Frailty Quotes

“How frail the human heart must be―a mirrored pool of thought.”
― Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

“The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited

“We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh; few are angels.”
― William Shakespeare, Henry VIII

“When rain and tears are making a trip together, emotions can be coming under pressure. But the fluid bond between the power of nature and the frailty of the soul may also smash the weight of the burden and create a liberating mental flow opening new insights. (“Rainman”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“You are human and fallible.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Every saint has a bee in his halo.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“The breath of wind that moved them was still chilly on this day in May; the flowers gently resisted, curling up with a kind of trembling grace and turning their pale stamens towards the ground. The sun shone through them, revealing a pattern of interlacing, delicate blue veins, visible through the opaque petals; this added something alive to the flower's fragility, to it's ethereal quality, something almost human ,in the way that human can mean frailty and endurance both at the same time. The wind could ruffle these ravishing creations but it couldn't destroy them, or even crush them; they swayed there, dreamily; they seemed ready to fall but held fast to their slim strong branches-...”
― Irène Némirovsky

“My Lady, you certainly tell me about wonderful constancy, strength and virtue and firmness of women, so can one say the same thing about men? (...)

Response [by Lady Rectitude]: "Fair sweet friend, have you not yet heard the saying that the fool sees well enough a small cut in the face of his neighbour, but he disregards the great gaping one above his own eye? I will show you the great contradiction in what the men say about the changeability and inconstancy of women. It is true that they all generally insist that women are very frail [= fickle] by nature. And since they accuse women of frailty, one would suppose that they themselves take care to maintain a reputation for constancy, or at the very least, that the women are indeed less so than they are themselves. And yet, it is obvious that they demand of women greater constancy than they themselves have, for they who claim to be of this strong and noble condition cannot refrain from a whole number of very great defects and sins, and not out of ignorance, either, but out of pure malice, knowing well how badly they are misbehaving. But all this they excuse in themselves and say that it is in the nature of man to sin, yet if it so happens that any women stray into any misdeed (of which they themselves are the cause by their great power and longhandedness), then it's suddenly all frailty and inconstancy, they claim. But it seems to me that since they do call women frail, they should not support that frailty, and not ascribe to them as a great crime what in themselves they merely consider a little defect.”
― Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies

“The Congresswoman was depressed by the fact that a woman of her standing could no longer count on making it to the rest room "in time" during the extensive rehabilitation that followed her shooting. Her husband, commander of a space shuttle crew, encouraged her by identifying with her limitation. Even revered astronauts, he revealed, have bodily limits and have to rely on Huggies during extended launch exercises.”
― Gabrielle Giffords, Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope

“as Schulz himself has pointed out, Snoopy is capable of being 'one of the meanest' members of the entire Peanuts cast ... he is lazy, he is a 'chow-hound' without parallel, he is bitingly sarcastic, he is frequently a coward, and he often becomes quite weary of being what he is basically -- a dog. He is, in other words, a fairly drawn caricature for what is probably the typical Christian.”
― Robert L. Short, The Gospel According to Peanuts

“Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Suicide Club

“And I think the answer is that we are, in reality, terribly frail animals. And we don't like to be reminded of how frail we are—how delicate the balances are inside our own bodies, how short our stay on Earth, and how easily it is ended.”
― Michael Crichton, Sphere

“In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love.”
― John Steinbeck

“We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“They are so frail humans. So easily crumpled and broken, like flower petals under foot.”
― Jennifer Hudock, The Goblin Market

“If I told you the few things keeping me alive,
Don’t run, don’t laugh, don’t cry.
Just forgive me for being soft in life,
I am one of those things that die”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Clusters of distant lights was the view of Mankind that he liked the best. The lights had the archaic charm of little fires on a plain, and the frailty about them, if it did not excuse anything, at least explained a lot of Man's stubborn ruthlessness. Mankind had not started the mess that was life, after all. And on the whole, it had been an interesting species to be a part of, the girls especially, as long as you remembered to watch your back.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Aurorarama

