"Inability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... found by a boy and brought down, extended to his guests a hospitality which was none the less urbane for the evidences of surprise with which it was seasoned. He concealed so indifferently his inability to account for Tavender, that the anxious Thorpe grew annoyed with him, but happily Tavender's perceptions were less subtle. He gazed about him in his dim-eyed way with childlike interest, and babbled cheerfully over his liquor. He had not been inside a London club ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... it was evident that their first conclusions regarding it were erroneous, and thereafter it was viewed by them with less disdain and spoken of more hopefully. One of the great objections by engineers to the use of the screw was their inability, at the time of its introduction, to construct properly a screw engine,—that is to say, a direct-acting horizontal engine, working at a speed of from sixty to one hundred revolutions per minute,—all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... It was this inability, or real indisposition, of the government to enforce the terms of the treaty of 1868, that led to the bitter war with Sitting Bull, and which terminated so disastrously on the ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... prostrated nerves and it shows itself first of all by worry. Worry means the inability to relax the attention from a definite fear or fancied hard luck. Worry leads to many physical ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... same task is assigned them. One of them being adapted to that line of work, and skilled, performs his task with ease; while the other, equally industrious, cannot get through with his. He is reported for shirking. He states his inability to do the amount of work assigned him. The contractor or his foreman makes a different report. The assertions of the convict amount to but little, as against the statements of the rich and influential contractor. ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... may, by law, provide for the case of removal, death, resignation, or inability of both the President and Vice President, declaring what officer shall then ...
— Elements of Civil Government • Alexander L. Peterman
... speech in respect to Henry, denouncing the crimes, and the acts of treachery and of oppression which his government had committed. He dilated long on the feebleness and incapacity of the king, and his total inability to exercise any control in the management of public affairs. After he had finished, he called out to the people in a loud voice to declare whether they would submit any longer to have such a ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... Further, Dionysius says (Div. Nom. iv) that evil is "weak and incapable." But weakness or inability either takes away or diminishes guilt. Therefore a human action does not incur guilt from ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... her work for its support was the only recognition of her individuality, or her common share in the institution. She was cudgelled with Paul in the Church and with her inability to fight ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... life,— his eyes sunken and dead, his cheeks fallen in against his teeth, his hands looking like claws; a dreadful cough, which seemed to rack his whole shattered system, a hollow, whispering voice, and an entire inability to move himself. There he lay, upon a mat, on the ground, which was the only floor of the oven, with no medicine, no comforts, and no one to care for or help him but a few Kanakas, who were willing enough, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... continued for an astonishing, an absurd, length of time. Woolfolk became infuriated at his inability to bring it to an end, and he expended an even greater effort. Nicholas' arms were about his chest; he was endeavoring by sheer pressure to crush Woolfolk's opposition, when the latter injected a mounting wrath into the conflict. They spun in the open like a grotesque ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... have received during my stay. Will you do the best to repair this omission on my part, and offer my warmest expressions of gratitude to Captain Sedgewick and Miss Nowell for their goodness to me? Pray apologise for me also to Mr. and Mrs. Lister for my inability to make my adieux in a more formal manner than this, a shortcoming which I hope to atone for on some future visit. Tell Lister I shall be very pleased to see him if he will look me up at the Pnyx when he is next ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... temporary inability to sleep, referable to a distressing impression, caused me to walk about the streets all night, for a series of several nights. The disorder might have taken a long time to conquer, if it had been faintly experimented on in bed; but, it was soon defeated by the brisk treatment ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... as far as it has not been produced by exterminating the natives, has been due to our indifference to the salvation of our subjects. Ireland is the exception which proves the rule; for Ireland, the standing instance of the inability of the English to colonize without extermination of natives, is also the one country under British rule in which the conquerors and colonizers proceeded on the assumption that their business was to establish Protestantism as well as to make money ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... is in his own room, Miss Dombey,' said Mrs Pipchin, 'and the best thing you can do, is to take off your things and go to bed this minute.' This was the sagacious woman's remedy for all complaints, particularly lowness of spirits, and inability to sleep; for which offences, many young victims in the days of the Brighton Castle had been committed to bed at ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... resignation on the 20th of December 1886. Various motives influenced him in taking this surprising step; but the only ostensible cause was that put forward in his letter to Lord Salisbury, which was read in the House of Commons on 27th January. In this document he stated that his resignation was due to his inability, as chancellor of the exchequer, to concur in the demands made on the treasury by the ministers at the head of the naval and military establishments. It was commonly supposed that he expected his resignation to be followed by the unconditional ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... a complete surprise — and a surprise attack in this great war had been called well nigh impossible. Even the German air service was fooled. As a result of its inability to anticipate General Byng's movements, the German fighting machine naturally ...
