Giving Up Control Quotes

When we give of ourselves, our time, and our money, we're also giving up control. As a control freak myself, I know that sounds scary, but I've learned that the momentary lack of control forces me to look at what I do have and truly count my blessings. I have clean drinking water. I have food on my table. I have a roof over my head and clothes on my back. Suddenly, my panic-stricken mindset is replaced with gratitude. ~ Jen Lilley

Love is giving up control. It's surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two - love and controlling power over the other person - are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all the desires within us to manipulate the relationship. ~ Rob Bell

It's funny how giving up control can actually end up putting things back in place. But that's what I'm learning, that too much of something ends up yielding the opposite reaction. ~ Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

The best thing is to go public only when you're absolutely sure that's the right move for the company. And in order to make sure that is the case, you need to have as much control over the company as possible, which means not giving up control early on. ~ Jon Oringer

surrender is giving up control bt nt lossing power ~ Sondra Ray

Still, how did you show the world's biggest control freak that the secret to lasting love meant giving up control? I didn't know, but I intended to find out. ~ Jeaniene Frost

Physically, emotionally, and spiritually I gave the ropes control, and then I understood what he meant. By giving up control, I became free. ~ Olivia Cunning

You have to get comfortable giving up control, and you find people who do things better than you do. Quora now does better with the team we have built. ~ Adam D'Angelo

Giving up control is fucking terrifying. Ask anyone who won't do it. ~ Sara Taylor Woods

We are not striving to make pain go away or to become a better person. In fact, we are giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall apart. This starts with realizing that whatever occurs is neither the beginning nor the end. It is just the same kind of normal human experience that's been happening to everyday people from the beginning of time. ~ Pema Chodron

The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control. ~ Terence McKenna

He who is silent is forgotten; he who does not advance falls back; he who stops is overwhelmed; out distanced, crushed; he who ceases to grow becomes smaller; he who leaves off, gives up; the condition of standing still is the beginning of the end. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

I don't know if you realize this, but there are some researchers - doctors - who are giving this kind of drug to volunteers, to see what the effects are, and they're doing it the proper scientific way, in clean white hospital rooms, away from trees and flowers and the wind, and they're surprised at how many of the experiments turn sour. They've never taken any sort of psychedelic themselves, needless to say. Their volunteers - they're called 'subjects,' of course - are given mescaline or LSD and they're all opened up to their surroundings, very sensitive to color and light and other people's emotions, and what are they given to react to? Metal bed-frames and plaster walls, and an occasional white coat carrying a clipboard. Sterility. Most of them say afterward that they'll never do it again. ~ Alexander Shulgin

Wine and women make wise men dote and forsake God's law and do wrong.
However, the fault is not in the wine, and often not in the woman. The fault is in the one who misuses the wine or the woman or other of God's crations. Even if you get drunk on the wine and through this greed you lapse into lechery, the wine is not to blame but you are, in being unable or unwilling to discipline yourself. And even if you look at a woman and become caught up in her beauty and assent to sin [= adultery; extramarital sex], the woman is not to blame nor is the beauty given her by God to be disparaged: rather, you are to blame for not keeping your heart more clear of wicked thoughts ... If you feel yourself tempted by the sight of a woman, control your gaze better ... You are free to leave her. Nothing constrains you to commit lechery but your own lecherous heart. ~ Anonymous

Abandoning a task that is futile and pointless is not giving up. ~ Megan Hart

I am convinced that this is the only means of advancing science, of clearing the mind from a confused heap of contradictory observations, that do but perplex and puzzle the Student, when he compares them, or misguide him if he gives himself up to their authority; but bringing them under one general head, can alone give rest and satisfaction to an inquisitive mind. ~ Joshua Reynolds

Give up all ideas about yourself and simply be. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

My world was one miserable mistake-shaping second after another, except for the breaks in my misery that belonged to her.
And no way was I ready to give that up.
Best two and a half weeks of my life came from a girl who was never meant to give me anything.
And she was giving me everything. ~ J. Daniels

No one was more surprised than I to realize that my newfound freedom had been purchased by giving up on eternity and settling for hell. ~ Carolyn Jessop

Early June, Providence, Rhode Island, the sun up for almost two hours already, lighting up the pale bay and the smokestacks of the Narragansett Electric factory, rising like the sun on the Brown University seal emblazoned on all the pennants and banners draped up over campus, a sun with a sagacious face, representing knowledge. But this sun
the one over Providence
was doing the metaphorical sun one better, because the founders of the university, in their Baptist pessimism, had chosen to depict the light of knowledge enshrouded by clouds, indicating that ignorance had not yet been dispelled from the human realm, whereas the actual sun was just now fighting its way through cloud cover, sending down splintered beams of light and giving hope to the squadrons of parents, who'd been soaked and frozen all weekend, that the unseasonable weather might not ruin the day's activities. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Desire creates attachment. Attachment to this world. And, when you don't get what you want or get what you don't want, it leads to suffering. And that to violence and wars. Which finally results in destruction. So, if you want to avoid destruction and suffering, you should control your desire right? Give up maya, the illusion of this world? ~ Amish Tripathi

But in every way, the shared metaphors we use of female access to power - 'knocking on the door', 'storming the citadel', 'smashing the glass ceiling', or just giving them a 'leg up' - underline female exteriority. Women in power are seen as breaking down barriers, or alternatively as taking something to which they are not quite entitled. ~ Mary Beard

You never want to give up your liberty, even if you are told it is for security. The Patriot Act is a perfect example of giving up liberty for security. It says let us tap your phones so we can keep safe. ~ Benjamin Franklin

We resist transition not because we can't accept the change, but because we can't accept letting go of that piece of ourselves that we have to give up when and because the situation has changed. ~ William Bridges

Would I rather be right, or would I rather be kind? ~ Wayne Dyer

There are two social classes in Pakistan," Professor Superb said to his unsuspecting audience, gripping the podium with both hands as he spoke. "The first group, large and sweaty, contains those referred to as the masses. The second group is much smaller, but its members exercise vastly greater control over their immediate environment and are collectively termed the elite. The distinction between members of these two groups is made on the basis of control of an important resource:air-conditioning. You see, the elite have managed to re-create for themselves the living standards of say, Sweden without leaving the dusty plains of the subcontinent. They're a mixed lot - Punjabi and Pathans, Sindhis and Baluchis, smugglers , mullahs, soldiers, industrialists - united by their residence in an artificially cooled world. They wake up in air-conditioned houses, drive air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned offices, grab lunch in air-conditioned restaurants (rights of admission reserved), and at the end of the day go home to an air-conditioned lounges to relax in front of their wide-screen TVs. And if they should think about the rest of the people, the great uncooled, and become uneasy as they lie under their blankets in the middle of the summer, there is always prayer, five times a day, which they hope will gain them admittance to an air-conditioned heaven, or at the very least, a long, cool drink during a fiery day in hell. ~ Mohsin Hamid

I think you people are just marvelous," she said in a dramatic manner, closing her eyes for a moment.

"You know, sometimes I hear the Great Spirit calling to me. Perhaps I was a squaw in my last life. My family would never talk about it when I was growing up, but I'm pretty sure my great-grandmother was a real Cherokee princess. Are you Cherokee, by any chance?"

"Cherokee to the bone, ma'am," Luther replied, giving Jimmy a wink.

"Oh, I knew it when I laid eyes on you," she responded and turned to Jimmy. "Are you also Cherokee?"

"No, ma'am. I wanted to be but I didn't have the grades to get in."

"Oh, you poor dear," the woman said, reaching over to pat him on the arm. ~ Robert Owings

Commitment becomes hysterical when those who have nothing to give advocate generosity, and those who have nothing to give up preach renunciation. ~ Eric Hoffer

I love idleness. I love to busy myself about trifles, to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them, to come and go as my fancy bids me, to change my plan every moment, to follow a fly in all its circlings, to try and uproot a rock to see what is underneath, eagerly to begin a ten-years' task to give it up after ten minutes: in short, to fritter away the whole day inconsequentially and incoherently, and to follow nothing but the whim of the moment. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The skeins are tangled. Some butterfly shaman up in the north beats his puny fucking wings and the storm gathers before you know it. Chaos gathers, like a bad poet's verse. We run damage control, but the rules of engagement have changed. You think we're any happier about it than you? We've got our balls to the wall here, hero. We're fighting half blind, nothing works, not the way it should, not anymore. Which ~ Richard K. Morgan

If each photograph steals a bit of the soul, isn't it possible that I give up pieces of mine every time I take a picture? ~ Richard Avedon

I don't even have a moment where I felt like I wanted to give up ~ Park Bom

He held her for a minute, then two, then three, simply holding her and committing to memory what he could not have in life. ~ Courtney Milan

John laughed. "You know, I've heard all the sayings about the wrath of women, but whew, Scar, you have a temper."
The others chuckled.
"Keep it in mind, John Little," I warned him. I didn't feel much like chuckling.
He laughed. "I'll be sure to inform Jenny Percy," he said.
I rolled my eyes, but this time I heard a small laugh come from Rob's distant corner. "So she really kissed
Scar?"
"Should have seen it, Rob! Scar's right in the middle of giving her a talking-to, and Jenny lays one on her," Much
crowed.
"So that's how we shut her up," John said.
I knew he were fair close to me so I tried to kick him. It took a few attempts, but one finally hit something and I heard him whine, "Ow, Scar!"
"And none of you jumped in to defend - her - her honor?" Rob asked, but it got broken up with laughs.
"The lot of you are stupid blighters," I snapped. "It ain't for laughing."
This made them crack apart with howls. ~ A.C. Gaughen

