"Incapability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... strikingly beautiful, features. Yet they were attractive, because they were harmonious, and betokened a certain inward agreement. It was a sane, sensible face, but a careless critic might have thought that it betokened an incapability of emotion, especially as Mrs. Cardew had a habit of sitting back in her chair, and generally let the conversation take its own course until it came very chose to her. She had a sober mode of statement and criticism, which was never brilliant ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... surrounding conditions to perform its particular work under the strong pressure of responsibility to the nation at large; that our public affairs should be got into a state in which there should be no impunity for foolish or faithless conduct. In this way the public judgment would sift out incapability and dishonesty from posts of high charge, and even personal ambition would necessarily become of a worthier sort, since the desires of the most selfish men must be a good deal shaped by the opinions of those around them; and for one person to put on a cap and bells, or ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... therein. I am not going to say anything here about the various errors in our systems of society and commerce, which appear (I am not sure if they ever do more than appear) to force us to over-work ourselves merely that we may live; nor about the still more fruitful cause of unhealthy toil—the incapability, in many men, of being content with the little that is indeed necessary to their happiness. I have only a word or two to say about one special cause of over-work—the ambitious desire of doing great or clever things, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... to be respected as long as persons suffering under the sense of having been injured take the law into their own hands, solely because of the proved incapability of those in authority to protect them where their interests ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... way to prove that matter may exist without any of the known properties of matter, and may therefore be changeable, he concludes that it can not be eternal, because "eternal (passive) existence necessarily involves incapability of change." I believe it would be difficult to point out any other connection between the facts of eternity and unchangeableness, than a strong association between the two ideas. Most of the a priori arguments, both religious ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Hurlingham." And the words he quotes from a letter addressed to the Times of Dec. 3, 1880, by the illustrious General Gordon, after a visit to the much afflicted country, show with equal clearness the sad condition of affairs in Ireland, and the apparent incapability of the English public to realize it. "I have been lately over the south-west of Ireland," he wrote, "in the hope of discovering how some settlement could be made of the Irish question, which, like a fretting cancer, eats away our vitals as a nation." After the bold and, as some ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... Lamh Laudher's public disgrace, and of his incapability to repel it, sank deep into his heart. The blood in his veins became hot and feverish when he reflected upon the scornful and degrading insult he had just borne. Soon after his return home, his father and mother both noticed the singularly deep bursts of indignant ...
— The Dead Boxer - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Central Asia, and which is still preserved in that of one of their principal surviving branches, the TURKS. All the different members of this great family have had very striking features in common,—the most extraordinary being an incapability of reaching the highest culture, of progressing indefinitely, improving continually. A strange law of their being seems to have condemned them to stop short, when they had attained a certain, not very advanced, stage. Thus their speech has remained extremely imperfect. They ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... horror—one to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered—vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... taste that the species of reading above complained of proceeds; on the contrary, there may be a very correct perception of the writer's meaning and object, while from want of practice, from mere mechanical inexpertness, there may be an incapability of giving effect to that meaning: hence arises false emphasis, ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... in front of him with a vague and rather painful suggestion of incapability that sometimes came over him. He was wondering whether he was doing ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... periods, nor men more sure than the development, among them or in them of a noble grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention or incapability of understanding it. I think that the central man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance and imaginative, moral and intellectual faculties, all at their highest is Dante; and in him ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... and the organist at the church offered to teach her with his own daughters, if she would sing with them on Sundays; but she could not get through the drudgery of the exercises, and advanced only so far as to be able to take her proper part in a hymn. Here, however, she was almost useless, from incapability of proper subordination, the sopranos, tenors, and basses being well ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... mechanically sacrifices everything to his dominant task. External circumstances might, as so often happens, have checked the cause of my life and prevented me from following my natural bent, but my utter incapability of succeeding in anything else would have been the protest of baffled duty, and Predestination would in one way have been triumphant by proving the subject of the experiment to be powerless outside the ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... the honest Methodist, who, like many other good and noble minds, yet could not understand fun. This incapability is also sometimes the case with persons of a sour, ill-natured, or susceptible disposition, whose excessive vanity is shocked at all simple, innocent explosions of gayety and pleasantry.