“Though strength be lacking, yet the will is to be praised.”
Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas.
Ovid book Epistulae ex Ponto
III, iv, 79
Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters From the Black Sea)
Ben che stia mal che l'uom se stesso lodi.
Canto XLIII, stanza 12 (tr. W. S. Rose)
Orlando Furioso (1532)
“Though strength be lacking, yet the will is to be praised.”
Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas.
Ovid book Epistulae ex Ponto
III, iv, 79
Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters From the Black Sea)
Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker
Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 164)
“She had married a vulgar man; and, though she had not become like the man, she had become vulgar.”
Anthony Trollope book The Prime Minister
Source: The Prime Minister (1876), Ch. 5
“Man as an observer is becoming completely alienated from himself as a being.”
Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic
The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)
Context: The relationship to the world that the modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality and with natural human experience. It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia: Man as an observer is becoming completely alienated from himself as a being.
Sophie Scholl (1921–1943) White Rose member
As quoted in O<sub>2</sub> : Breathing New Life Into Faith (2008) by Richard Dahlstrom, p. 223; this source is disputed as it does not cite an original document for the quote.
Disputed
Context: Isn't it bewildering … that everything is so beautiful, despite all the horrors that exist? Lately I've noticed something grand and mysterious peering into my sheer joy in all that is lovely — the sense of a Creator whom innocent creation worships with its beauty. Only man can be hateful or ugly, because he possesses a free will to cut himself off from the chorus of praise. It often seems that he will succeed in drowning out this chorus with his cannon thunder, curses, and blasphemy. But it has become clear to me this spring that he cannot. And so I must try to throw myself on the side of the victor.
“it was odd, he thought, that a man could hate himself as though he were someone else.”
Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …
Lalleshwari (1320–1392) Indian writer, mystic and saint
Naked Songs, p. 18
Poetry, From Kashmiri Poetry
Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian
Source: Between Man and Man (1965), p. 150