— The Boy Allies with Haig in Flanders • Clair W. Hayes
... devoting a part of it to some Northern colleges, but his attention being turned to the needed and successful work done among the colored people of the South, his purpose was soon formed to aid them. He said he knew them, and the disadvantages arising out of their ignorance, their inability to keep accounts, to secure their rights in making settlements, and consequently the hindrances they encountered in their industries and in the acquisition of lands and homes. As it was known that he had money ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... communications. Besides a number of letters that have here and there been published, I include, further, a translation of Chopin's letters to Fontana, which in Karasowski's book (i.e., the Polish edition) lose much of their value, owing to his inability to assign ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... his comic illustrations ought not to have prevented this. But it was really more his inability to resist making himself into a figure of fun. He was funny and the jokes were funny but they did prevent his really being given by all the position given him by so many, of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... drawing-rooms do so from inability to bear the restraints prescribed by a genuine refinement, and they would be greatly improved by being kept under these restraints. But it is not less true that, by adding to the legitimate restraints, which are based on convenience and a regard for others, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Isaiah, 32, 11. O.N. duglauss, Norse duglaus, good for nothing, said of a person who has lost all courage or strength, as opposed to duglegr, capable. Norse dugloysa, weakness, inability. Cp. Dan. due, to be ...
— Scandinavian influence on Southern Lowland Scotch • George Tobias Flom
... intoxication are wholly due to a defective sanitary condition; but no person can have the experience I have had without coming to the conclusion that unhealthy and unhappy homes,—loss of vital and consequently of industrial energy, and a consciousness of inability to control external circumstances,—induce thousands to escape from miserable depression in the temporary excitement of noxious drugs and intoxicating liquors. They are like the seamen who struggle for awhile against the evils by which they are ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... amusements than of the troubles of his country; but a wild and senseless gaiety will sometimes spring from despair as well as from lightness of heart; and after all, the dread responsibility, the sense that in all his helplessness and inability to do anything he was still the man who ought to do all, would seem to have moved him from time to time. A secret doubt in his heart, divulged to no man, had added bitterness to the conviction of his own weakness. ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... come out of the hole and reproach him for being a coward and a rebel, seizing him at last and shaking him severely, and all the while, though he struggled hard, he could not free himself from his grasp. So tight was his hold that he felt helpless and half strangled, the painful sensation of inability to move increasing till he seemed to make one terrible effort, seized the hands which held him, looked fiercely in his assailant's eyes, and ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... water, people never dine. At any rate, abundantly as Nature has provided us with most of the material requisites, the highest possible dinner has never yet been eaten in America. It is the consummate flower of civilization and refinement; and our inability to produce it, or to appreciate its admirable beauty, if a happy inspiration should bring it into bloom, marks fatally the limit of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... all but irrepressible desire to cry out, to cover her face like a child. A flash of anger at her inability to maintain her self-control ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... by the curious titles which novelists selected for their books, and very much annoyed by my inability to discover where they picked them up. I persevered, however, and discovered that they found them in the daily papers. In fact, I shrewdly suspect that I have discovered, in these veracious sheets, the very incidents which suggested the names of a number of volumes. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 23, September 3, 1870 • Various
... and restricted as he was in bodily freedom, the absolute grace was marvellous, but the uncanny words and the girl's apparent seriousness gave a touch of unreality to the scene. Presently, from sheer inability to further control himself, the looker-on gave a laugh that rent the stillness of the afternoon like a ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... passes from the character of a mere advocate to that of a partisan, and by the time that he has brought his work down to the execution of Thomas Cromwell, Henry has risen to the rank of a saint, with a more than royal inability to do any wrong. That "the king can do no wrong" is an English constitutional maxim, which, however sound it may be in its proper place, is not to be introduced into history, unless we are desirous of seeing that become a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... that there were really righteous people on earth when Christ came into the world, and that it was to such that Christ referred, when He said, He "came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." This was made into an assertion that the coming of Christ was unnecessary. Inability to accept unauthorized definitions and unscriptural theories of Scriptural doctrines, was construed into a denial of those doctrines. My endeavor to strip religious subjects of needless mystery, was represented ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... a relative thing,—as being good in the making,—the unripe and bitter bud of that which shall be hereafter a beautiful flower,—although not expressed with perfect clearness, yet indicate his belief that our view of evil things rises in great measure from our inability to perceive the great whole of which they are ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... than twenty feet from shore it stopped and a guttural voice spoke. Dr. Bird started. He had expected the language to be Russian, but it came as a shock to him, nevertheless. He strained his ears and cursed his inability to make out the words. Dr. Bird had been assiduously studying Russian under the tutelage of his new secretary for some months, but he had not yet progressed to the stage where he could readily understand it. The gift of languages ...
— Poisoned Air • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... together words, phrases, or sentences, that would otherwise appear as loose shreds, or unconnected aphorisms; and thus, by various forms of dependence, to give to discourse such continuity as may fit it to convey a connected train of thought or reasoning. The skill or inability of a writer may as strikingly appear in his management of these little connectives, as in that of the longest and most significant words in ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... have heard in her waking state, and that the definitive philosophy of her trances is yet to be found. The limitations of her trance information, its discontinuity and fitfulness, and its apparent inability to develop beyond a certain point, although they end by arousing one's moral and human impatience with the phenomenon, yet are, from a scientific point of view, amongst its most interesting peculiarities, since where there are limits there are conditions, and ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... "deaf" in the present study is meant that element of the population in which the sense of hearing is either wholly absent or is so slight as to be of no practical value; or in which there is inability to hear and understand spoken language; or in which there exists no real sound perception. In other words, those persons are meant who may be regarded as either totally deaf or practically totally deaf.[1] ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... for I resented his behaviour towards me. Fearful of discovery, I had never paid any attention to music since my marriage; I had always pretended that I could not sing. Even my wife was not aware of my talent; and although latterly I had no fear of the kind, yet as I had always stated my inability, I did not choose to bring forth a talent, the reason for concealing which I could not explain even to my wife and mother, without acknowledging the deception of which ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... I know it was not love for you, nor her inability to marry for lack of money. Were you aware that Miss ...
— A Successful Shadow - A Detective's Successful Quest • Harlan Page Halsey
... Colonel James Swan, as in that of Doctor Benjamin Church, money was the root of all evil. Swan was almost a fool because of his pig-headedness in financial adversity, and Church was ever a knave, plausible even when proved guilty. Yet both fell from the same cause, utter inability to keep money and ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... the few brief hours I stay at Aivan-i-Kaif. It is not improbable that these people are merely carrying their ideas of politeness to the insane length of holding out the promise of what they think or ascertain one wants, knowing at the same time their inability ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... Besides, morally to sustain, to forbear with, a fellow-creature in misfortune, seemed to him as difficult and thankless a task as any required of one. Infinite tact was essential, and a skin thick enough to stand snubs and rebuffs. But here he smiled. "Or my little wife's inability ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... to check the Colonnesi in the neighborhood of Rome. How utterly Piero de' Medici by his folly and defection ruined what remained of the plan will be seen in the sequel. This sluggishness in action and dismemberment of forces—this total inability to strike a sudden blow—sealed beforehand the success of Charles. Alfonso, a tyrant afraid of his own subjects, Alexander, a Pope who had bought the tiara to the disgust of Christendom, Piero, conscious that his policy was disapproved by the Florentines, together with ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... virtuous Antonia, who waiving every other consideration, would have personally appeared for the vindication of her husband's honour, had not we dissuaded her from such a rash undertaking, by demonstrating her inability to contend with such a powerful antagonist; and representing that her appearance would be infallibly attended with the ruin of Serafina, who would certainly fall into the hands of the villain to whom she had been contracted. We exhorted her to wait patiently for some happy revolution of fortune, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... in face of this great fact? Already the State Churches of Europe are placed in imminent peril by the controversies which, since religious life has reawakened among us, rend them from within, and by their manifest inability to satisfy the craving of society for new assurance of its faith. I cannot much blame the High-Church bishop who goes to Lord Palmerston to ask for intervention in company with Lord Clanricarde and Mr. Spence. You express surprise that the son of Wilberforce ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... friction were required in the operation. Of course, the Baba waited until after dark before performing his ablutions. But finally his plans were more or less disturbed by certain rising youth, who timed his habits and awaited his disrobing with o'erripe tomatoes. The bombardment, and the inability to pursue the enemy, turned the genial current of the Baba's life awry until I put a bathroom in my house, with a lock ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the world's other major languages makes the designers' choice of 7 bits look more and more like a serious {misfeature} as the use of international networks continues to increase (see {software rot}). Hardware ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... obliged to confess our inability to say for certain why a temporary star blazes up so suddenly, we have every cause to think that these strange bodies will by degrees tell us a great deal about the constitution of the fixed stars. The great variety