This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned into it), are the natural securities for this transmission." - Edmund Burke
"The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice." - Edmund Burke
"Genius is only the power of making continuous efforts. The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it.... There is no failure except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose." - Elbert Green Hubbard
"There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no insurmountable barrier except our own inherent weakness of purpose." - Elbert Green Hubbard
"Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many." - Eric Hoffer
"Weakness of conduct is but the consequence of weakness of conviction; for the strongest of all the springs of human action is human belief." - François Guizot, fully François Pierre Guillaume Guizot
"Will is not unfrequently weakness." - George MacDonald
"Must love be ever treated with profaneness as a mere illusion? or with coarseness as a mere impulse? or with fear as a mere disease? or with shame as a mere weakness? or with levity as a mere accident? whereas it is a great mystery and a great necessity, lying at the foundation of human existence, morality, and happiness - mysterious, universal, inevitable as death." - Harriet Martineau
"If a boy is not trained to endure and to bear trouble, he will grow up a girl; and a boy that is a girl has all a girl’s weakness without any of her regal qualities. A woman made out of a woman is God’s noblest work; a woman made out of a man is His meanest." - Henry Ward Beecher
"When we feel a strong desire to thrust our advice upon others, it is usually because we suspect their weakness; but we ought rather to suspect our own." - James Bryant Conant
"Patience is the support of weakness; impatience is the ruin of strength." - James Bryant Conant
"Tolerance is a tremendous virtue, but the immediate neighbors of tolerance are apathy and weakness." - James Goldsmith
"Restraint does not mean weakness. It does not mean giving in." - Jawaharlal Nehru
"Inconsistency with ourselves is the great weakness of human nature." - Joseph Addison
"It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution." - Joseph Addison
"Mutability of temper and inconsistency with ourselves is the great weakness of human nature." - Joseph Addison
"Vanity is the natural weakness of an ambitious man, which exposes him to the secret scorn and derision of those he converses with, and ruins the character he is so industrious to advance by it." - Joseph Addison
"Laughter, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the mind, weakens the faculties and causes a kind of remissness and dissolution in all the powers of the soul; and thus it may be looked on as weakness in the composition of human nature. But if we consider the frequent reliefs we receive from it and how often it breaks the gloom which is apt to depress the mind and damp our spirits, with transient, unexpected gleams of joy, one would take care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life." - Joseph Addison
"There are many shining qualities on the mind of man; but none so useful as discretion. It is this which gives a value to all the rest, and sets them at work in their proper places, and turns them to the advantage of their possessor. Without it, learning is pedantry; wit, impertinence; virtue itself looks like weakness; and the best parts only qualify a man to be more sprightly in errors, and active to his own prejudice. Though a man has all other perfections and wants discretion, he will be of no great consequence in the world; but if he has this single talent in perfection, and but a common share of others, he may do what he pleases in his station of life." - Joseph Addison
"Know your own true worth, and you shall not perish. Reason is your light and beacon of Truth. Reason is the source of Life. God has given you Knowledge, so that by its light you may not only worship him, but also see yourself in your weakness and strength." - Kahlil Gibran
"Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution." - Kahlil Gibran
"If you wish particularly to gain the good graces and affection of certain people, men or women, try to discover their most striking merit, if they have one, and their dominant weakness, for every one has his own, then do justice to the one and a little more than justice to the other." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"Every society is often composed of the weakness that we're damned if we are going to show." - Mignon McLaughlin
"You cloak your weakness in big words." - Ovid, formally Publius Ovidius Naso NULL
"No matter what his present state, man can change for the better through self-control, discipline, and following proper diet and health laws. Why do you think you cannot change? Mental laziness is the secret cause of all weakness." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"Virtue and purity are not rooted in weakness." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"There is something odd about the weakness which irreligious men feel for religion. Almost invariably it becomes their favorite topic." - Philip Guedalla
"Our strength grows out of our weakness." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Motives are symptoms of weakness and supplements for the deficient energy of the living principle, the law within us. Let them then be reserved for those momentous acts and duties in which the strongest and best-balanced natures must feel themselves deficient, and where humility no less than prudence prescribes deliberation." -
"The acknowledgment of our weakness is the first step in repairing our loss." - Thomas Kempis, aka Thomas à Kempis, Thomas von Kempen, Thomas Haemerkken or Hammerlein or Hemerken or Hämerken
"To work a Man to thy bent: 1. Know his Inclinations. 2. Observe his Ends. 3. Search out his Weakness. And So thou mayst either draw or drive him." - Thomas Fuller
"A multitude of laws in a country is like a great number of physicians, a sign of weakness and malady." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Weakness on both sides is, as we know, the motto of all quarrels." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery." - William Hazlitt
"A person who is a truth seeker and readily admits his mistakes will gain both the respect of others and will ultimately have more self-respect. Instead of looking at admitting mistakes as a sign of weakness, look at it as a manifestation of intellectual honesty." - Zelig Pliskin
"The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow. Bigness means weakness. " - Eric Sevareid, fully Arnold Eric Sevareid
"The principles of war, not merely one principle, can be condensed into a single word - "Concentration." But the truth this needs to be amplified as the concentration of strength against weakness. And for real value, it needs to be explained that the concentration of strength against weakness depends on the dispersion of your opponent's strength." - B. H. Liddell Hart, fully Captain B. H. Liddell
"Weakness has many stages. There is a difference between feebleness by the impotency of the will, of the will to the resolution, of the resolution to the choice of means, of the choice of the means to the application." - Cardinal de Retz, Jean Francois-Paul de Gondil
"Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture. " - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness" - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"A principal characteristic of technique … is its refusal to tolerate moral judgments. It is absolutely independent of them and eliminates them from its domain. Technique never observes the distinction between moral and immoral use. It tends on the contrary, to create a completely independent technical morality. Here, then, is one of the elements of weakness of this point of view. It does not perceive technique's rigorous autonomy with respect to morals; it does not see that the infusion of some more or less vague sentiment of human welfare cannot alter it. Not even the moral conversion of the technicians could make a difference. At best, they would cease to be good technicians. This attitude supposes further that technique evolves with some end in view, and that this end is human good. Technique is totally irrelevant to this notion and pursues no end, professed or unprofessed." - Jacques Ellul
"I am struck by how sharing our weakness and difficulties is more nourishing to others than sharing our qualities and successes." - Jean Vanier
"The more weakness the more falsehood; strength goes straight; every cannon-ball that has in its hollows and holes goes crooked. Weaklings must lie. " - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
"Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, 'Do thou,' and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in 'Thou shalt.' Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But 'Thou mayest'! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win." - John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
"The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat - for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation." - John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
"It is an inherent weakness of religion not to take offense at the segregation of God, to forget that the true sanctuary has no walls... It has often done more to canonize prejudices than to wrestle for truth; to petrify the sacred than to sanctify the secular. Yet the task of religion is to be a challenge to the stabilization of values." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"You can't let praise or criticism get to you. It's a weakness to get caught up in either one. " - John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden