Quotes, aphorisms and sentences on weakness, or on the inability to resist and react to an adverse situation or event, with more or less marked absence of sufficient strength and energy.
Quotes about weakness
- There are two kinds of weakness: one that bends and one that breaks. (James Russell Lowell)
- If you focus your attention strictly on your needs, you will increase your weakness and aggravate your needs. But if you focus on something outside of yourself, you will grow stronger and feel better. (Denis Waitley)
- We are all mixed with weaknesses and errors; let's forgive each other our nonsense: this is the first law of nature. (Voltaire)
- If you think that a weakness can be transformed into a strength, I am sorry to tell you, but it is another weakness. (Jack Handey)
- I am weak in character, without courage, without ambition. A guy like me has only one great moment in his life, a perfect vault on the highest trapeze. Then he spends the rest of his days trying not to fall off the sidewalk into the gutter. (Raymond Chandler)
- Not violence, only weakness scares me. (Karl Kraus)
- Once we know our weaknesses they cease to harm us. (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)
- We are never as vulnerable as when we trust someone, but paradoxically we cannot find joy and love without trust. (Walter Inglis Anderson)
- In any kind and in any case the weak government is the worst of all. (Massimo d'Azeglio)
- A weak mind sinks both in times of prosperity and during adversity. (Julius Charles Hare)
Recommended readings- Phrases about habit: aphorisms, quotes
- Phrases about revenge: aphorisms, quotes
- Speed phrases: aphorisms, quotes
- Phrases on clothes: aphorisms, quotes
- Phrases on boredom: aphorisms, quotes
- Here's a great thing: having the weakness of a man and the tranquility of a god. (Lucio Anneo Seneca)
- Violence has its roots in weakness. (Lucio Anneo Seneca)
- You should never form a company with the strongest and smartest because the weak or the naive will always come out with broken bones. (Phaedrus)
- In life it is easier to influence the strong characters than the weak ones. (Margot Asquith)
- Accepting our weakness instead of trying to hide it is the best way to adapt to reality. (David Viscott)
- There are two kinds of weakness: one that bends and one that breaks. (James Russell Lowell)
- The story of women is the story of the worst form of tyranny ever seen in the world. The tyranny of the weakest over the strongest. It is the only tyranny that lasts. (Oscar Wilde)
- I certainly can not escape the flaws and weaknesses inherent in necessity to my nature as to each other: but I will not increase them with unworthy compromises. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
- Our weaknesses: our strengths. (Paul Celan)
- Dying to escape poverty or love or any suffering is not a brave man, but rather a cowardly one: it is a weakness to flee the troubles, and who in this case faces death does not do it because it is beautiful, but to escape an evil. (Aristotle)
- A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest people can enjoy the highest civil, economic and social rights that the largest and most powerful have. (A. Philip Randolph)
- What is blissful and incorruptible has no problems, nor does it provide others. In the same way, he does not get caught up in hatred or passion; in the weak one, however, all these things are found. (Epicurus)
- Prayer is a confession of one's inability and weakness. (Mahatma Gandhi)
- The biggest weakness of violence is being a downward spiral that gives life precisely to the things it tries to destroy. Instead of diminishing, evil multiplies it. (Martin Luther King)
- What fault have all the others, weak men, if they could not bear what the strong endured? What fault is the weak soul if it has not had the strength to accept such tremendous gifts? (Fëdor Dostoevskij)
- The weaknesses and follies of other men can also be instructive. (Michel Eyquem De Montaigne)
- The weakest link in the chain is also the strongest because it can break it. (Stanislaw Jerzy Lec)
- He who uses clay pots as if they were silver is great, but those who use silver pots as if they were clay are no less. A weak soul cannot bear wealth. (Lucio Anneo Seneca)
- There are two types of men: those who know they are weak and those who think they are strong. (Kurt Vonnegut)
- The strong do what they have to do, and the weak accept what they have to accept. (Thucydides)
- Those who know their weakness are really stronger than those who blindly believe their strength. (Pierre Reverdy)
- It is in weakness that people demand dictatorships and concentrated powers from the government. Only the strong can be free. And only the productive ones can be strong. (Wendell Lewis Willkie)
- Our strength matures from weakness. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
- You need courage to fight against strength, but you need even more to admit your weakness. (Napoleon Bonaparte)
- It takes a lot of courage to prove weak. (David Foster Wallace)
- Men blush less for their crimes than for their weaknesses and vanities. (Jean De La Bruyere)
- You must appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak. (Sun Tzu)
- A friend should endure his friend's weaknesses, but Brutus does my best than I already am. (William Shakespeare)
- Reality is the most skillful of enemies. It launches its attacks against that point of our heart where we did not expect them and where we had not prepared defenses. (Marcel Proust)
- The only vulnerable spot in Achilles' body was that for which his mother had kept him. (Henry De Montherlant)
