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these effects. Suffice it here to say, that a Custom-House officer, of long continuance, can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and another, the very nature of his business, which—though, I trust, an honest one—is of such a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.

An effect—which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every individual who has occupied the position—is, that, while he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability of self-support. If he possess an unusual share of native energy, or the enervating magic of place do not operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable. The ejected officer—fortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him forth betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world—may return to himself, and become all that he has ever been. But this seldom happens. He usually keeps his ground just long enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath of life as he best may. Conscious of his own infirmity,—that his tempered steel and elasticity are lost,—he for ever afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest of support external to himself. His pervading and continual hope—a hallucination, which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of impossibilities, haunts him while he lives, and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief space after death—is, that, finally, and in no long time, by some happy coincidence of circumstances, he shall be restored to office. This faith, more than any thing else, steals the pith and availability out of whatever enterprise he may dream of undertaking. Why should he toil and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him? Why should he work for his living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so soon to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of glittering coin out of his Uncle's pocket? It is sadly curious to observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow with this singular disease. Uncle Sam's gold—meaning no disrespect to the worthy old gentleman—has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment like that of the Devil's wages. Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to manly character.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“As truly as God by His power once
created, so truly by that same power must God every moment maintain.”
― Andrew Murray, Humility: The Journey Toward Holiness

“I do the splits perfectly in PE. I lose half a pound in two days. I get the spinach and pig-meat frittata from the lo-carb section for lunch. And no-one else knows. I mentally construct a MyFace status, polishing the memories carefully until they shine. The need to record my life is as fundamental as my need to breathe. Without MyFace, I'm floating. I have nothing to anchor me down, to prove I exist.”
― Louise O'Neill

“When we stop looking for someone to complete us, we find completion in ourselves.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Love Mindset

“The jinni sighed. 'I'm less grateful to him than I should be. He's a good and generous man, but I'm not accustomed to relying on someone else. It makes me feel weak.’

'How is relying on others a weakness?'

'How can it be anything else? If for some reason Arbeely died tomorrow, I'd be forced to find another occupation. The event would be outside my control, yet I'd be at its mercy. Is that not weakness?'

'I suppose. But then, going by your standard, everyone is weak. So why call it a weakness, instead of just the way things are?”
― Helene Wecker, The Golem and the Jinni

“It can’t be done for you; it must be done by you.”
― Frank Sonnenberg, Listen to Your Conscience: That's Why You Have One

“The author points to the impact of what he called Dutch disease, where the discovery of found wealth from a particular commodity causes a culture to atrophy with respect to work ethic and broader development. Continuing wealth from the single commodity is taken for granted. The government, flush with wealth, is expected to be generous. When the price of that commodity drops, a government which would remain in power dare not cut back on this generosity.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“But God does give us responsibility, and it takes biblical faith to do those things in dependence on God.”
― Craig Groeschel, The Christian Atheist: Believing in God but Living As If He Doesn't Exist

“Employment will fail you someday”
― Sunday Adelaja