Strength quotes (page 74) | Quotes of famous people

“Press on! If Fortune play thee false
To-day, tomorrow she'll be true;
Whom now she sinks she now exalts,
Taking old gifts and granting new,
The wisdom of the present hour
Makes up the follies past and gone;
To weakness, strength succeeds, and power
From frailty springs! Press on, press on!”

Park Benjamin, Sr. (1809–1864) American journalist

Press On.

“Sixty-three years ago, representatives from around the world gathered in San Francisco to complete the founding of the Charter of the United Nations. They met in the shadow of a devastating war, with grave new dangers on the horizon. They agreed on a historic pledge: To reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, and unite their strength to maintain international peace and security.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2008, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2008)

“When I understand this liability as a trade-off for my strengths, something new and liberating arises within me. I no longer want to have my liability “fixed”—by learning how to dance solo, for example, when no one wants to dance with me—for to do that would be to compromise or even destroy my gift.”

Parker Palmer (1939) American theologian

Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), p. 53

“I don't think I need to experiment with anything like carrom ball or so. I have my core strengths which is the off-break and the doosra. It has given me results in the last 15 years and no one can take away my 700 plus international wickets from me.”

Harbhajan Singh (1980) Indian cricketer

Singh on his cricket performance, quoted on sports.ndtv, "Harbhajan Singh Says He Relies On His Strength Which Has Served Him Well For 15 Years" http://sports.ndtv.com/australia-vs-india-2015-16/news/253472-harbhajan-singh-says-he-relies-on-his-strength-which-has-served-him-well-for-15-years, December 22, 2015.

“It is not easy for a free community to organise for war. We are not accustomed to listen to experts or prophets. Our strength lies in an ability to improvise. Yet an open mind to untried ideas is also necessary. No-one can say when the end will come. In the war services it is recognised that the best security for an early conclusion is a plan for long endurance.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Source: How to Pay for the War (1940), Ch. 1 : The Character of the Problem

“Why should Ossian sing of battles? For never more shall my steel shine in war. I remember the days of my youth with grief; when I feel the weakness of my arm. Happy are they who fell in their youth, in the midst of their renown! They have not beheld the tombs of their friends, or failed to bend the bow of their strength.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

"The War of Caros"
The Poems of Ossian

“It is always a matter of regret from the personal point of view when divergences arise between colleagues, but it is the team that matters and not the individual, and I am quite happy about the strength and the power of the team, and so I thought the best thing to do was to settle up these little local difficulties, and then turn to the wider vision of the Commonwealth.”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

"Mr Macmillan sets out", The Times, 8 January 1958, p. 8
Statement to the press at Heathrow Airport, 7 January 1958. Macmillan was refusing to postpone a Commonwealth tour despite the resignation of the entire Treasury team of ministers.
1920s-1950s

“I conceive the essential relationship between God and the world to be not one of power and violence, as might think the primitive man, who worships physical strength and imagines that it is a superior power shaking the earth with earthquakes or hurling a thunderbolt through space; it is nearness, something which might seem insignificant but which brings spiritual awareness.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Hymn

“It makes the prophet in us all presage
The glory of a next Augustan age
Of a power leading from its strength and pride,
Of young ambition eager to be tried,
Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,
In any game the nations want to play.
A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday's the beginning hour.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Dedication (1960)

“In time of crisis, we summon up our strength.
Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

Introduction
The Life of Poetry (1949)
Context: In time of crisis, we summon up our strength.
Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used.
In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all our need, our need for each other and our need for our selves. We call up, with all the strength of summoning we have, our fullness.

“The conditions of recovery which have been stated do indeed involve the restoration of what has been called capitalism. But the slump was not due to these conditions. On the contrary, it was due to their negation. It was due to monetary mismanagement and State intervention operating in a milieu in which the essential strength of capitalism had already been sapped by war and by policy.”

Lionel Robbins (1898–1984) British economist

"Conditions of Recovery," ch. 8 of The Great Depression https://mises.org/library/great-depression-0 (Freeport, N. Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971; orig. 1934), pp. 193–194.
Context: It has been the object…to show that if recovery is to be maintained and future progress assured, there must be a more or less complete reversal of contemporary tendencies of governmental regulation of enterprise. The aim of governmental policy in regard to industry must be to create a field in which the forces of enterprise and the disposal of resources are once more allowed to be governed by the market.But what is this but the restoration of capitalism? And is not the restoration of capitalism the restoration of the causes of depression?If the analysis of this essay is correct, the answer is unequivocal. The conditions of recovery which have been stated do indeed involve the restoration of what has been called capitalism. But the slump was not due to these conditions. On the contrary, it was due to their negation. It was due to monetary mismanagement and State intervention operating in a milieu in which the essential strength of capitalism had already been sapped by war and by policy. Ever since the outbreak of war in 1914, the whole tendency of policy has been away from that system, which in spite of the persistence of feudal obstacles and the unprecedented multiplication of the people, produced that enormous increase of wealth per head…. Whether that increase will be resumed, or whether, after perhaps some recovery, we shall be plunged anew into depression and the chaos of planning and restrictionism—that is the issue which depends on our willingness to reverse this tendency.

“We kneel, how weak; we rise, how full of power!
Why, therefore, should we do ourselves this wrong,
Or others — that we are not always strong,
That we are ever overborne with care,
That we should ever weak or heartless be,
Anxious or troubled, when with us is prayer,
And joy and strength and courage are with Thee?”

Richard Chenevix Trench (1807–1886) Irish bishop

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 467.

“I know not what fear is, nor I know not what it is that I fear now; I fear not the hastening of my death, and yet I do fear the increase of the disease… my weakness is from nature, who hath but her measure, my strength is from God, who possesses and distributes infinitely.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

VI. Metuit. The physician is afraid
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624)

“I think it is interesting that God designed people to need other people. We see those cigarette advertisements with the rugged cowboy riding around alone on a horse, and we think that is strength, when, really, it is like setting your soul down on a couch and not exercising it. The soul needs to interact with other people to be healthy.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

“History is a great teacher. Now everyone knows that the labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Address to AFL–CIO (1961)

“The greatest artist is he who is greatest in the highest reaches of his art, even although he may lack the qualities necessary for the adequate execution of some minor details. It is not by his faults, but by his excellences, that we measure a great man. The strength of a beam is measured by its weakest part, of a man by his strongest..”

George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) British philosopher

On Actors and the Art of Acting (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1875) p. 13

“We have been dealt a situation from which there is no escape. You have seen what Muhammad has done. Arabs have submitted to him and we do not have the strength to fight. You know that no herd is safe from him. And no one even dares go outside for fear of being terrorized.”

Al-Tabari (839–923) influential Persian scholar, historian and exegete of the Qur'an

Source: Al-Tabari, Vol. 9, p. 42

“Accustom yourself to look first to the dreadful consequences of failure; then fix your eye on the glorious prize which is before you; and when your strength begins to fail, and your spirits are well nigh exhausted, let the animating view rekindle your resolution, and call forth in renewed vigour the fainting energies of your soul.”

William Wilberforce (1759–1833) English politician

“If news organizations learned anything after the campaign, they should have learned that groupthink has a tendency to miss the point and journalistic myopia requires some extra-strength corrective lenses. Do something different. Represent the interests of a broader, more ideologically diverse population. Figure out what they’re thinking and feeling — and why.”

Margaret Sullivan (journalist) American journalist

Journalists in the age of Trump: Lose the smugness, keep the mission. (November 29, 2016)

“Part of the strength of science is that it has tended to attract individuals who love knowledge and the creation of it. Just as important to the integrity of science have been the unwritten rules of the game. These provide recognition and approbation for work which is imaginative and accurate, and apathy or criticism for the trivial or inaccurate… Thus, it is the communication process which is at the core of the vitality and integrity of science…”

Philip Abelson (1913–2004) US physicist, editor of the journal Science, and director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Geoph…

The roots of scientific integrity, Editorial in Science (29 March 1963) 139: 1257 [DOI: 10.1126/science.139.3561.1257]

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