- You will be loved on the day you can show your weakness without the other using it to affirm his strength. (Cesare Pavese)
- The weaker the body, the more it commands: the stronger it is, the better it obeys. (Jean Jacques Rousseau)
- You are not worthy of having what you let yourself be taken for weakness; it is not worthy of it because it is not capable of it. (Max Stirner)
- Stubbornness is the only strength of the weak ... and one more weakness. (Arthur Schnitzler)
- The strongest love is the one capable of showing one's fragility. (Paulo Coelho)
Aphorisms about weakness
- The humor of those sentenced to death is not a sign of strength: for those who are weak and scared, fear makes less horror if they can laugh at it. (Vasily Grossman)
- Only silence is great; all the rest is weakness. (Alfred de Vigny)
- It takes a lot of courage to prove weak. (David Foster Wallace)
- The knowledge of a weakness is closer than the knowledge of a virtue. (Andrea Pinketts)
- A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest people can enjoy the highest civil, economic and social rights that the largest and most powerful have. (Asa Philip Randolph)
- There is never weakness without some inclination towards evil. (Simon de Bignicourt)
- When I am dead, speak freely about my shortcomings and weaknesses. Learn from these, because I won't have any egos that can hurt themselves. (Aaron Mcgruder)
- Love is the noblest weakness of the spirit. (John Dryden)
- The enemy behaves like a woman because, in spite of himself, he is weak and wants to look strong. (Saint Ignatius Of Loyola)
- Revenge always proceeds from the weakness of the soul, which is not capable of enduring insults. (François de La Rochefoucauld)
- The weak weakens the strong. The strong eats it! (Tom Hanks)
- In the whole universe there is nothing softer and weaker than water. But nothing is equal to her in her way of opposing what is hard. Nothing can change the water. That weakness wins strength, that softness wins hardness everyone on earth knows, but nobody is able to do the same. (Lao Tzu)
- The weak, when he wants to imitate the powerful, goes to ruin. (Phaedrus)
- The greatest men are always united to their century by a weakness. (Johann Wolfgang Goethe)
- If we are weak in prayer we are weak everywhere. (Leonard Ravenhill)
- It is better to make a weak enemy than to have him as a friend. (Josh Billings)
- The real objective of the strong is to promote greater strength in the weak, and not to maintain the weak in the state in which it is found, at the mercy of the strong. (Christian Daa Larson)
- Only those who are strong are capable of forgiving. The weak can neither forgive nor punish. (Mahatma Gandhi)
- He betrays himself more often for weakness than for a deliberate plan to betray. (Francois De La Rochefoucauld)
- Of all the weaknesses, the biggest is the excessive fear of appearing weak. (Jacques Bénigne Bossuet)
- Experience informs us that the first defense of weak spirits is to complain. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
- Strength is only a fortuitous event that derives from the weakness of others. (Joseph Conrad)
- Weakness. It is easier for the weak to make the strong weak than for the strong to make the weak strong. (Marlene Dietrich)
- Weak heart never won a beautiful woman. (Miguel de Cervantes)
- Without mercy justice becomes cruelty. And mercy without justice is weakness. (Metastasio)
- The two saddest sciences: psychiatry and history: one studies the weaknesses of the individual, the other the weaknesses of humanity. (Michel Campiche)
- It is not temptation that is strong, it is I who am weak. (Charles De Foucauld)
- The woman is often the weakness of the husband. (James Joyce)
- The weak doubts before the decision; the fort later. (Karl Kraus)
- If we resist our passions, it is more thanks to their weakness than to our strength. (François de La Rochefoucauld)
- The weakness of the limbs of young children is innocent, not their souls. (St. Augustine)
- If the body is weak, the mind will not be strong. (Thomas Jefferson)
- What's bad? Everything that comes from weakness. (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche)
- Feeling weak you gain power. And at the same time you make people feel stronger. By letting yourself be saved, you save them. You just have to show yourself fragile and grateful. So do the loser, always and anyway. People need to feel superior to someone. So do the submissive, always and anyway. (Chuck Palahniuk)
- He who offends you is more powerful or weaker than you: if he is weaker, spare him, if he is more powerful, save yourself. (Lucio Anneo Seneca)
- The weaker the body, the more it commands: the stronger it is, the better it obeys. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
- Misadventures, unexpected events, open situations, reveal the skill of a general, while success hides his weakness, his weaknesses. (Horace)
- The fear of failure or success is unique is always the same. Both are fear of exhibiting. Not our strength, but our weakness. (Denis Waitley)
- Those who know their weakness are really stronger than those who blindly believe their strength. (Pierre Reverdy)
- He who offends you is more powerful or weaker than you: if he is weaker, spare him, if he is more powerful, save yourself. (Lucio Anneo Seneca)
- Strength of character is only weakness of feelings. (Arthur Schnitzler)
- There is not a soul so weak that he cannot well-guided acquire an absolute dominion of his passions. (Descartes)
- Man is very weak towards women and towards love, especially when he is strong. (Alphonse Karr)
- The weakness of character is the only flaw that cannot be corrected. (François de La Rochefoucauld)
- A weakness in attitude becomes a weakness in our character. (Albert Einstein)
Phrases about weakness
- The weak doubts before the decision; the fort later. (Karl Kraus)
- How hard-hearted women are! How weak bad men are! (Oscar Wilde)
- Our biggest weakness lies in renunciation. The safest way to succeed is always to try one more time. (Thomas A. Edison)
- The moment you show yourself weak it means that you are. (Kate Mulgrew)
- People are fickle and unstable and fragile and distract themselves from their interests for anything, thus betraying or fading their character. (Javier Marías)
- Nature has ingenious methods to find our weak point. (Michael Stuhlbarg)
- Anything cracked will be shattered with a simple touch. (Ovid)
- To wash one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the weak means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. (Paulo Freire)
- He betrays himself more often for weakness than for a deliberate plan to betray. (François de La Rochefoucauld)
- Motherhood is not suitable for the faint of heart. Frogs, skinned knees and the insults of the girls are out of the reach of the weak. (Danielle Steel)
- Unstable mood and inconsistency are the greatest weaknesses of human nature. (Joseph Addison)
- Weakness is doubly weak when it is a novice. (Thomas Hardy)
- My family is my strength and my weakness. (Aishwarya Rai)
- Morality is the weakness of the brain. (Arthur Rimbaud)
- Mankind has many weaknesses, but the main two were: inability to arrive on time and inability to keep promises. (Charles Bukowski)
- You must never threaten anyone, because it is a weakness for women. (Kilo Of Sparta)
- Things are not so painful or difficult in themselves: it is our weakness and our cowardice that make them so. (Michel de Montaigne)
- Each human being compensates for his weaknesses by force, strengthening and controlling every ineptitude. (James Hillman)
- The weak cannot be sincere. (François de La Rochefoucauld)
- You should never form a company with the strongest and smartest because the weak or the naive will always come out with broken bones. (Phaedrus)
- Weakness is what brings ignorance, convenience, racism, homophobia, despair, cruelty, brutality, all things that will do nothing but keep a society chained to the ground and the foot nailed to the floor . (Henry Rollins)
- The fragility of the crystal is not a weakness, but a refinement. (Emile Hirsch)
- Give freedom to the weak man, and he himself will bind and bring it back to you. For the weak heart, freedom makes no sense. (Fëdor Dostoevskij)
- The weak cannot forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. (Mahatma Gandhi)
- The strong do what they have to do, and the weak accept what they have to accept. (Thucydides)
- Changing opinion, or even political line, is a sign of weakness. (George Orwell)
- The worst temptations are those to which one gives in without having anything in return, making only the bitter discovery of our weakness. (Paolo Maurensig)
- Violence is not strength but weakness, nor can it ever be a creator of anything but only a destroyer. (Benedetto Croce)
- Weakness is contrary to virtue more than vice. (François de La Rochefoucauld)
- Nothing is more repulsive than the majority: since it consists of some strong leaders, in rascals who adapt, in weak who assimilate, and in the mass that trots behind without knowing in the least what they want. (Goethe)
- In every moment of history there is human weakness, unhealthy self-seeking, comfortable selfishness and, ultimately, lust that threatens us all. (Pope francesco)
- The lover is the weakest person in the universe because his happiness depends on the presence and availability of the loved one. (Julius Caesar Jacob)
- It is not temptation that is strong, it is I who am weak. (Charles Eugene de Foucauld)
- Sarcasm is the refuge of the weak. (Jean Paul Sartre)
- Violence has its roots in weakness. (Lucio Anneo Seneca)
- God is the hope of the strong, and not the excuse of the coward. We are all mixed with weaknesses and errors: forgiving each other our fools is the first law of nature. (Plutarch)
- It is not our enemies that frighten us, but our weaknesses. (Valeriu Butulescu)
- Even if the ability to cheat is a sign of acuteness and power, the intention to cheat is undoubtedly a sign of malice or weakness. (Descartes)
- What's bad? Everything that comes from weakness. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
- Protect animals against men's cruelty, feed them if they are hungry, drink if they are thirsty; to run to their aid if exhausted by fatigue, this is the most beautiful virtue of the strong towards the weak. (Giuseppe Garibaldi)
- The most difficult war for the human being is the war against himself. History is full of men and women who have conquered the world but who have collapsed in front of themselves and their weaknesses. (Michel de Montaigne)
- Ingratitude is always a form of weakness. I have never seen that excellent men were ungrateful. (Goethe)
- I am really surprised when I consider how weak my mind is and how prone to error. (Descartes)
- Tenderness and kindness are not a symptom of despair and weakness, but an expression of strength and determination. (Khalil Gibran)
- You can't escape a weakness. You must defeat it, otherwise you will succumb. And if this is the case, why not now? And where exactly are you? (Robert Louis Stevenson)
