Mental weakness

“ Like the unstable or inert they are not failures because of a lack of intellectual understanding of right and wrong, but because of excess or deficiency of their instinctive tendencies especially in the emotional sphere. Such weakness of will may arise either from abnormality of specific instinctive impulses or inability to organize these impulses so that one impulse may 16be utilized to supplement or inhibit another. We may call all this group of cases socially deficient because of a weakness in the volitional, or conative, aspect of mind. ”

“ If you go to a hanging and sympathize with the condemned, it is plain that your mental distress, without helping that gentleman, weakens, to a perceptible degree, your own mind and body, just as all other powerful emotions weaken them, by consuming energy, and so you are handicapped in the struggle for life to the extent of this weakness. ”

“ In many such instances there is little doubt that an inherent weakness in mental make-up exists which predisposes the individual toward mental breakdown. This is more apparent when one recalls that there are thousands of other individuals who undergo equally great or greater calamities without loss of mental balance. ”

“ The mind-weakness which results from the terrible error of mental dissipation, whatever the direction in which the thoughts are permitted to disport themselves, is one of the most perilous conditions of exhaustion into which the faculties of a still sound brain can be allowed to sink. ”

“ It has been prepared in weakness of body and in suffering, which have been to some extent relieved by the mental occupation thus afforded, but which may have nevertheless left their impress on the work. ”

“ Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old. ”

“ But, on the other hand, who that has suffered from unstrung nerves does not know that what is most needed in such a case, is to divert the mind from itself—to present suddenly some other image powerful enough to efface from it the impressions of its own wretched self—to enable it to rouse itself and rise above the weakness it is ashamed of, but has no power to conquer? ”

“ The effort to work becomes daily more laborious, the task of fixing the attention grows increasingly difficult, thoughts wander, memory fails, the reasoning power is enfeebled; prejudice—the shade of defunct emotion or some past persuasion—takes the place of judgment; physical nerve or brain disturbance may supervene, and the crash will then come suddenly, unexpected by on-lookers, perhaps unperceived by the sufferer himself. This is the history of "worry," or disorder produced by mental disquietude and distraction, occasionally by physical disease. ”

“ Just remember every time you think of yourself as being weak, in some way you are making yourself so by thinking you are. Our mental conditions make us what we are. Just watch yourself and see how much time you waste in worrying, fretting and complaining. The more of it you do the worse off you are. ”

“ But the gist of the whole matter is this: in a neurosis, certain forces of the personality—instincts and their accompanying emotions—which ought to work harmoniously, having become tangled up with some erroneous ideas, have lost their power of coöperation and are working at cross purposes, leaving the individual mis-adapted to his environment, the prey of all sorts of mental and physical disturbances. ”

“ That intangible tendency to weakness, to unhealth, so indefinable, so delicate, so inappreciable to our senses, is yet the mightiest factor in our being, and measures the amount of our physical pains and sufferings with a greater delicacy than we have been wont to think. ”

“ It is as if their vulnerable being was exposed and they have not the wit to cover it. There is a pathos of physical sensibility and mental inadequacy. Their mind is not sufficiently alert to run with their quick, warm senses. ”

“ To strike out right and
left against the mist, never clears the vision; but to lift
your head above it, is a sovereign panacea. Mental dark-
ness is senseless error, neither intelligence nor power, and
its victim is responsible for its supposititious presence. [20]
“Cast the beam out of thine own eye.” Learn what in
thine own mentality is unlike “the anointed,” and cast
it out; then thou wilt discern the error in thy patient's
mind that makes his body sick, and remove it, and rest
like the dove from the deluge. [25]
“Physician, heal thyself.” ”

“ Perhaps there is something organically wrong with me—God, if you exist, you should have given me some manly vigor commensurate with the mental strength I imagine I have, and after all, is my mind weak or has my poor, weak body and abuse merely dragged it down, and is it capable of resurrection? ”

