If you have great talents, industry will improve them; if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency. - Sir Joshua Reynolds
But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences. - John Stuart Mill
Silence can be breathing space and spawn release and wellness in a time of appalling inflation of words. But silence may be intolerably screaming, if it means absence of communication, deficiency in friendship and emotional deficit. (« A gap of silence) - Erik Pevernagie
Those who are critical don’t like being criticized, and those who are insensitive have a deficiency in their senses. - Suzy Kassem
The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. - Walter Bagehot
My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre, and that I am therefor excused from saving Universes. - Douglas Adams
Indeed taking all the evidence together, it is not too much to say that there is no single historic incident better or more variously supported than the Resurrection of Christ. Nothing but the antecedent assumption that it must be false could have suggested the idea of deficiency in the proof of it. - Brooke Foss Westcott
Even the most impassioned devotee of the ghost story would admit that the taste for it is slightly abnormal, a survival, perhaps, from adolescence, a disease of deficiency suffered by those whose lives and imaginations do not react satisfactorily to normal experience and require an extra thrill - L.P. Hartley
Where any one body of educated men, of whatever denomination, are condemned indiscriminately, there must be a deficiency of information, or...of something else. - Jane Austen
One needs to be either more brave or more good, because if courage is lacking goodness can substitute, while cowardice is the deficiency of both. - Neel Burton