[151] Colonel Stanhope, who knew Lord Byron at the same period, and who was ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... platform a few minutes after the train had arrived. That entire incapability of devising administrative measures for the management of large crowds, which is one of the characteristics of Englishmen in authority, is nowhere more strikingly exemplified than at York. Three different lines of railway assemble ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... company brought him more closely in touch with its underwriting affairs, as the questionable losses from Boston and other similar agencies began to arrive in faster and faster succession, and he clearly perceived the weakness and incapability of Gunterson's management, his irritation rightly directed itself more and more against ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... death of one so fair and innocent has whitened my locks and seared my very heart-strings. I shall never get over it; and whatever evidence you may have or think you have, of my having handled bow and arrow in that museum gallery, it must fall before the fact of my natural incapability to do the thing with which you have charged me. No act possible to man is more in contradiction to my instincts, than the wanton or even casual killing ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... decisive one, and the good God of love becomes the God of the spirit, the Old Testament god the god of the flesh. In point of fact, Marcion seems to have given such a turn to the good God's attributes of love, and incapability of wrath, as to make Him the apathetic, infinitely exalted Being, free from all affections. The contradiction in which Marcion is here involved is evident, because he taught expressly that the spirit of man is in itself just as foreign to the good ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... display its potent effects upon the heads and understandings of the party. All restraint being completely banished by the effect of the liquor, every one indulged in their characteristic eccentricities. Dick Gradus pleaded his utter incapability to sing or produce an impromptu rhyme, but was allowed to substitute a prose epitaph on the renowned school-master of Magdalen parish, Fatty T—b,{18} who lay snoring under the table. "It shall be read over him in lieu of burial service," said Echo. "Agreed, agreed," vociferated all ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... new to life! It enchanted one, painfully fastidious in what relates to the true nobility of character, that, however various the themes discussed, no low or mean thought ever sullied those beautiful lips. It was not the mere innocence of inexperience, but the moral incapability of guile, that charmed him in the companion he had chosen on his path to Eternity! He was also delighted to notice Evelyn's readiness of resources: she had that faculty, without which woman has no independence from the world, no pledge that domestic retirement will not ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IX • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Stories first made its debut, I have been a rabid and enthusiastic reader of your excellent publication. As yet, I have never missed an issue, and only a physical incapability could compel me to. The unlimited amount of pleasure derived from your magazine is beyond compensation. Your selections are varied, interesting and based on cold, scientific logic, barring minor discrepancies. My whole-hearted approval, commendation and good wishes go to ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... zigzags? Was it in parsimony that you buried its paltry pinnacles in that eruption of diseased crockets? or in pecuniary embarrassment that you set up the belfry foolscaps, with the mimicry of dormer windows, which nobody can ever reach nor look out of? Not so, but in mere incapability of better things. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... your incapability. Bring him down stairs! Your hero of a fashionable novel never ascends to the first floor. Bed-room, dressing-room, breakfast-room, library, and boudoir, all are upon a level. As for his dressing, you must ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... feebleness of death, and while every human succour is rendering to them. They cast a furtive glance around, and their countenances indicate all the horror of their minds at their late reverses, and to be thinking less of the bodily pains they are enduring, than of their incapability to revenge themselves upon their victors! Such was the scene exhibited this morning on the steps of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 570, October 13, 1832 • Various