Christ's version of kindness:
I know you are hurt. I contributed to that. Maybe, I should have said more. Done more. Listened. I am sorry for my part in the situation. I am sorry if I caused you any pain or confused you with my actions or words. How can I help you move on? I want you to have peace in your life. Let's end this by communicating.
The world's perverted version of kindness:
You caused your own pain. You get what you get. Get over it and move on. Maybe, one day you will figure out what happiness really means. By the way, I am not responsible for giving it to you. Nor, do I have to put up with people that don't bring me joy or who I can't trust. I am only responsible for myself. I will pray for you because I am a good Christian. ~ Shannon L. Alder

I want to be in the arena. I want to be brave with my life. And when we make the choice to dare greatly, we sign up to get our asses kicked. We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can't have both. Not at the same time. Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it's having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. Vulnerability is not weakness; it's our greatest measure of courage. A lot of cheap seats in the arena are filled with people who never venture onto the floor. They just hurl mean-spirited criticisms and put-downs from a safe distance. The problem is, when we stop caring what people think and stop feeling hurt by cruelty, we lose our ability to connect. But when we're defined by what people think, we lose the courage to be vulnerable. Therefore, we need to be selective about the feedback we let into our lives. For me, if you're not in the arena getting your ass kicked, I'm not interested in your feedback. ~ Brene Brown

This seemed to be happening more and more lately out in Greater Los Angeles, among gatherings of carefree youth and happy dopers, where Doc had begun to notice older men, there and not there, rigid, unsmiling, that he knew he'd seen before, not the faces necessarily but a defiant posture, an unwillingness to blur out, like everyone else at the psychedelic events of those days, beyond official envelopes of skin. Like the operatives who'd dragged away Coy Harlingen the other night at that rally at the Century Plaza. Doc Knew these people, he'd seen enough of them in the course of business. They went out to collect cash debts, they broke rib cages, they got people fired, they kept an unforgiving eye on anything that might become a threat. If everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent, out doing the shitwork, who'd make it happen.
Was it possible, that at every gathering--concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back east, wherever--those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?
'Gee,' he said to himself out loud, 'I dunno... ~ Thomas Pynchon

At the Centers for Disease Control, I rose up fairly quickly into management positions. The first team I led there included many people who had been my supervisors in previous roles or were more senior than I was. So it was kind of a daunting challenge. ~ Helene D. Gayle

It is better to risk starving to death than giving up on your dream. If you have given up on your dream, what's left? ~ Manoj Arora

Don't ever give up on your dream. Ever. ~ Tohoru Masamune

All I know is that I've wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I'd get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don't want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow's sky. That's what I want now, and I think it's what you should want too. But it will be too late soon. We'll become too set to change. If we don't take our chance now, another may never come for either of us. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

We think we control our environment, but in fact, it's our environment that controls us. We can't change the world. The only thing we can change is ourselves, by trying to get a better understanding of our own messed-up wiring. ~ Guy Spier

Let me simplify my take on intervention. To me it is mostly about having a systematic protocol to determine when to intervene and when to leave systems alone. And we may need to intervene to control the iatrogenics of modernity - particularly the large-scale harm to the environment and the concentration of potential (though not yet manifested) damage, the kind of thing we only notice when it is too late. The ideas advanced here are not political, but risk-management based. I do not have a political affiliation or allegiance to a specific party; rather, I am introducing the idea of harm and fragility into the vocabulary so we can formulate appropriate policies to ensure we don't end up blowing up the planet and ourselves. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

She knows about men, knows a good deal of the world's character. But it is hard, whatever you have endured, to give up on love. Hard to stop thinking of it as a home you might one day find again. More than hard. ~ Andrew Miller

Trust me, Jennifer. Just...trust me."
I drove another block or two. "Why should I?"
"Why shouldn't you?"
Because you left me, Cameron. After everything we went through. But I knew it wasn't his fault, any more than it was mine. It wasn't like either of us had control over our lives. We were at the mercy of our parents, both of us. Anyway, I'd already turned the car toward the freeway entrance. I turned on the car radio and we drove twenty minutes without talking. When the exit finally came into view, ugly warehouses and the new Wal-Mart looming before us, I said, "Let's go to my old apartment first. I haven't been there since we moved."
"I've gone by it a couple of times."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Living there with you was kind of my best memory."
I imagined that, him going to the apartment and looking up at the window and thinking about me. ~ Sara Zarr

From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that evanescent and dissolving sound - something the city was tossing up and calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness - and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald