Skip to content

I am struck by how sharing our weakness and difficulties is more nourishing to others than sharing our qualities and successes.

— Jean Vanier

Another quote →

Topics

Success

More quotes by Jean Vanier

Many people are good at talking about what they are doing, but in fact do little. Others do a lot but don't talk about it; they are the ones who make a community live.

The strong need the weak in order to become more human, more compassionate.

There is that little compass within each one of us where we know what is right, what is just, what is good, what is true.

Love doesn't mean doing extraordinary or heroic things. It means knowing how to do ordinary things with tenderness.

“To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefor unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain.”

All Jean Vanier quotes →

You may also like

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962)

To rank the effort above the prize may be called love.

Confucius

Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power.

Martin Buber Between Man and Man (1965)

The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Jean Vanier (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.