of spectra which we see in the starry universe, nebula spectra with bright ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... and observed. They brought her their poor confidences, painfully similar. Always poverty—or they would not be there. Always ignorance, or they would not stay there. Then either incompetence in the work, or inability to hold their little earnings—or both; and further the Tale of the Other Side—the exactions and restrictions of the untrained mistresses they served; cases of withheld wages; cases of endless requirements; cases of most arbitrary interference ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... with my inability to produce more evidence. For the present I will mention two additional instances only, and perhaps I shall not be invited to swell the ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... misery could not be conveyed to the mind. The woman was like a demon come among them. They felt chiefly degraded, not by her vulgarity, but by their inability to cope with it, and by the consequent sickening sense of animal inefficiency—the block that was put to all imaginative delight in the golden hazy future they figured for themselves, and which was their wine of life. An intellectual adversary they could have combated; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... desire to say something—something grand and terrible—which would give Edith a faint idea of the strength of the passion burning in his breast. Inability to say this something kept him silent for a long period. Several times, indeed, he was on the point of speaking, but the words that came to him were too commonplace and weak to express his tumultuous thoughts. Just as he was on ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... No one had spoken to him outside of Burton. Judd imagined that they all were conscious of his showing the white feather. The first team men seemed especially hostile. They had received a tongue-lashing from the coach for their inability to run the score up. Of course he could not know that they were a bit resentful at him for having thwarted their scoring ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... he would tell me the road to a fortune. I saw he was smart and disclosed considerable truth and displayed considerable inteligence of the interior. He said he would go to that place but owing to physical inability he could not. What could a trapper from the flowery fields of the rockies, and broad basins of the Platte now of the Snow hidden mountains ice bound rivers of Alaska do but inmediately without ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... echo of her laugh. But the family took up residence at Grasmere only in December 1799, and the "Poems on the Naming of Places" were published before the close of 1800. The effect of these lines to Joanna, however, is certainly not impaired—it may even be enhanced—by our inability to localise them. Only one in the list of places referred to can occasion any perplexity, viz., Hammar-scar, since it is a name now disused in the district. It used to be applied to some rocks on the flank of Silver-how, to the wood around them, and also to the gorge between Silver-how and ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... supposed (perhaps falsely) to be the bad military administration of your only army. Secondly, and much more, by your apparent inability ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... greatest weakness of our public school system today is the inability, because of our division between church and state, to give the boy any religious instruction in connection with what is styled "secular education." For the first time in the history of the world has religious instruction been barred from the public school, and that in our free America. ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... he chafed against the helplessness which prevented him from following up the clue he had already obtained, but still more did he chafe against his inability to renew his acquaintance with the woman who had ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... chemicals, pesticides; salinization, water-logging of soil due to poor irrigation methods; Caspian Sea pollution; diversion of a large share of the flow of the Amu Darya into irrigation contributes to that river's inability to replenish the Aral Sea; desertification natural hazards: NA international agreements: party to - Ozone Layer Protection; signed, but not ratified ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... that 'The probable cause of the accident was the decision of the captain to continue the flight at low level toward an area of poor surface and horizon definition when the crew was not certain of their position and the subsequent inability to detect the rising terrain which intercepted the aircraft's flight path'. He adhered to this in evidence before the ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... use of Anthropomorphism. Mr. Spencer's argument, in his own words, is this:—"From the inability under which we labor to conceive of a Deity save as some idealization of ourselves, it inevitably results that in each age, among each people, and to a great extent in each individual, there must arise just that conception of Deity best adapted ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... and an empty government treasury have led to serious economic disarray, indeed near collapse. Tanker deliveries of crucial fuel supplies (including those for electrical generation) have become sporadic due to the government's inability to pay and attacks against ships. Telecommunications are threatened by the nonpayment of bills and by the lack of technical and maintenance staff many of whom have left the country. The disintegration of law and order left the economy in tatters by mid-2003, and on 24 July 2003 more ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Thus has he given to philosophy a higher ideal, a new urgency—by his continued emphasis upon the spiritual he has given to philosophy a nobler and a higher mission. He has placed the emphasis in general upon life, and has pointed out the inability of the intellect to solve all life's problems. He has given to idealistic philosophies a possible rallying-point, where theories differing in detail can meet on common ground. As one eminent writer says: "The depth and inclusiveness of Eucken's philosophy, the comprehensiveness of its ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... resilience, whatever the camels might say by way of objection. And they said a very great deal gutturally, as camels always do, yielding their prodigious power to our use with an incomprehensible mixture of grouchiness and inability to do less than ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... oratorical training, and his clergyman's inability to come quickly to a point the denunciation lost its effect, for Nickie was not at the speaker's side; he had gone. He had taken the Rev. James Nippit's buggy, and driven off, and he carried the ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... smiling in a manner that proclaimed his entire inability to perceive the point. "That must be the point of the joke. Ah, yes. I see it distinctly now. It is very good! It is very ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... songs have another excellent quality. They show all through that splendid unconsciousness of the soldier, that inability in him to see himself from without, or to pose as civilians always think and say ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... balls in the fashion of Jane Austen's most aristocratic characters. Friendly letters went back and forth between Bath and Mount Vernon. After the Revolution, Fairfax wrote to Washington: "I glory in being called an American," regretted his inability to contribute to the "glorious cause of Liberty" and offered his "best thanks for all your exertions ... to ... the End of the Great ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... Parliament to raise wages; that Parliament could not raise wages. And yet the very next thing you did was to pass a law to raise the price of produce of your own land, at the expense of the very class whose wages you confessed your inability to increase. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... has consumed his whole estate, and laments over an empty exchequer. He who requites my favors with ingratitude adds to, instead of diminishing, my wealth; and he who cannot return a favor is equally poor, whether his inability arises from poverty of spirit, sordidness of soul, or ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... the child, e.g. by having taken out a policy permitted under the Friendly Societies Acts. A parent or other person legally liable to maintain a child or young person will be deemed to have "neglected" him by failure to provide adequate food, clothing, medical aid, or lodging, or if in the event of inability to provide such food, &c., by failure to take steps to procure the same under acts relating to the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... nevertheless, choose the Paquin gowns and the six-course dinners. Luxury is better than simplicity if it can be the luxury of all. If not, it means selfishness, callousness, and broken bonds of brotherhood. Moreover, it has personal dangers; it tends to breed softness and laziness, an inability to endure hardship, what Agnes Repplier calls "loss of nerve." It tends to choke the soul, to crush it by the weight of worldly things, as Tarpeia was crushed by the Sabine shields. "Hardly can a rich man enter the kingdom of heaven." Simple living, with occasional ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... electors of Noonoon. As a tallow candle if placed near can obscure the light of the moon, so the approaching election lying at the door shut out all other worldly doings. The Russo-Japanese war became a movement of no moment; the season, the price of lemons and oranges, the doings of Mrs Tinker, the inability of the municipal council to make the roads good, and all other happenings, became tame by comparison with politics. They were discussed with unabating interest all day and every day, and by everyone upon all occasions. Even the children battled out differences regarding their respective ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... Harvey of the "Review" was inability to put himself in another's place if that happened to be at any considerable distance from his own place. He made no allowance for the difference in the point of view—for the difference, that is, between his mind and the mind of ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... Most of them (of course) were 'the people of whom crowds are made,' owning no sort of mental furniture worth exchange or purchase. They killed the fashion of despising Dickens as a fashion, and the Superior Person, finding that his sorrowful inability was no longer an exclusive thing, ceased to brag about it. When a fashion in dress is popular on Hampstead Heath on Bank Holiday festivals, the people who originally set the fashion discard it, and set another. In half a generation some of our superiors, ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... accurate enough, but she was undeniably awkward and clumsy in her movements and there was an almost total absence of coordination of muscle and brain. She had, however, suffered too long and too keenly from her inability to join with the others in the dance to fail to make the best of her opportunity to relieve herself ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... me how our Indictment stood. It would be tried very soon. He was going to insist on being tried