A Quote by Sophie Hannah

We manufacture anger to give ourselves the illusion of power when we feel weak and helpless.

Sophie Hannah

Quote Topics

Anger Feel Give Helpless Illusion Ourselves Power Weak

Quote Author

Sophie Hannah
British - Novelist
Born: 1971

Often, we feel helpless in lots of situations in our lives. The way anger gets a grip on us is it seems to be a way to extricate ourselves from helplessness.

Martha Nussbaum

We won't let ourselves feel our anger, rage, and pain. We push it down or anesthetize it through drugs, alcohol, shopping, or whatever we do in order not to feel it. When that memory and the associated feelings get lodged down there in our soul, the feelings are still there. They don't just magically go away. We have to give ourselves the opportunity to feel them.

Gabrielle Bernstein

Your soul has a special mission. Your soul is supremely conscious of it. Maya, illusion or forgetfulness, makes you feel that you are finite, weak and helpless. This is not true. You are not the body. You are not the senses. You are not the mind. These are all limited. You are the soul, which is unlimited. Your soul is infinitely powerful. Your soul defies all time and space.

Sri Chinmoy

In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed, America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence.

Barbara Tuchman

Anger makes people feel uncomfortable, because the minute somebody shows it, it puts you in a position where you can't laugh or make light of something... not to trivialise it I don't mean. But your reaction to anger is supposed to be fear or returned anger. So, you're really trying to control a situation when you show anger and it's a very weak position to take. It often works on people who aren't in a position to fight back.

Miranda Raison

The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.

John Fowles

‘Cause sometimes you just feel tired, feel weak And when you feel weak, you feel like you wanna just give up But you gotta search within you And gotta find that inner strength And just pull that shit out of you And get that motivation to not give up And not be a quitter, no matter how bad you wanna just fall flat on your face, and collapse.

Eminem

When you feel bad, find a person to talk to and cry with, to tell of your anger and other helpless feelings.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Almost everywhere we find . . . the use of various coercive measures, to rid ourselves as quickly as possible of the child withinus--i.e., the weak, helpless, dependent creature--in order to become an independent competent adult deserving of respect. When we reencounter this creature in our children, we persecute it with the same measures once used in ourselves.

Alice Miller

No one likes to feel helpless. We find it psychologically unbearable and inside ourselves we may try to make ourselves part author of our misfortune rather than simply the recipient of it.

Susie Orbach

Wherever there is injustice, there is anger, and anger is like gasoline - if you spray it around and somebody lights a matchstick, you have an inferno. But anger inside an engine is powerful: it can drive us forward and can get us through dreadful moments and give us power. I learnt this with my discussions with nuclear policy makers.

Scilla Elworthy

The thing that I find so bad about anger is the desire for payback. Of course, it is very human to wish for revenge. Your mother has died in the hospital, and the first thought a lot of people have is, I'll sue the doctor. You feel helpless, and you think, I'm less helpless if I'm doing something active that makes someone else pay. And social media make it easy to inflict all kinds of pain on other people. But what good does it do?

Martha C. Nussbaum

Another illusion is that external events have the power to hurt you, that other people have the power to hurt you. They don't. It's you who give this power to them.

Anthony de Mello

Compared to other animals, we humans enter the world remarkably weak and helpless. We remain relatively weak for many years before we can truly operate on our own.

Robert Greene

When the weak want to give an impression of strength they hint menacingly at their capacity for evil. It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.