“ Yet my one great fault of intense self-consciousness haunts me still, mars my enjoyment, unnerves me often in the very moment of action, and makes me feel every day the evil brought upon a too sensitive disposition, when defects, whether physical or mental, are made a theme for ridicule and banter, without regard to the present pain and future loss such a course is only too sure to entail.—Temple Bar. ”

“ I observed, that in proportion as our strength decayed, our minds exhibited symptoms of weakness, evinced by a kind of unreasonable pettishness with each other. Each of us thought the other weaker in intellect than himself, and more in need of advice and assistance. ”

“ If therefore we regard these periods of temperamental depression as incomprehensible, it is because we have come to look upon the conscious, reasoning part of our intelligence as the sole source of mental energy, whereas it is only one factor in the complicated organism which we know as the human ego. ”

“ What a profound consciousness of inward weakness and of outward antagonism there breathes in that humble and modest hope, as being the loftiest result of the presence of Omnipotence for our aid: 'I shall not be moved'! When we think of our inner weakness, when we remember the fluctuations of our feelings and emotions, when we compare the ups and downs of our daily life, or when we think of the larger changes covering years, which affect all our outlooks, our thoughts, our plans ”

“ With them the will-power is oftentimes an element in the recovery, throwing off disease by the determination not to yield to its influence. There is no doubt but that this temperament is more liable to mental derangement than any other; the great emotional intensity and the difficulty of moral control laying the mind open to causes that tend to produce insanity. ”

“ After all my work, I am, in a day, brought face to face with my great ignorance and weakness, at the very time I seemed nearest to the goal I have so long held before me, while all my boasted calmness and control over my nerves and body were instantaneously dispelled by a woman's presence.
"No man could have made me believe I was so weak. ”

“ Yet in process of time, as I have been told, he came to some recovery and confessed this error; an evident proof of human weakness, and a notorious instance of our frailty, when we assume to ourselves the doing of any thing to which Heaven alone can enable us. ”

“ If these two forces are lacking in the body to any considerable extent, we have sickness and infirmity and accidents of every kind. If they are lacking in the mind, we find every degree of mental deficiency, every variety of insanity. ”

“ Their perpetual solicitude for him, acting as a suggestion of irresistible force, tends to engender in him a mental attitude out of which may afterward spring, according to the subsequent circumstances of his life, a cold, heartless, calculating selfishness, or a morbid self-anxiety, perhaps eventuating in all sorts of neurotic symptoms. ”

“ In the degenerate, whose brain and nervous system are characterized by hereditary malformations or irregularities; in the hysterical, whom we have learnt to regard as victims of exhaustion, the will is entirely lacking, is possessed only in a small degree. The consequence of weakness or want of will is incapacity of attention. ”

“ All other miseries come from the brain, and, as these belong to thought, they can be driven out by their master as unruly and unpleasant vagabonds; for a mental trouble should be spoken to, confronted, reprimanded and so dismissed. ”

“ Weakness produces fear, and fear produces weakness. Here is a fatal revolution in the functions of the organism. Of what use are the arbitrary and imaginary distinctions philosophers have made in the functions of the mind, when they cannot be separated from those of the body? There are in life fatal cliffs, currents which we cannot stem, and which carry us to inevitable destruction.
Weakness increases excitability, excitability foments lasciviousness, and lasciviousness in its turn begets weakness. ”

“ But it is also his nature both to return periodically to the physical position of the earth-worms, and to revert occasionally to the mental position of the savage. We do not wait to lie down till we have fallen from fatigue; we accustom ourselves and our children to relax and revert at regular intervals. Only the exceptionally weak take such indulgences as lying down during the day; but mentally and morally we act as if only the exceptionally weak need He down at all! ”

“ The combination of colorless monotony with constant racking anxiety slackened the springs of moral energy, which, and which alone, responding joyously to a call to action, afforded the stimulus capable of triumphing over his bodily weakness, and causing it for the moment to disappear. ”

“ When the mind undergoes degeneration, the moral feeling is the first to show it, as it is the last to be restored when the disorder passes away; the latest and highest gain of mental evolution, it is the first to witness by its impairment to mental dissolution.... ”

“ Then add to defective vision his lack of physical endurance, his liability to various organic affections caused by structural defects, and his abnormal appetites which are constantly demanding for their gratification the things which are injurious to his mental and physical constitution, and we are enabled to judge, to some extent, of the obstacles against which, in the struggle for existence, the future man will find himself obliged to contend. ”

“ To say that we are "human" and that we must ever remain so in this world is not only the untruth, but such expressions give weakness and adverse conditions to the personal life. We cause the flesh to become weak and remain weak by living in the belief that we are mere human creatures, and therefore when we meet adversity we "fall down," become sick, or otherwise manifest the imperfection of that life that is lived apart from the spirit. ”

“ I am often vexed myself at my weakness, at my eyes, from which I privately seek to wipe away all traces of emotion, and at my heart, which, at offences such as I now frequently experience, though certainly without the intention of the offenders, does not boil up with passion, but compresses itself as if into a great tear over the wicked world. ”

“ Third, let us now consider another different yet quite as prolific source of mental pain and its resulting invalidism, namely, that which is to be found in the ever-insistent consciousness of misfit into the ever-growing complexity and demands of the life of to-day, the necessarily consequent failure to realize what has been legitimately expected and striven for, and all the mental wear and tear which so necessarily follows or accrues. ”

“ It is a weakness comparable to the weakness of many premature religious syntheses; and it has the same soothing and disintegrating effect upon the creative energy of the mind.
What, as a matter of fact, hurts us all, much more than any tendency of life to be over-fluid and over-evasive, is the atrocious tendency of life to be inflexible, rigorous, implacable, harshly immobile. ”

“ Beginning with scarcely recognized perversions of one or more sense functionings, or with weakening or perversion of the more elaborate perceptional or ideational activities, the victim duly comes to the point where everything persistently clusters about his inner self, progressively to lead on to perplexity or danger or failure, with all the poignant mental distress that naturally belongs therewith ”

“ But we have become so blinded and stupefied with the race-thought of fear and weakness, and so hypnotized with the suggestions of weakness that we hear on all sides of us, that even the best of us find it hard to avoid occasionally sinking back into the lower depths of despair and discouragement. ”

“ For weakness in the body is not like that in the Soul: the word weakness, which covers the incapacity for work and the lack of resistance in the body, is applied to the Soul merely by analogy—unless, indeed, in the one case as in the other, the cause of the weakness is Matter. ”

“ The weakness of your body communicated itself to your soul. I do not know what infinite yearning possesses you, so that you are driven to a perilous, lonely search for some goal where you expect to find a final release from the spirit that torments you. ”

“ When it appears that our fate may be determined by a single word which we feel the power of uttering, we can scarcely help thinking that upon our own heads must be all the consequences which may follow; and thinking thus, we must realize our weakness and insufficiency. ”

“ To other doubts are often added the doubt of one's own mental balance; but it is a long step from these faulty habits of mind to real mental unbalance, which involves an inability to plan and carry out a line of conduct consistent with one's station. ”

“ Approaching the matter from a new angle, we find once more that the difference between strength and weakness is in many cases merely a difference in the emotions and feeling-tones which habitually control. ”

“ Yet, in all these cases, this feeling will rapidly lead the soul on to become unconsciously weak or feverish, unless the latter manfully escapes from this feeling’s tyranny, and nobly bends under the yoke and cramps itself within the narrow limits of the life-giving concrete act. ”

“ This explains why persons who are cut off from social converse by some bodily infirmity so frequently become discontented and morose, in spite of every resolution to the contrary. The feelings and faculties of the mind, which had formerly full play in their intercourse with their fellow-creatures, have no longer scope for sufficient exercise, and the almost inevitable result is irritability and weakness in the corresponding parts of the brain. ”