Don’t ever mistake my silence for ignorance, my calmness for acceptance or my kindness for weakness. Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength.

Insincerity is always weakness; sincerity even in error is strength.

There are two ways of exerting one’s strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.

Success is achieved by developing our strengths, not by eliminating our weaknesses.

My attitude is that if you push me towards something that you think is a weakness, then I will turn that perceived weakness into a strength.

You can’t run away from yourself

Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.

Social reforms are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak.

Great players crave instruction on their weaknesses.

I don’t think there’s anything to be admired in lying, cheating or philandering. But there might be something to be admired in not burning people at the stake because they have those weaknesses.

Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.

Strength that goes wrong is even more dangerous than weakness that goes wrong.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

Is it courage in a dying man to go, in weakness and in agony, to affront an almighty and eternal God?

Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.

The rights of neutrality will only be respected when they are defended by an adequate power. A nation, despicable by its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral.

The weakness of most men they do not know how to become a stone or tree.

And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire.

Plainly, this unwillingness to give ground even on unimportant disagreements is the symptom of some deepseated insecurity, as was my one-time fondness for making teasing remarks (which I amended when I read Anthony Powell’s matter-of-fact observation that teasing is an unfailing sign of misery within) and as is my very pronounced impatience. The struggle, therefore, is to try and cultivate the virtuous side of these shortcomings: to be a genial host while only slightly whiffled, for example, or to be witty at the expense of one’s own weaknesses instead of those of other people.

It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man’s death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too.

The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.

I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair.

The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet how can anyone speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?… With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

As long as I fear my weakness, I am stronger than when I trust my strength.

The weak can be terrible because they try furiously to appear strong.

No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty. Good men will obey the last, but bad ones the former only. If our government ever fails, it will be from this weakness.

The best revenge against bullies is absolutely, resolutely, never to let them change who you are. Know that whatever bullies say or do – it comes from their weakness, not yours.

I learned what my weaknesses were and I went out the next day to turn those weaknesses intro strengths.

Life before Death. Strength before Weakness. Journey before Destination.

You know, [women] do not really condemn any weakness: rather, they try to humiliate or disarm our strengths. That is why women arethe reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal.

A cartoonist’s style is created by weaknesses and personal restrictions as much as strengths.

I’m learning to use others’ weaknesses. I don’t hammer a man’s soft spot constantly, because he may strengthen it. I just save it as a trump up my sleeve for moments when I really need a point.

What played to what had been a relative weakness for us-this was exploding overseas as well, and we had to scramble to mount some reach and get into places and be competitive on the ground.

No soul of high estate can take pleasure in slander. It betrays a weakness.

The word ‘God’ is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, and religious scripture a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this.