...in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.

If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?

...For that matter, men are perhaps indifferent to power.... What fascinates them in this idea, you see, is not real power, it's the illusion of being able to do exactly as they please. The king's power is the power to govern, isn't it? But man has no urge to govern — he has an urge to compel, as you said. To be more than a man, in a world of men. To escape man's fate, I was saying. Not powerful — all-powerful. The visionary disease, of which the will to power is only the intellectual justification, is the will to god-head — every man dreams of being god.

He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire.

He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad. A gentle melancholy took possession of him. He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this being the burden of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed him.

Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.

The obstacle: for the improvement of the capacity for experience and use generally involves a decrease in man’s power to relate — that power which alone can enable man to live in the spirit.

He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love.

He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light. The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle.

To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.

...it is natural for man to try to attain power without recovering grace...(3)

Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying.

... The power which the common people ascribe to God is not only a human power (which shows that they look upon God as a man, or as being like a man), but that it also involves weakness.

A man who is defeated by power dies without really knowing how to handle it. Power is only a burden upon his fate. Such a man has no command over himself, and cannot tell when or how to use his power.