“You see, my son,” continues Kolbe softly, “the saints are not so different than you or me. Their stories reveal them to be very much human. However, this frailty does not weaken their witness or holiness, but rather extends to us the invitation to the same life amid our own frailty.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci, The Sinner Saint: A Novella of St. Patrick of Ireland

“You can never be a first class human being, until you have learnt to have some regard for human frailty.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Conscience over Nonsense

“When I grow up next year my life will be easy." Vanity”
― Caroline Gerardo, Cardinal Sin Vanity

“[Jean-Christophe’s father] was not a bad man, but a half-good man, which is perhaps worse—weak, without spring, without moral strength, but for the rest, in his own opinion, a good father, a good son, a good husband, a good man—and perhaps he was good, if to be so it is enough to possess an easy kindness, which is quickly touched, and that animal affection by which a man loves his kin as a part of himself. It cannot even be said that he was very egoistic; he had not personality enough for that. He was nothing. They are a terrible thing in life, these people who are nothing. Like a dead weight thrown into the air, they fall, and must fall; and in their fall they drag with them everything that they have.”
― Romain Rolland, Jean Christophe

“...[A]ll the elements which belong to the notion of happiness are altogether empirical, that is, they must be borrowed from experience, and nevertheless the idea of happiness requires an absolute whole, a maximum of welfare in my present and all future circumstances. Now it is impossible that the most clear-sighted and at the same time most powerful being (supposed finite) should frame to himself a definite conception of what he really wills in this. Does he will riches, how much anxiety, envy, and snares might he not thereby draw upon his shoulders? Does he will knowledge and discernment, perhaps it might prove to be only an eye so much the sharper to show him so much the more fearfully the evils that are now concealed from him and that cannot be avoided, or to impose more wants on his desires, which already give him concern enough. Would he have long life? Who guarantees to him that it would not be a long misery? Would he at least have health? How often has uneasiness of the body restrained from excesses into which perfect health would have allowed one to fall, and so on? In short, he is unable, on any principle, to determine with certainty what would make him truly happy; because to do so he would need to be omniscient.”
― Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals

“In real life I fell easily under the spell of all traveling artists. En route to New Orleans, entertainments of many kinds would stop over in those days for a single performance in Jackson's Century Theatre. Then, as now, my imagination was magnetized toward transient artists - toward the transience as much as the artists. I must have seen "Acrobats in a Park" at the time I wrote the story as exotic, free of any experience as I knew it. At the center of the little story is the Zorro's act: the feat of erecting a structure of their bodies that holds together, interlocked, and stands like a wall. Writing about the family act, I was writing about the family itself, its strength as a unit, testing its frailty under stress. I treated it in an artificial and oddly formal way; the stronghold of the family is put on view as a structure built each night; on the night before the story opens, the Wall has come down when the most vulnerable member slips, and the act is done for. But from various points within it and from outside it, I've been writing about the structure of the family in stories and novels ever since. In spite of my uncompromising approach to it, my fundamental story form might have been trying to announce itself to me.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“Mortal frailty, greed, and error, know no boundary lines. The explosives of war do not care whose hands fashion them. Certainly, both Marxists and Christians can be cruel. Would that Christ came back to save us all. We do not know how to save ourselves.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Oh, what the ocean did to a man. How unmatched it was. One could competitively build a giant castle made of sand or even hire architects to construct a true castle by the shore made of rocks and furnish its enormous insides with crystals. Yet plop him closer to the sea and within seconds, he will yield and feel as dumb as any other measly man lost at land.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“Frailty, thy name is woman.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Exaggeration of hurt enhances the defaulter's guilt.”
― B.S. Murthy

“In a world infatuated with victimhood, has trauma emerged as a passport to status - our red badge of courage?”
― Parul Sehgal

“Those who follow evil gods become evil themselves”
― Elizabeth Moon, Oath of Fealty

“Sadness, like birch bark, had all the appearance of frailty. And yet... The tree prevailed.”
― Rachel Gillig, The Knight and the Moth