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“No, Madam,' cried I, '—only—only I did not know that gentleman,—and so,—and so I thought—I intended—I—'
Overpowered by all that had passed, I had not strength to make my mortifying explanation; — my spirits quite failed me, and I burst into tears.”

Frances Burney book Evelina

Letter XIII
Evelina (1778)

“In the day I can smile though I wanna die / Hold on, hold on / I can keep it together for a little while / and be strong, so strong / But when the sun goes down and I'm all alone / I haven't the strength to fight / That's when my tears give in to the night”

Kim Wilde (1960) English pop singer

Hold on
Now & Forever (1995)

“Socially, women are the equals of men, without restrictions. The beings who shine and who bring forth are not made solely to lend or to give the heat of their bodies. It is right that the sum total of work should be shared, reduced and harmonized by their hands. It is just that the fate of humanity should be grounded also in the strength of women.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XXII - Light

“When you are working, you are so far away and so absorbed, it's inevitable that you fall into a vacuum when you stop.... every time when I finish a painting, I always have to wait to get my strength back before I can begin another.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

3 April 1972; p. 90
1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

“The American ash from which bats are made has an unusually high strength-to-weight ratio. Ash was celebrated in medieval times as the only proper wood from which to construct the lances of knights errant; an ash lance was light enough to carry and wield and strong enough to impale the opposition.”

Robert Adair (physicist) (1924) Physicist and author

Source: The Physics Of Baseball (Second Edition - Revised), Chapter 6, Properties Of Bats, p. 134

“I could tell you about my strengths and weaknesses. I'm creative and intelligent and able to rock the boat and do things that can create uncomfortable situations and then not be bothered about it. But I'm not the best diplomat, I don't have a lot of patience for being sunny and making people happy.”

Holden Karnofsky (1981) American nonprofit executive

In an interview https://80000hours.org/2014/10/interview-holden-karnofsky-on-the-importance-of-personal-fit/ with Benjamin Todd, January 2014

“On my good days and bad days, when I’m shining or standing in the shadows, no matter what I face, God is my strength. My goal is to build a platform where I can spread the Gospel. Share the good news freely and to all who have ears to hear.”

Joel Courtney (1996) American actor

Exclusive Interview With “Super 8” And “The Kissing Booth” Star Joel Courtney https://daman.co.id/exclusive-interview-with-super-8-and-the-kissing-booth-star-joel-courtney/ (June 6, 2011)

“The first essential of civilization is law. Anarchy is simply the handmaiden and forerunner of tyranny and despotism. Law and order enforced with justice and by strength lie at the foundations of civilization. Law must be based upon justice, else it cannot stand, and it must be enforced with resolute firmness, because weakness in enforcing it means in the end that there is no justice and no law, nothing but the rule of disorderly and unscrupulous strength. Without the habit of orderly obedience to the law, without the stern enforcement of the laws at the expense of those who defiantly resist them, there can be no possible progress, moral or material, in civilization. There can be no weakening of the law-abiding spirit here at home, if we are permanently to succeed; and just as little can we afford to show weakness abroad.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900), National Duties

“… I draw on the work of Piaget (1968) in identifying conflict as the harbinger of growth and also on the work of Erikson (1964) who, in charting development through crisis, demonstrates how a heightened vulnerability signals the emergence of a potential strength, creating a dangerous opportunity for growth, "a turning point for better or worse" (p. 139).”

Carol Gilligan (1936) American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist

Source: In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development

“Once I was lost in a forest. I was so afraid. My blood pounded in my chest and I knew my heart's strength would soon be exhausted. I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.”

Anne Michaels book Fugitive Pieces

Source: Fugitive Pieces

“Just look at the strengths we bring as Americans to meet these challenges. We have the most dynamic and diverse people in the world. We have the most tolerant and generous young people we've ever had. We have the most powerful military. The most innovative entrepreneurs. The most enduring values.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), (July 28, 2016)

“He stood, and heard the steeple
Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town.
One, two, three, four, to market-place and people
It tossed them down.

Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,
He stood and counted them and cursed his luck;
And then the clock collected in the tower
Its strength, and struck.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

No. 15 ("Eight O'Clock"). <br class="br"> Last Poems http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8lspm10.txt (1922)

“A neural network is a massively parallel distributed processor that has a natural propensity for storing experiential knowledge and making it available for use. It resembles the brain in two respects:
1. Knowledge is acquired by the network through a learning process.
2. Interneuron connection strengths known as synaptic weights are used to store the [[knowledge].”

Igor Aleksander (1937) scientist

As cited in: Brian D. Ripley (2008) Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks. p.4
An introduction to neural computing (1990)

“We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

On Fredrick the Great (1842)

“Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction’s strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length;
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o’er the disentangled doom.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Demogorgon, Act IV, l. 562–569
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

“We can ask ourselves daily what we have done to make the world a better place, to make someone smile, to help someone to feel more secure, etc. It's the simple things which have the greatest effect. We must never underestimate the strength of a smile or act of kindness.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

A Magazine of People and Possibilities interview (1998)

“Strong, responsible unions are essential to industrial fair play. Without them the labor bargain is wholly one-sided. The parties to the labor contract must be nearly equal in strength if justice is to be worked out, and this means that the workers must be organized and that their organizations must be recognized by employers as a condition precedent to industrial peace.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

Reported in Osmond Kessler Fraenkel, Clarence Martin Lewis, The Curse of Bigness: Miscellaneous Papers of Louis D. Brandeis (1965), p. 43.
Extra-judicial writings

“When Croft's "Life of Dr. Young" was spoken of as a good imitation of Dr. Johnson's style, "No, no," said he, "it is not a good imitation of Johnson; it has all his pomp without his force; it has all the nodosities of the oak, without its strength; it has all the contortions of the sibyl, without the inspiration."”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Comment quoted by Matthew Prior in his Life of Burke
Undated

“Not another day or hour would she remain, no help was possible, no atonement could retrieve the past, no love or pity, pardon or excuse should soften the sharp pang of reparation for the guilty man. To go instantly and forever was her only thought, and this gave her strength to rise and look about her.”

Louisa May Alcott A Long Fatal Love Chase

A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866)

“The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”

Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909) German mathematician and physicist

Address to the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, (Sep 21, 1908)