separately, and had no doubt he should be. In that event, his case would precede ours. What did I intend to do? His advice was that I should plead inability to defend myself while in prison, and ask for a postponement until after my release. If that were done he believed I should never hear of the ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... shadow on the ground, and Virgil explaining that the spiritual form, while capable of feeling pain, has not the property of intercepting light, takes occasion to point out that there are mysteries for which the human reason is unable to account, and that this very inability forms the chief unhappiness of the great thinkers whom they saw among the virtuous heathen on the border of Hell. With this they reach the foot of the mountain of Purgatory. As is explained elsewhere, this occupies a position exactly opposite to the conical pit of Hell; being indeed formed of ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... a certain distrust, if not disdain, visited upon the honest challenge I ventured to offer your Civil Service policy, when you were actually in office, that you did not differ from some other great men I have known in an unwillingness, or at least an inability, to accept, without resentment, the question of your infallibility. Nevertheless, I was then, as I am now, your friend, and not your enemy, animated by the single purpose to serve the country, through you, as, ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... instinct, if such an expression be allowed, and at the same time his tragic limitations, due to an inability fully to understand the origin of this instinct, come out clearly in the battle he waged against the 'idea' as his immediate predecessors understood it. We know that Plato introduced this word into the philosophical language of mankind. In Greek ιδέα (from ιδεῑν, ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... the father to determine, as soon as a child was born, whether it should be exposed to death or brought up; and this not because the rearing of a deformed or weak child would deteriorate a race which prided itself on strength and courage, but from the inability of the parents, from poverty, to bring up their offspring. The newly born child was laid on the ground, and there remained untouched until its fate was decided by the father or nearest male relative; if it was to live, it was taken up and carried ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... prowess. When his numerous relatives had all shaken hands with him, and laughed, smiled, or smirked their felicitations, they made way for the press of eager acquaintances. His prize library was reverently surveyed, and many were the sportive sallies elicited by the victor's obvious inability to carry away what he had won. Suavely exultant, ready with his reply to every flattering address, Bruno Chilvers exhibited a social tact in advance of his years: it was easy to imagine what he would become when ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... OF BRAIN—STUNNING.—This may be caused by a blow or a fall.—Symptoms. Cold skin; weak pulse; almost total insensibility; slow, weak breathing; pupil of eye sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, than natural; inability to move; unwillingness to answer when spoken to. These symptoms come on directly after the accident.—Treatment. Place the patient quietly on a warm bed, send for a surgeon, and do nothing else for the first four or six hours. After this time the skin will become ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... days, of which many have slipped from my memory, and others which remain it would be difficult, and often painful to me, to endeavour to draw out and disentangle from other thoughts. I the less regret my inability to do more, because, in describing a great part of what we saw from the time we left Kenmore, my work would be little more than a repetition of what I have said before, or, where it was not so, a longer time was necessary to enable us to bear ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... room, except Tom Cogit, who could have told you the name of the town in which they were living. There they sat, almost breathless, watching every turn with the fell look in their cannibal eyes, which showed their total inability to sympathize with their fellow-beings. All the forms of society had been forgotten. There was no snuff-box handed about now, for courtesy, admiration, or a pinch; no affectation of occasionally making a remark upon any other ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... account of some rather singular circumstances connected with my residence in Toronto. Though repeatedly urged to do so, I have hitherto refrained from giving any extended publicity to those circumstances, in consequence of my inability to see any good to be served thereby. The only person, however, whose reputation can be injuriously affected by the details has been dead for some years. He has left behind him no one whose feelings can be shocked by the disclosure, and the story is in itself sufficiently remarkable ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... disputed her will, except occasionally her brother James, until I came; and like all tyrants she holds tenaciously to her divine right to do as she pleases. If she ever failed to get what she wanted, it was because of her inability to make the vassals of her household understand what it was. Every thwarted desire was the signal for a passionate outburst, and as she grew older and stronger, these tempests became more violent. As I began to teach her, I was beset by many difficulties. She ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... by successive modifications, slow in their operation, the teeming variety of living things is believed to have developed. Now it is a notable fact, that many evolutionists (among them Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer of the theory which goes under Darwin's name) frankly admit the inability to account for the origin of protoplasm. From mineral substances, protoplasm differs in that it possesses the power of growth, development, and reproduction. The very first vegetable cell "must have ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... to Augustus, the emperor, who ratified all its provisions with one exception: he withheld from Archelaus the title of king until he proved his capacity and loyalty; in lieu thereof, he created him ethnarch, and as such permitted him to govern nine years, when, for misconduct and inability to stay the turbulent elements that grew and strengthened around him, he was sent into Gaul ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... ill-humour, as some people do, in total neglect. Children, when they are left to weep in solitude, often continue in wo for a considerable length of time, until they quite forget the original cause of complaint, and they continue their convulsive sobs, and whining note of distress, purely from inability ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... a most agreeable acquaintance and regretted their inability to accept his invitation to visit him. His name was Louis Wallingford. He was an American, born in Missouri. He had been a reporter, then editor. His passion was music and he had forsaken a literary life for that ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... confess, however, the inability I found to weave a catastrophe, such as I desired, out of these ordinary incidents. What I have here said, therefore, must not be interpreted as applicable to the ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... the admission of destitute Orphans, which continue to be made, I consider as a call from God upon me, to do all that is in my power to provide a Home and Scriptural Education for a still greater number of Orphans. Nothing but positive inability to go forward ought to keep me standing still, whilst I have almost daily fresh entreaties to receive Orphans. Since I began writings on this subject in my journal, thirty more Orphans have been applied for, from two years old and upwards. I ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, Fourth Part • George Mueller
... of co-ordinating the various activities. The necessary associations between the hearing centres and the motor centres for the control of voice have not been built up. But they can be so built, and then the inability to sing vanishes. A person who can speak has the necessary machinery for song, and to say that one has ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... cheerfully enduring an amount of overcrowding that would have been fiercely resented in a railway carriage. Near the entrance Mervyn Quentock was talking to a Serene Highness, a lady who led a life of obtrusive usefulness, largely imposed on her by a good-natured inability to say "No." "That woman creates a positive draught with the number of bazaars she opens," a frivolously-spoken ex-Cabinet Minister had once remarked. At the present moment ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... out," rasped the superintendent. The mine-owners' conference, from which he had just returned, had been called to protest against the poor service given by the railroad, and knowing his present inability to give better service, he had temporized until it needed but this one more touch of the lash to make him lose his ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... was the sweeping of garments, the soft tinkle of pendants as they struck together, and Salome, the actress, was beside the pair. Close at hand was Amaryllis. The Greek showed for the first time discomfiture and an inability to rise to the demand of the occasion. The glance she shot at Laodice was full of cold anger that she had permitted herself to be surprised in company ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... were afraid to go on to the sick-list. Nothing short of total inability to continue would have prevented them from working, such was the terror with which that man had inspired us all. It may be said that we were a pack of cowards, who, without the courage to demand better treatment, deserved all we got. While admitting that such ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... elapsed before he succeeded in mastering this singular attack. At length he rose, and placing his chair somewhat further back from the window, continued to look out in silence, not so much from love of silence, as apparently from inability to speak. The stranger, in the mean time, eyed him keenly; and as he examined his features from time to time, it might be observed that an expression of satisfaction, if not almost of certainty, settled upon his own countenance. In a quarter of an hour, the sound of the carriage-wheels ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... relations practically recognized in domestic life. It is very certain that at both extremities of the social scale family affection is liable to be impaired, on the one hand, by the delegation of parental duties to hirelings, and, on the other, by the inability to render them constantly and efficiently. We may observe also a difference in family affection, traceable indirectly to the influence of climate. Out-of-door life is unfavorable to the intimate union of families; ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... Austria was reduced to the status of a parasite living on the bounty of the Great Powers and denied the right of self-determination. Even France, exhausted by five years' superhuman efforts, beholds with alarm her financial future entirely dependent upon the ability or inability of Germany to pay the damages to ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon |
