"Imbecility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... imbecility in which we happen to find ourselves," added Paul, "I should think that a judicious application of the world's wisdom would be better than trifling with theories ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance. But Catherine did not know her own advantages—did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... become a mere expression of contempt. But I am afraid that even this disdainful phrase does me too much honour. I am more and more convinced that I suffer, not from a shiny or showy impertinence, but from a simplicity that verges upon imbecility. I think more and more that I must be very dull, and that everybody else in the modern world must be very clever. I have just been reading this important compilation, sent to me in the name of a number of men for whom I have a high ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... Such an act of folly while the tender babe lay sick is not to be forgiven. Peradventure, it was the mate-boy of the cook who is of an imbecility past understanding, owing to his extreme youth. Not even the intellect of a cow has he. Urre bap! Did he not ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... arm of his beautiful pupil, or reclining on a lichen-carpeted knoll while she sketched the surrounding scenery. Increased feebleness prevented Mrs. Clifton from joining in these outdoor jaunts, and early in September, when it became apparent that her mind was rapidly sinking into imbecility, they returned to the city. Memory seemed to have deserted its throne; she knew neither her son nor Electra, and the last spark of intelligence manifested itself in a semi-recognition of her favourite cat, which sprang to welcome her back as friendly hands bore ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... subjects.[5] In India there are no universities or public schools, in which young men might escape, as they do in Europe, from the enervating and stultifying influence of the zanana.[6] The state of mental imbecility to which a youth of naturally average powers of mind, born to territorial dominion, is in India often reduced by a haughty and ambitious mother, would be absolutely incredible to a man bred up in such schools. They are often utterly unable to act, think, or speak for themselves. ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... would do if I were both poor and genteel—the gentility should go to the place of all good ilities, including utility, respectability, and imbecility, and I would sit, quite frankly poor, with a piece of bread, and a pot of geraniums, and a book. I conclude that if I did without the things erroneously supposed necessary to decency I might be able ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... was that he had verged on imbecility when he fancied he admired that slender, dark-haired type. A woman's hair ought to be an enormous coronal of sunlight; a woman ought to have very large, candid eyes of a colour between that of sapphires and that of the ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... the second place, I have discovered that of all cursed places under the sun, where the hungriest soul can hardly pick up a few grains of knowledge, a girls' boarding-school is the worst. They are called finishing schools, and the name tells accurately what they are. They finish everything but imbecility and weakness, and that they cultivate. They are nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the question, 'Into how little space a human soul can be crushed?' I have seen some souls so compressed that they would have ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... them to you; until then I had but to think of one thing, and that was of keeping body and soul together. My chance of seeing you was to let them have their will with me. Those brutes were sure, sooner or later, to bring you to me, that you might see the caged fox worn down to imbecility, eh? That you might add your tears to their persuasion, and ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... masturbation could be more easily traced among men than among women, excessive masturbation was more common among women. And, while among the men masturbation was most frequent in the lowest grades of mental development (idiocy and imbecility), and least frequent in the highest grades (general paralysis), in the women it was the reverse. (P. Naecke, "Die Sexuellen Perversitaeten in der Irrenanstalt," Psychiatrische en Neurologische ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... devised for recreation and pastime may be roughly divided into two classes: Puzzles that are built up on some interesting or informing little principle; and puzzles that conceal no principle whatever—such as a picture cut at random into little bits to be put together again, or the juvenile imbecility known as the "rebus," or "picture puzzle." The former species may be said to be adapted to the amusement of the sane man or woman; the latter can be confidently recommended ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... Dutch paper of former days, sent him twenty such volumes, and laid the foundation of a love of books which grew with the child's growth, and did not cease even when the vacant mind and eye could only gaze in piteous, though blissful imbecility upon the things ...
— Goody Two-Shoes - A Facsimile Reproduction Of The Edition Of 1766 • Anonymous
... in this case be: "A Celt crossed with Gascon with a slight infusion of Laplander blood." Such a condition of things ought, if I am not mistaken, according to the theories of the anthropologists, to represent the maximum of idiocy and imbecility; but the decrees of anthropology are only relative: what it treats as stupidity among the ancient races of men is often neither more nor less than an extraordinary force of ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... folded up in the bosom of prophecy—the clearer prophecy, we believe, of science and history. We are confident that the prestige of the past and the earnest of the future are for us and our cause; that our nation will not be torn to pieces and sunk to the dead level of political imbecility, but will victoriously avouch the integrity of American unity, and gradually gain the advance in the grand march of civilization, and lead the nations for hundreds ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... at Klin, brought him scarce one outward incident worthy of note; yet it was to him a time overflowing with events—of mind, and memory. To an outsider or a mondaine, the Maidonovo routine would have seemed monotonous to a verge of imbecility. Ivan, ghost-haunted, found each minute of each day pregnant with its own suggestion: saw his life as a tapestry, the design of which was woven upon a background of surpassing natural beauty—the climax and gradual decrescendo of the year. He had emerged from that long period of semi-idleness ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... by, and Harry Forsyth remained in this state of semi- imbecility, free from anxiety about his mother and sister at home, forgetful of all but his animal comforts and the superficial interest he felt in such prattle as this. His bodily health improved before his mental activity; perhaps it ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... all her servants lie above, one upon the other, so that if the thunderbolt fell, it might have its effect upon them before penetrating to her. She had ruined herself and her husband, though they were rich, through sheer imbecility; and it is incredible the amount of money she ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... the crown and the tiara, the ultramontane in religion, the despotic in policy—found their fullest expression and most fatal exercise. Her records shine with glorious deeds, the self-devotion of heroes and of martyrs; and the result of all is disorder, imbecility, ruin. ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... would be afraid, if he could help it." "There is more logic in that remark," resumed the knight, "than I expected from your clod-pate, Crabshaw. But I must explain the difference between cowardice and madness. Cowardice, though sometimes the effect of natural imbecility, is generally a prejudice of education, or bad habit contracted from misinformation, or misapprehension; and may certainly be cured by experience, and the exercise of reason. But this remedy cannot be applied in madness, which is a privation ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... that those who are able to give relief, in ceasing to feel the necessity, lose the will and the capacity of benevolent effort. Yet, were there no public provision for the poor, there would be cases of destitution, disease, disability, and mental imbecility, which would elude private charity, however diligent and generous. It must be remembered, too, that the same causes may at once enhance the demand for beneficent aid, and cripple its resources. Thus, in a conflagration, ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... carried to America, Bellenger was the agent employed. The dauphin's sister is married to her cousin, the nephew of Monsieur. She herself believes these things; and it is certain a sum of money is sent out to America every year for his maintenance. He was reduced to imbecility when removed from the Temple. It is not known whether he will ever be fit to reign if the kingdom returns to him. No communication has been held with him. He was nine years old when removed from the Temple: he would now be in his ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... see stately pictures of papa and mamma, Johnny and Bub and Sis, or a couple of country cousins, all smiling hideously, and all disposed in studied and uncomfortable attitudes in their carriage, and all looming up in their grand and awe-inspiring imbecility before the snubbed and diminished presentment of that majestic presence, whose ministering spirits are the rainbows, whose voice is the thunder, whose awful front is veiled in clouds, who was monarch here dead and forgotten ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... counsel has brought on their sovereign and their country. Such sanguine declarations tend to lull authority asleep,—to encourage it rashly to engage in perilous adventures of untried policy,—to neglect those provisions, preparations, and precautions which distinguish benevolence from imbecility, and without which no man can answer for the salutary effect of any abstract plan of government or of freedom. For want of these, they have seen the medicine of the state corrupted into its poison. They have seen ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the colour was restored and the dishevelled hair rearranged, had a very peculiar effect on him. His mother's idea of a "waux doll" instantly recurred to his mind, but the interest and intelligence in Susy's pretty face was very far indeed removed from the vacant imbecility which usually characterises that fancy article ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... was spent uncomfortably at El Hamra, a miserable collection of hovels made of unbaked brick and mud. It was reported that Saad, the great robber-chief, was in the field, and there was consequently danger that our march would be delayed. The power of this ruffian is a standing proof of the imbecility ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... the ancient Mysteries, it is so only in this qualified sense: that it presents but an imperfect image of their brilliancy, the ruins only of their grandeur, and a system that has experienced progressive alterations, the fruits of social events, political circumstances, and the ambitious imbecility of its improvers. After leaving Egypt, the Mysteries were modified by the habits of the different nations among whom they were introduced, and especially by the religious systems of the countries into which they were transplanted. To maintain the established government, laws, and religion, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... tribute to largeness in a fish that I remember anywhere to have seen was the altered expression on the face of a baby some six months old, whose features settled permanently down into the collapse of imbecility, from the moment of the arrival on the upper deck of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... unmanageable, and at puberty fall victims to self-abuse, which helps to lead to neurasthenia. Then they may drift slowly into a state of mental weakness, and often require as much care as imbeciles. If the fits are severe from an early age, arrest of mental development and imbecility follow. If the disease be very mild in character, and especially if it be petit mal, the victim may be very precocious, get "pushed" at school, and later ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... worth,—indeed, she was stained by the grossest immoralities that can degrade a woman. She died in 1796, and her son Paul succeeded her,—a prince whom his imperial mother had excluded from all active participation in the government of the empire because of his mental imbecility, or partial insanity. A conspiracy naturally was formed against him in such unsettled times,—it was at the height of Napoleon's victorious career,—resulting in his assassination, and his son Alexander ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... "through this channel, this innocent medium, this creature the fruit of my loins, the idol of my heart, is the lightning of reproof hurled. A wandering idiot is prompted by the very inspiration of her imbecility to put into the hands of my child the emblem of my wickedness, that she in her love might place it before my eyes, there to develop the sin-print in the dark camera of my mind. No wonder she is alarmed at the mention of the words, for ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... party-colored, but never learned actually to hold anything. The play of feature was animated. The dark eyes, shining and rapidly moving, never lingered long upon one and the same object. The child was much inclined to bite, and always bit very sharply. Mentally there was pronounced imbecility. In spite of his four years the boy never got so far as to produce any articulate sounds whatever. Even simple words like "papa" and "mamma" were beyond his ability. His desire for anything was expressed in inarticulate and not specially expressive tones. His sleep was short ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... are shocked too severely, we become totally and permanently impaired, and suffer violent fits and fearful rages, insanity or imbecility. ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... well have addressed their petitions to the stones and trees, and thereby have spared themselves the mortification of a refusal. They never experienced a more stinging sense of their own humbleness and imbecility than on such occasions, and never had they greater need of patience and lowliness of spirit. In most African towns and villages, they had been regarded as demi-gods, and treated in consequence with universal kindness, civility, and veneration; but here, alas! what a contrast, they were ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... done) during his period of groping for the way, with his actual stumble into it for the first time, but also such justification as there is for the hero's figure. Nobody ever judged the unlucky captain of Gardiner's better than his creator, who at the time frankly called him 'a sneaking piece of imbecility,' and avowed, with as much probability as right, that 'if he had married Flora, she would have set him up on the chimney-piece, as Count Borowlaski's[25] wife used to do.' But his weaknesses have at least an excuse from his education and antecedents, which does not appear ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... Frenchmen who accompanied him the misery of the Irish people and the imbecility of the Irish government produced an effect which they found it difficult to describe. Lauzun wrote to Louvois that the Court and the whole kingdom were in a state not to be imagined by a person who had always lived in well governed countries. It was, he said, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Cauldstaneslap—say fifty acres—ipsissimus. Clement was Mr. Elliott, as upon his door-plate, the earlier Dafty having been discarded as no longer applicable, and indeed only a reminder of misjudgment and the imbecility of the public; and the youngest, in honour of his perpetual wanderings, was known by the sobriquet of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... disaster, which may fairly be ascribed in part to his want of health and to the jealousy entertained of him at home. Crassus, on the other hand, committed so many errors as not to leave fortune room to show him favor. It is no surprise to find such imbecility fall a victim to the power of Parthia; the only wonder is to see it prevailing over the wonted good-fortune of Rome. One scrupulously observed, the other entirely slighted the arts of divination; and as both equally ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... now, ashamed of the slavery of the past, and too ignorant and helpless to govern them now slavery is gone, we are half-minded to throw them away again, or to allow them to annex themselves, in sheer weariness at our imbecility, to the Americans, who, far too wise to throw them away in their turn, will accept them gladly as an instalment of that great development of their empire, when 'The stars and stripes shall ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... Beatrice, in all her glory and sweetness, is but a specimen of the jargon and slang of Ghibelline freemasonry. When Italians write thus, they degrade the greatest name of their country to a depth of laborious imbecility, to which the trifling of schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to solve the enigma of Dante's works by imagining for him a character in which it is hard to say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank, or infidel. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... us about your old lady, and what it was you said to her," spoke impatiently the Girton Girl, who is always eager when the subject under discussion happens to be the imbecility or criminal tendency of the ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... Catholicism. Modern scepticism, distinguishing it from scholarly scepticism, is nothing but stupidity or weakness. Few people like to confess outright that they do not believe in a God, although the belief in a personal devil is considered to be a sign of imbecility. Nevertheless, men, as a rule, have no ground for believing in God a whit more respectable than for disbelief in a devil. The devil is not seen nor is God seen. The work of the devil is as obvious as that of God. Nay, as the devil is a limited personality, belief in him is not encumbered with ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... them promptly into the car and soon had them in line for the motor, bearing the hand baggage and wraps, the porter following with Jane's own bag. "Thank you, porter," said Jane, giving him a smile that reduced that functionary to the verge of grinning imbecility, and a tip which he received with an air of absent-minded indifference. "Good-bye, porter; you have made us very comfortable," said Jane, shaking hands ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... Archbishop had too timidly betrayed the trust reposed in him from weakness and want of spirit, there were two other men who had no such plea of imbecility, and who, being independent, and above being awed, basely sacrificed their honour and their integrity for positive sordid gain. George the First had deposited duplicates of his will with two sovereign German princes: I will not specify them, because ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... been approved without a division was rejected without a division; and the subject was not again mentioned. Thus a grievance so scandalous that none of those who profited by it dared to defend it was perpetuated merely by the imbecility and intemperance of those who attacked ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... grimaced bitterly at any claim to excellence being set up for the mysterious voice in the woods. Tapping one forefinger on the uplifted point of the other, he observed that to sing abroad in the night air of an English Spring month was conclusive of imbecility; and that no imbecile sang at all. Because, to sing, involved the highest accomplishment of which the human spirit could boast. Did the ladies see? he asked. They thought they saw that he carried on a deception admirably. In return, they inquired whether he would come with them ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... reasons popular education will be more widely diffused, talents of every kind will be able to develop and manifest themselves freely; but this will not cause the disappearance of idiocy and imbecility due to hereditary pathological conditions. Nevertheless it will be possible for different causes to have a preventive and mitigating influence on the various forms of congenital degeneration (ordinary diseases, criminality, insanity and nervous disorders). Among these preventive ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... being unmoved by a discussion as to whether Mr. Stephen Phillips is or is not a true poet, that they are perfectly within their rights. It is not a crime not to love literature. It is not a sign of imbecility. The mandarins of literature will order out to instant execution the unfortunate individual who does not comprehend, say, the influence of Wordsworth on Tennyson. But that is only their impudence. Where would they be, I wonder, if requested ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... easily beset him. The eye that spared not woman in its lust, Glaring with maniac terror, sinks in death. The homicidal hand, whose fiendish skill Made man its victim, crushed and bleeding lies. The crafty tongue, a ready instrument Of that most subtle wickedness, his brain, Babbles in fatuous imbecility." ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... mind that was being buffeted by winds from every quarter of the compass of sensation. And through it all, she struggled to drive words together into sentences, words, that like a flock of witless sheep upon open ground, would not be driven, but ran this way and jumped that in a frolicsome imbecility of purpose. ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... conscious only of the fact that he was going to be near her, to talk to her uninterruptedly—for hours, maybe. After that he would go back content, ask Beth to marry him, and recover from this fever, this unreasoning, uncontrollable longing to see Kate again, which made him weak to imbecility. ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... is too much in the style of the male story-monger—you all know him—who repeats with undiminished gusto for the forty-ninth time a story that was tottering in senile imbecility when Methuselah was teething, and is now in ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... The recollection gave him fresh cause of regret. He remembered they had parted on his refusing to suffer Lady Clementina to admit the acquaintance of Henry's wife. Both Henry and his wife he now contemplated beyond the reach of his pride; and he felt the meanness of his former and the imbecility of ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts—when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break—at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent—I am ever ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... in, but it only changes the contempt into pity. And when years have passed away, and the mother is perhaps in her grave, her sons think of her with a mingled feeling excited by the conjoined remembrance of her helpless imbecility and of her true maternal love, and say to each other, with a smile, "Poor dear mother! what a time she had of it trying ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... above a week past, a priest or a monk preached a daily sermon. This began a short while after the young man had taken his place, and it was with painful feelings that he recognized, in the hollow-eyed and ragged monk who mounted the pulpit, a priest whom he had seen more than once drunk to imbecility, in Nesptah's tavern, And the revolting creature, who thus flaunted his dirty, dishevelled person even in the pulpit, thundered down on the trembling congregation declarations that the delay in the rising of the Nile was the consequence of their sins, and God's punishment for their evil deeds. Instead ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... am glad you appraise me so highly. I am glad I have escaped all the 'sweetness, and freshness,' and general imbecility the orthodox village maiden is supposed to possess. Though why a girl must necessarily be devoid of wit simply because she has spent her time in good, healthy air, is a thing that puzzles me. Have you delayed me only to ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... had laid before him? It was monstrous! it was treason to womanhood! One look in her eyes, superb in their innocence, was too much for his determined impartiality. Armitage gave himself a mental kick for what he termed his imbecility, and went back to ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... of substance and property. These assertions are facts to which names and amounts can be given; and that question, Cui bono? answers itself. The inference to be drawn is too grave to be set aside; and to plead "charitable judgment" is to plead imbecility. ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... the Jacobite times, of the rebellion of '45. The hero, Edward Waverley, who is no such great hero either, his author calling him indeed "a sneaking piece of imbecility," gives his name to the book. He meets Bonnie Prince Charlie, is present at the famous ball at Holyrood, fights at the battle of Prestonpans, and marches with the rebel ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... another French cruiser, the "Zephyr," which hailed his brig and inquired how the great man was. "Marvellously well," came the reply, suggested by Napoleon himself to his captain. The royalist cruiser passed on contented. And thus, thanks to the imbecility of the old Governments and of their servants, Napoleon was able to land his little force safely in the Golfe de Jouan on the afternoon of March 1st.[464] Is it surprising that foreigners, who had not yet fathomed the eccentricities ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... misfortunes; when his gout troubled him less and he was in a somewhat more humane frame of mind, he would perhaps give the rector some money, after having bullied him in the most painful manner, and berated the whole parish for its shiftlessness and imbecility. But, whatsoever his mood, he never failed to make as many sarcastic and embarrassing speeches as possible, and to cause the Reverend Mr. Mordaunt to wish it were proper and Christian-like to throw ...
— Little Lord Fauntleroy • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... commonwealth be as equal as you can imagine, two or three men when all is done will govern it; and there is that in it which, notwithstanding the pretended sufficiency of a popular State, amounts to a plain confession of the imbecility of that policy, and of the prerogative of monarchy; forasmuch as popular governments in difficult cases have had recourse to dictatorian power, as ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... bathtub doesn't walk about where mud is flinging. I'm an honest man, please God. You're an honest man, and that's why a lot of us are running you with might and main and money. But there's an honesty that verges on imbecility, and that's the kind that talks itself hoarse when it ought to keep silent. Save your talking until you get to the Senate, and then let fly as much morality as you please; it won't hurt anybody there, ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... there is no absolute rule on the subject. And it will be clearly shown in the course of this investigation that as far as the principle contended for has prevailed, it has been the cause of incurable disorder and imbecility in the government. The definition of a CONFEDERATE REPUBLIC seems simply to be "an assemblage of societies,'' or an association of two or more states into one state. The extent, modifications, ...
— The Federalist Papers
... whole the school had sunk very far below what it had been in the days of Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Blake, and its ordinary average had come to be something for which commonplace is a laudatory term, and imbecility a not ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... clearly that at any moment he might kick over the traces, and that the starvation and misery of the Paris episode would have to be faced again. We can readily picture him coming in raging after a conflict at the theatre with official imbecility, and Minna, instead of sympathizing, counselling him to be wise and temporize. His exasperation grew, and only the events of 1849 prevented a rupture—so much seems certain—and he vented his spleen by making ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... carriage in a fog, steal a necklace, and carry it around with him for months? Never in this world. And private secretary to the very person he had robbed? Of all the fool situations, this was the cap! Imbecility was written all over the face of it. It was simply a coincidence in the matter of names. Yet, steward on the Celtic; there was no getting away from that. There could not have been two Thomas Webbs on board. I'm afraid Killigrew swore; distant ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... his epigram the sudden death of a man on rising from prayer. This was in such lamentably bad taste that he did not win the prize, but otherwise it would have certainly been his. His four lines could not have been surpassed for clumsy and laboured imbecility. The ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... moment; for the reader will be sure to ask, when we come to the story, "Was this other creature present?" He was not; or more correctly, perhaps, it was not. We dropped the creature—or the creature, by natural imbecility, dropped itself—within the first ten miles from Manchester. In the latter case, I wish to make a philosophic remark of a moral tendency. When I die, or when the reader dies, and by repute suppose of fever, it will never be known whether we died in reality of the fever or of the doctor. But this ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Think of the result of this everywhere! Some suffocated, some blinded, and millions probably mad and sightless, stumbling over the bodies of the dead to cut each other's throats in the frenzy of sudden imbecility." ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... together in his face. It was an eloquent, sharp, ugly, earthly countenance. His hands were small and prehensile, with fingers knotted like a cord; and they were continually flickering in front of him in violent and expressive pantomime. As for Tabary, a broad, complacent, admiring imbecility breathed from his squash nose and slobbering lips: he had become a thief, just as he might have become the most decent of burgesses, by the imperious chance that rules the lives of human ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... the painter, though powerful, was light. They all knew that the loud ravings of the painter never presaged violence. They had grown to like him, to accept him as almost one of themselves; though of course they looked down upon him with amused pity for his imbecility regarding ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... and here was the man himself who had actually been there, and here was a sworn affidavit from every member of his crew to say that they had been there too. This kind of logic is irresistible if you only grant the first little step; and Columbus had the art of making it seem an act of imbecility in any of his hearers to doubt the strength of the little link by which his great golden chains of argument were fastened to ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... faded before the exhausted eye, they must have had iron frames. Shakespeare never grasped the airy dagger with a nerveless hand, nor did Milton tremble when he led Satan far from the confines of his dreary prison. These were not the ravings of imbecility, the sickly effusions of distempered brains; but the exuberance of fancy, that "in a fine phrenzy" wandering, was not continually reminded of its ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... these lists of names of the United States again and again, only that I might have the thought that one of them—though I knew not which—might be this lady's, and that in so infinitesimal a degree I had been near her again. Will it be estimated extreme imbecility in me when I ventured the additional confession that I felt a great warmth and tenderness toward the possessors of all these names, as being, if not herself, at least ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... God, they adjoining, though not as Israel did by way of generality, a cheerful promise, 'All that the Lord hath commanded we will do,' yet that which God doth no less approve, that which savoureth more of meekness, that which testifieth rather a feeling knowledge of our common imbecility, unto the several branches thereof several lowly and humble requests for grace at the merciful hands of God to perform the thing which is commanded; or when they wish reciprocally each other's ghostly happiness, ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... guard against the dangerous opinion that he knows enough: an opinion that will weaken the energy and reduce the powers of the mind, which, though once perhaps vigorous and effectual, will be sunk to a state of literary imbecility, by cherishing vain and presumptuous ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... relieved from the imbecility of the little boy's father and the questionableness ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... heart sinks at this prospect! Does not thine, Jane? Dost thou not fear to take such a wretched chance with me? I that know myself, my own imbecility,—I ought surely to rescue thee from such a fate, by ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... at her different changes, without troubling your mind with the question, "Why are these things so?" What would be the condition of the world if all our minds lay dormant? If men did not think, reason, and act, our undisturbed, slumbering intellects would not excel the imbecility of the brute; we should live in chaos, hardly aware of our existence. And yet, with all our activity of mind, we daily pass by unobserved that which would be wonderful if philosophized and reasoned upon; and with the same inconsistency wonder at that which ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... doubt, the unenviable advantage over you of having wasted three mortal months in reading all the literary criticism extant of the first quarter of this century. It would be difficult to express my sense of its imbecility, its blundering, and its bad passions. But the good books it assailed are not lost, and the bad ones it glorified do not survive. It is not that the public has been the better judge, but that good work has the seeds of life, while bad work carries with it the seeds of dissolution. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... surroundings, its own 'as it were titanic' charm. We now employ our wealth, our technical knowledge, our rich variety of materials for the purpose of building millions of imitation hovels in totally unsuitable surroundings. Could imbecility ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... hand, is a disease which destroys or clouds an intellect which has once been developed. It is true that certain conditions of idiocy and imbecility do resemble that phase of insanity known as dementia—a reversion to the original mental state of childhood—in reality a form of second childhood. But the states are not identical, although one ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... simply stopped going. When I want to see a four-act play, I will go to the legitimate theatre, and see something that I can smell, too. The influence of the vaudeville has, on the whole, been so elevating and refining that its audiences cannot stand either the impurity or the imbecility of the fashionable drama. But now the vaudeville itself is beginning to decline in quality as well ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... disgust. But the habitual ascendency of the favorite over his master prevented the latter from disclosing this feeling until it was heightened by an occurrence which sets in a strong light the imbecility of the one and the presumption of the other. John, on the death of his wife, Maria of Aragon, had formed the design of connecting himself with a daughter of the king of France. But the constable, in the mean time, without even the privity ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... threshold, between Mrs. Pipchin the Ogress in bombazeen and the weak-eyed young man-servant who opens the door! The latter of whom, having "the first faint streaks or early dawn of a grin on his countenance—(it was mere imbecility)" as the Author himself explains parenthetically—Mrs. Pipchin at once takes it into her head, is inspired by impudence, and snaps at accordingly. Of this we saw nothing, however, in the Reading. We heard nothing of Mrs. Pipchin's explosive, "How dare you ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... her face to him at the beginning of the service, he thought it wore a look of fierce triumph, of victory, of disdain. But as the ceremony proceeded and he observed her absent-ness, her vacancy, her pathetic imbecility, he began to be oppressed by an awful sense of her consciousness of error. Was she taking this step out of pique? Was she thinking to punish him, forgetting the price she would have to pay? Would she awake ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... disgraced, and restrained to your heart's content. Do not imagine I have any intention of putting servility and canting hypocrisy permanently out of place, or of filling up with courage and sense those offices which naturally devolve upon decorous imbecility and flexible cunning: give us only a little time to keep off the hussars of France, and then the jobbers and jesters shall return to their birthright, and public virtue be called by its own name of fanaticism." Such is the advice I would have offered to my infatuated ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... negotiations on the continent, and the weakness of Austria and Prussia, mixed up with no inconsiderable amount of indecision and duplicity, are freely commented upon in letters from Mr. Grenville and Lord Malmesbury. Want of power, and want of will—fear, hesitation, and imbecility—were so conspicuous in the conduct of these Courts, as to destroy all confidence in their professions. The character drawn by Lord Malmesbury of the King of Prussia—which the reader will find confirmed in the subsequent communications ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... that a brick wall would make no difference to a spirit, but I felt that I was lapsing into a state of imbecility, and stood silent, shivering a little. For it had ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... to her defunct doggie shows to what a degree of imbecility an old maid may carry fondness for her pets, ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... to Torres Vedras, where they heard that a general movement was expected to begin. The regiment had now a comfortable mess, and the situation was freely discussed as scraps of news arrived from Lisbon. Could the English ministry have heard the comments on their imbecility passed by the officers of the British army, even they might have doubted the perfect wisdom of their plan. On the 6th of October, Moore had received a despatch stating that 30,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... no more, to give her no hopes that might prove groundless. The future was uncertain: the patient might have convulsions, paralysis, locomotor ataxia, mere imbecility with normal physical functions, or intermittent insanity. It was highly unprofessional to speculate in this loose fashion about ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... with his usual avarice-blinded imbecility, had, immediately on concluding a treaty with the Neapolitan viceroy, discharged all his troops except a bodyguard of about six hundred men. Florence was nearly in as defenceless a position. She had, says Varchi, "two ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... of a disposition to drop from the Confederacy, if this valuable acquisition could not otherwise be made. This temper could not fail to be viewed with interest by the neighboring powers, who had been encouraged by it and by the imbecility of the government, to enter into intrigues ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... Barlow. My Sandford half would like to exhibit an intelligent curiosity, but is generally suppressed by Merton, who has a morbid horror of useful information. Not that BOSCH is remarkably erudite, but nevertheless he contrives to reduce me to a state of imbecility, which I catch myself noting with a pained surprise. There is a statue in the Plein, and the Sandford element in me finds a satisfaction in recognising it aloud as WILLIAM the Silent. It is—but, as my Merton part thinks, a fellow would be a fool ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 18, 1892 • Various
... head, without regard for taste or sense, and the result, half raffish and half brilliant, somehow justified her. The notable and notorious men there, the bar-loungers whose life gave them a look of almost pathetic imbecility, the women of fashion and the too fashionable ladies of the chorus had, at least temporarily, accepted some common denominator. They rubbed shoulders in the stuffy, dingy, green-room with an ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... Falkland became more palpable and uniform, Miss Melville increased in her precaution. She would stop herself in the half-pronounced sentences that were meant to his praise. This circumstance had necessarily an ungracious effect; it was a cutting satire upon the imbecility of her kinsman. Upon these occasions she would sometimes venture upon a good-humoured expostulation:—"Dear sir! well, I wonder how you can be so ill-natured! I am sure Mr. Falkland would do you any good office in the world:"—till she was checked by ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... and again that he was irreclaimably a fool and a prodigy of irresponsibleness. She tolerated him, now with sweetness, now bitterly; accepting always his caprices, and not permitting herself to have wishes of her own. She was ready to pay the price of pride and of a moment's imbecility with a lifetime of self-repression. It was high, but it was the price. She had acquired nothing but an exceptionally good knowledge of the French language (she soon learnt to scorn Gerald's glib maltreatment of the tongue), and she had conserved nothing but her dignity. She knew that Gerald ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... are to man in every condition matter of dislike. Ignorance and imbecility are objects of contempt: penetration and conduct give eminence and procure esteem. Whither should his feelings and apprehensions on these subjects lead him? To a progress, no doubt, in which the savage, ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... every case feeble and conventional; in some they verge on the ridiculous. What, for instance, can be weaker than the figure above given from the great work of Perrot and Chipiez, with its good-humoured face, its tongue hanging out of its mouth, its tottering forelegs, and its general air of imbecility? The lioness' head represented in the same work is better, but still leaves much to be desired, falling, as it does, very far behind the best Assyrian models. Nor were the sculptors much more successful in their mode of expressing animals with ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... education," they say, "cultivates the imagination a great deal too much, and other habits of mind a great deal too little, and trains up many young men in a style of elegant imbecility, utterly unworthy of the talents with which nature has endowed them.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} The matter of fact is, that a classical scholar of twenty-three or twenty-four is a man principally conversant with works of imagination. ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... from Gil Blas, Don Quixote, and the Vicar of Wakefield, or mountain sceneries with young idiots of Londoners wearing Highland bonnets and brandishing rifles in the foregrounds. Do but think of these things in the breadth of their inexpressible imbecility, and then go and stand before that broken bas-relief in the southern gate of Lincoln Cathedral, and see if there is no fiber of the heart in you ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... remembered—when we recollect the exhaustion of Austria, the menacing insurrection of Hungary, the feuds and jealousies of the German princes, the strength and activity of the Jacobite party in England, and the imbecility of nearly all the Dutch statesmen of the time, and the weakness of Holland if deprived of her allies—we may adopt his words in speculating on what would have ensued if France had been victorious in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... is, that the Basques cared nothing for Carlos or Rome, and merely took up arms to defend certain rights and privileges of their own. For the dwarfish brother of Ferdinand they always exhibited supreme contempt, which his character, a compound of imbecility, cowardice, and cruelty, well merited. If they made use of his name, it was merely as a cri de guerre. Much the same may be said with respect to his Spanish partisans, at least those who appeared in the ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... If, indeed, they had so fully appreciated each other's character before the burst of passion in which they hastily pledged their faith to each other, Lucy might have feared Ravenswood too much ever to have loved him, and he might have construed her softness and docile temper as imbecility, rendering her unworthy of his regard. But they stood pledged to each other; and Lucy only feared that her lover's pride might one day teach him to regret his attachment; Ravenswood, that a mind so ductile as Lucy's might, ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... kind in the wrong. You will no doubt find excellent grounds for doubting his ability to reconstruct; for suspecting what you will feel to be his pretentious breadth of view, his assumed omniscience. But if, on the other hand, thinking life in your sombre moments a nightmare of imbecility and in your more expansive moments a high adventure of immeasurable possibilities, you are straitened between cold despairs and immense hopes, you will readily forgive this irreverent, self-confident ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... is as impudent as the other passages below are imbecile—of course in each case (as before) with a calculated impudence and imbecility. The miserable creature had himself obliged her to "come out of the water" by declining to join her there on the plea that he was never good for an assignation when ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... extraction, and unconversant with your somewhat cryptic patois, the lady in question is the less likely to have been sickened by your extravagances in the way of misapprehension. I candidly confess such imbecility annoys me. What!" he cried out, "what if I marry! is matrimony to be ranked with arson? And what if my cousin, Eiran, affords me a hiding-place wherein to sneak through our honeymoon after the cowardly fashion of all modern married couples! Am I in consequence ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... future, and craving at the same moment after the seemingly obsolete past; longing for fresh truth, and yet dreading to lose the old; with hope struggling against fear, courage against modesty, scorn of imbecility against reverence for authority in the same man's heart, while the mystery of the new world around him strives with the mystery of the old world which lies behind him; while the belief that man is the same being now as he was five thousand years ago strives with the plain fact that he is assuming ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley |
