Weakness Quotes

“As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“Unrequited love is the only emotion that allows sane people to taste the “life sentence” of someone with bipolar disorder. The longer they hang onto a lost cause the more unstable they look to everyone else. They contradict their own belief systems and statements, by circling the drain with two competing emotions—love and hate.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“All God's giants have been weak men who did great things for God because they reackoned on God being with them.”
― J. Hudson Taylor

“I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists. I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“It is the destiny of the weak to be devoured by the strong.”
― Otto von Bismarck

“They said love made you strong, but in Louise's opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn't get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.”
― Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn

“I think in a moment of weakness, you might surprise yourself.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Mine Till Midnight

“I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.”
― Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose

“Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“Woman's fatal weakness is to desire sympathy and comprehension.
--"Wanda”
― Ouida

“Satirize wickedness if you must--but pity weakness.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

“Woe betide him, and her too, when it comes to things of consequence, when they are placed in circumstances requiring fortitude and strength of mind, if she have not resolution enough to resist idle interference ... It is the worst evil of too yielding and indecisive a character, that no influence over it can be depended on. You are never sure of a good impression being durable; everybody may sway it. Let those who would be happy be firm.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“The willingness to change one’s mind in the light of new evidence is a sign of rationality not weakness.”
― Stuart Sutherland, Irrationality

“Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Superman comics are a fable, not of strength, but of disintegration. They appeal to the preadolescent, (sic) mind not because they reiterate grandiose delusions, but because they reiterate a very deep cry for help.
Superman's two personalities can be integrated only in one thing: only in death. Only Kryptonite cuts through the disguises of both wimp and hero, and affects the man below the disguises.
And what is Kryptonite? Kryptonite is all that remains of his childhood home.
It is the remnants of that destroyed childhood home, and the fear of those remnants, which rule Superman's life. The possibility that the shards of that destroyed home might surface prevents him from being intimate- they prevent him from sharing the knowledge that the wimp and the hero are one. The fear of his childhood home prevents him from having pleasure.
He fears that to reveal his weakness, and confusion, is, perhaps indirectly, but certainly inevitably, to receive death from the person who received that information.
[...]
Far from being invulnerable, Superman is the most vulnerable of beings, because his childhood was destroyed. He can never reintegrate himself by returning to that home- it is gone. It is gone and he is living among aliens to whom he cannot even reveal his rightful name.”
― David Mamet

“A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

“You will be loved the day when you will be able to show your weakness without the other person using it to assert his strength.”
― Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950

“If you cannot bear our pain, you are not fit to carry our strength.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Wonder Woman: Warbringer

“And yet I wasn't sure what his weakness was. We all do that as we get to know someone. Like a tabloid editor, we search for both greatness and weakness, jotting down notes in our heads for future exploitation. We are never comfortable with those who have no visible flaw.”
― Wayne Elise, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists

“...people change, even good people, if they get the wrong thing in their head. And not everything is always what it looks like and sometimes just because one person looks weak, they might be very strong, and another person might look like a spooky freak but he might be one of the kindest people you'd ever meet. And I guess I learned that time is slippery...We have to enjoy every second, love with all our hearts, all we can, while we can.”
― Lee Thompson

“A 'civilization' that makes such a ridiculous fuss about alleged 'war crimes' - acts of violence against the actual or potential enemies of one's cause - and tolerates slaughterhouses and vivisection laboratories, and circuses and the fur industry (infliction of pain upon creatures that can never be for or against any cause), does not deserve to live.”
― Savitri Devi

“We…realized that no matter who won the race, we were girls, and we were from Soso, Mississippi, population 434, which meant we were destined to be last in pretty much everything else.”
― Karen Hinton, Penis Politics: A Memoir of Women, Men and Power

“He didn't like to be seen needing it - as if hunger were a sign of weakness.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“...for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“If your opponent is of choleric temper, you should seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak so that he grows arrogant. The good tactician plays with his enemy like a cat plays with a mouse. Feign weakness and immobility, and then pounce on him.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“The Congresswoman was depressed by the fact that a woman of her standing could no longer count on making it to the rest room "in time" during the extensive rehabilitation that followed her shooting. Her husband, commander of a space shuttle crew, encouraged her by identifying with her limitation. Even revered astronauts, he revealed, have bodily limits and have to rely on Huggies during extended launch exercises.”
― Gabrielle Giffords, Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope

“For fanaticism is the only form of willpower that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“Weak people never put an end to things themselves. They always wait for the end.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Spring Torrents

“Every man has a weakness," he patiently explained. "I'll find theirs, I promise you."
"Every man?"
"Yes," he answered emphatically.
His hand moved to the back of her neck. Twisting her curls around his fist, he jerked her head back. His face loomed over hers, his breath warm and sweet as he stared down into her eyes.
"What is your weakness, Brodick?" she asked.
"You.”
― Julie Garwood, Ransom