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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Strength

  • To be strong
  • Is to be happy!
  • Longfellow.

  • And, weaponless himself,
  • Made arms ridiculous.
  • Milton.

  • The king’s name is a tower of strength,
  • Which they upon the adverse party want.
  • Shakespeare.

    Profan’d the God-given strength, and marr’d the lofty line.

    Scott.

    Strength alone knows conflict; weakness is below even defeat, and is born vanquished.

    Mme. Swetchine.

    Strength, wanting judgment and policy to rule, overturneth itself.

    Horace.

    The virtue of Paganism was strength; the virtue of Christianity is obedience.

    Hare.

    Strength is born in the deep silence of long-suffering hearts; not amidst joy.

    Mrs. Hemans.

  • O, it is excellent
  • To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous
  • To use it like a giant.
  • Shakespeare.

  • But Hercules himself must yield to odds;
  • And many strokes, though with a little axe,
  • Hew down and fell the hardest-timber’d oak.
  • Shakespeare.

    Men mighty-thewed as Samson was, dark-browed as kings in iron cast, broad-breasted as twin gates of brass.

    Joaquin Miller.

    I would have you call to mind the strength of the ancient giants, that undertook to lay the high mountain Pelion on the top of Ossa, and set among those the shady Olympus.

    Rabelais.

    The ideal of morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of highest strength, of most powerful life. It is the maximum of the savage.

    Novalis.

    We deceive ourselves when we fancy that only weakness needs support. Strength needs it far more. A straw or a feather sustains itself long in the air.

    Mme. Swetchine.

    The exhibition of real strength is never grotesque. Distortion is the agony of weakness. It is the dislocated mind whose movements are spasmodic.

    Willmott.

    Although men are accused for not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps as few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.

    Swift.

  • What is strength, without a double share
  • Of wisdom? Vast, unwieldy, burdensome;
  • Proudly secure, yet liable to fall
  • By weakest subtleties; not made to rule,
  • But to subserve where wisdom bears command.
  • Milton.

  • In that day’s feats,
  • *****
  • He prov’d best man i’ the field, and for his meed
  • Was brow-bound with the oak.
  • Shakespeare.

  • So let it be in God’s own might
  • We gird us for the coming fight,
  • And, strong in Him whose cause is ours
  • In conflict with unholy powers,
  • We grasp the weapons He has given,—
  • The Light, and Truth, and Love of Heaven.
  • Whittier.

  • Atlas, we read in ancient song,
  • Was so exceeding tall and strong,
  • He bore the skies upon his back,
  • Just as the pedler does his pack;
  • But, as the pedler overpress’d
  • Unloads upon a stall to rest,
  • Or, when he can no longer stand,
  • Desires a friend to lend a hand,
  • So Atlas, lest the ponderous spheres
  • Should sink, and fall about his ears,
  • Got Hercules to bear the pile,
  • That he might sit and rest awhile.
  • Swift.