Definition of Passive

Passive

Not active, but acted upon; suffering or receiving impressions or influences; as, they were passive spectators, not actors in the scene.

Receiving or enduring without either active sympathy or active resistance; without emotion or excitement; patient; not opposing; unresisting; as, passive obedience; passive submission.

Inactive; inert; not showing strong affinity; as, red phosphorus is comparatively passive.

Designating certain morbid conditions, as hemorrhage or dropsy, characterized by relaxation of the vessels and tissues, with deficient vitality and lack of reaction in the affected tissues.

Related Definitions:

Acted, Active, Affected, Affinity, And, As, But, By, Certain, Characterized, Comparatively, Deficient, Designating, Dropsy, Either, Emotion, Enduring, Excitement, Hemorrhage, In, Inactive, Inert, Is, Lack, Morbid, Not, Obedience, Of, Opposing, Or, Passive, Patient, Phosphorus, Reaction, Receiving, Red, Relaxation, Resistance, Scene, Showing, Strong, Submission, Suffering, Sympathy, The, They, Upon, Vitality, Were, With, Without

Passive Quotations

Today we did what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong.
Ronald Reagan

Hatred is active, and envy passive dislike; there is but one step from envy to hate.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Active Evil is better than Passive Good.
William Blake

Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.
Elie Wiesel

To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
Simone de Beauvoir

It is unfortunate that Americans are no longer aware of what the constitution says and what their rights are. Because of that, we are often very passive about what happens when the government violates those rights.
James Bovard

Passivity is fatal to us. Our goal is to make the enemy passive.
Mao Tse-Tung

In this very real world, good doesn't drive out evil. Evil doesn't drive out good. But the energetic displaces the passive.
William Bernbach

Observation is a passive science, experimentation an active science.
Claude Bernard

Dr. King used Gandhi's commitment to non-violence and to passive resistance.
Al Sharpton

It is a struggle; for though the black man fights passively, he nevertheless fights; and his passive resistance is more effective at present than active resistance could possibly be. He bears the fury of the storm as does the willow tree.
James Weldon Johnson

Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.
Edith Hamilton

Maverick is a word which appeals to me more than misfit. Maverick is active, misfit is passive.
Alan Rickman

Mental events, it is said, are not passive happenings but the acts of a subject.
Hermann Ebbinghaus

A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all.
Tacitus

The real or supposed rights of man are of two kinds, active and passive; the right in certain cases to do as we list; and the right we possess to the forbearance or assistance of other men.
William Godwin

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes "sight-seeing."
Daniel J. Boorstin

I didn't know how to go about preparing for the part of someone who can't remember who he is. The frustration angle is written in, but there's also this incredible passive state.
Tom Berenger

If all Church power vests in the clergy, then the people are practically bound to passive obedience in all matters of faith and practice; for all right of private judgment is then denied.
Charles Hodge

All observers not laboring under hallucinations of the senses are agreed, or can be made to agree, about facts of sensible experience, through evidence toward which the intellect is merely passive, and over which the individual will and character have no control.
Chauncey Wright

I think you can't be passive in making this film - or in watching it.
James Caviezel

Of course. I favor passive investing for most investors, because markets are amazingly successful devices for incorporating information into stock prices.
Merton Miller

The crucial question one comes back to is the examination; without that experience is meaningless. And I think it's true that society is becoming more and more passive, less and less fired up with enthusiasm, in many spheres.
Peter Hammill

Passive fatalism can never be the role of a revolutionary party, like the Social Democracy.
Karl Liebknecht

Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict - alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence.
Dorothy Thompson

Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material. It finds it hard to endure the feeling that it must resign itself to passive acceptance of changes introduced from above.
Czeslaw Milosz

The concept of neutrality can lead to a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive, or even active, hostility to the religious. Such results are not only not compelled by the Constitution, but, it seems to me, are prohibited by it.
Arthur J. Goldberg

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.
Christopher Isherwood

Most people have a passive relationship with music and clothes, with culture. But music was my first contact with anything creative. Music is it, as far as I'm concerned.
Martin Freeman

One secret of leadership is that the mind of a leader never turns off. Leaders even when they are sightseers or spectators, are active; not passive observers.
James Humes

More Passive Quotations

Passive Translations

passive in French is inactif
passive in Italian is passivo, inerte
passive in Spanish is inerte, pasivo
passive in Swedish is passiv

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