... this was done most of them were drunk, but none were so drunk as poor Macdermot. His intoxication, moreover, was unfortunately not of that sort which was likely to end in quiescence and incapability. It was a sign of the great degradation to which Macdermot had submitted, in joining these men, that in talking over the injuries which Ussher had inflicted on them all, he had quietly heard them canvass Ussher's conduct to his sister, and that in no measured ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... come, is in the same category as his assertion of the eternity of future punishment, and would appear, by applying the argument already expounded (p. 80) with respect to that doctrine, to be in like manner contributory towards generating in the spirit of man an incapability of sinning. It is farther to be taken into account that these words were addressed by the Lord to his apostles—to the elect of the elect—with particular reference to the sin of betraying the Son of man, which was exemplified by the outward act of Judas, who also ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... those by whom, at the time, I have had the honour to be surrounded, I have sometimes, I will cheerfully own—for why should I deny it?—felt the overwhelming nature of the task I have undertaken, and my own utter incapability to do justice to the subject. If such have been my feelings, however, on former occasions, what must they be now—now—under the extraordinary circumstances in which I am placed. (Hear! hear!) To describe my feelings accurately, would be impossible; but I cannot give you a better ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Sweet, our father, has been in command of Jolo Archipelago, no disturbance of any description has occurred; the reason is, that he has taken great interest in our country and its people. He was the man who saw our poverty, our incapability of paying customs duties, as more than one calamity has befallen our islands; therefore, we thank him and we trust him, although not knowing what he will do in the future, if it will change or not. Therefore, I and my people ask you to consider ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... Bedouins will inquire where Allah is to be found: when asked the object of the question, they reply, "If the Eesa could but catch him they would spear him upon the spot,—who but he lays waste their homes and kills their cattle and wives?" Yet, conjoined to this truly savage incapability of conceiving the idea of a Supreme Being, they believe in the most ridiculous exaggerations: many will not affront a common pilgrim, for fear of being killed by a ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... with feeling and expression is good, however accompanied. Otherwise, the pianoforte is not much to my mind. All its intervals are false, and temperament is a poor substitute for natural intonation. Then its incapability of sustaining a note has led, as the only means of producing effect, to those infinitesimal subdivisions of sound, in which all sentiment and expression are twittered ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... took the liberty of wearing my fur cloak, and was not particular as to accuracy, we parted on short notice; and I got this woman to come in every day to scrub, help make the bed, etc. It is much less trouble, and the only fault I have to find with her is an absolute incapability of discerning blacks. I believe she thinks I have ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Saint-Germain was rather like an army without a base of operation. It had utterly failed to take advantage of the peace to plant itself in the heart of the nation. It sinned for want of learning its lesson, and through an utter incapability of regarding its interests as a whole. A future certainty was sacrificed to a doubtful present gain. This blunder in policy may perhaps be attributed to ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... the gold-fields; which ordinances, left to the discretion—that is, the caprice; and to the good sense—that is, the motto, 'odi profanum vulgus et arceo;' and to the best judgment—that is the proverbial incapability of all aristocractical red-tape, HOW TO RULE US VAGABONDS. Both those reasons, I say, must make even the most hardened bibber of Toorak small-beer acknowledge and confess, that the perfidious mistake at head-quarters was, their persisting ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... direction of Berlin, but that desperate strain of forces does not deceive us: it is only a proof of the abdication of Austria-Hungary. We have lost all confidence in the vitality of Austria-Hungary, and we no more recognise its right to existence. Through its incapability and dependence it has proved to the whole world that the assumption of the necessity of Austria has passed, and has through this war been proved to be wrong. Those who have defended the possibility and necessity of Austria-Hungary—and at one time it was Palack himself—demanded ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... plus incapability," observed Granby. "We must take her to the station. You can charge her. I have so many important engagements this week that I can't spare time to be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... crisis came in a heavy discharge of bills, the consequence of Allen's incredulity as to their poverty and incapability of economising. He said "the rascals could wait," and "his mother need not trouble herself." She said they must be paid, and she found it could be done at the cost of giving up spending August at ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with an unwise flippancy;"— remonstrated the professor with a pained, forced smile. "If an idiot or a madman were unfortunately born to a throne, a regency would be appointed to control state affairs, but the heir would, in spite of natural incapability, remain the lawful king." ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli |
