"Capability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been torn in two. The other half is in the military despatch office in Madrid to-day. Juanita had arranged in her own mind what to say. She was quite mistress of the situation, and was ready to move serenely and surely in her own sphere, taking the lead in such subtle matters with the capability and mastery which characterised Marcos' lead in affairs of action. But Marcos' mistake seemed to have put out her ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... more systematic, scientific manner the training of the sense organs already begun by the home, thus opening up the life to the beauties of nature, art, and other forms of truth, and so providing for the development of the inner life of each in accordance with inherent leaning and capability; and, third, equip them with the tools of knowledge and give such knowledge facts and develop such points of view as will enable each to become a self-directing, constructive, and contributing member of his ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... contrast was caused by the necessity of "CONSOLING MISERY" (CIESZYC BIDE), which necessity induced them to seek the magical distraction of the graceful Mazourka, with its transient delusions. The words which were sung to these melodies, gave them a capability of linking themselves with the sacred associations of memory, in a far higher degree than is usual with ordinary dance-music. They were sung and re-sung a thousand times in the days of buoyant youth, by fresh and sonorous voices, in the hours ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... However we may pretend to estimate men according to the wrong things which they have done, or abstained from doing, we in fact follow the example of Nobel, the king of the beasts: we give them their places among us according to the service-ableness and capability which they display. We might mention not a few eminent public servants, whom the world delights to honour—ministers, statesmen, lawyers, men of science, artists, poets, soldiers, who, if they were tried by the negative test, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the somewhat imposing steps of her sister's Commonwealth Avenue home and pressed an energetic finger against the electric-bell button. From the tip of her wing-trimmed hat to the toe of her low-heeled shoe she radiated health, capability, and alert decision. Even her voice, as she greeted the maid that opened the door, vibrated with the ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... been made and published in respect to what is the real actual grain average of Canada West. My own opinion is, that even could a truthful average be obtained, it would throw very little light on the real capability of the land—and for this reason. One-half of the emigrants who settle upon land in Canada, and adopt cultivation as their employment, are weavers, tinkers, tailors, sailors, and twenty other trades and professions. It must be the work of years to convert ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... with his new millions—why had he not offered something, instead of letting himself be dunned? Truly, truly, Providence—his Providence, was a sorry jade! Tricks enough she had certainly played him: him, to whom she had given so enormous a secret capability for spending! With a crust for food, a rag for his covering, a garret for shelter, she had endowed him with artist-dreams of luxury, with every extravagant desire, and but one, faint possibility of attainment. One, however, he had; together with a higher ambition than ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... cafes. Now in Paris you can dine every day exactly as it suits your means and mood. You may dine for a couple of francs in a quiet, unknown street, and very well; or you may dine for a couple of napoleons in a flaming saloon, with windows opening on a crowded boulevard. London is deficient in dining capability." ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... true artist do for you by his picture of Yosemite Valley? He not only gives you a free conveyance to it, but he goes with you, and interprets its grandeur to you. He translates into the language of your consciousness beauties which, without him, you would entirely miss. It is this very capability of seeing more in Nature than is ever perceived by the common throng that constitutes the especial genius of the artist, and a work that is not aglow with its creator's personality—personality, mind you, not coarse realism—can never rank as a masterpiece. But, come, ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... the sort of domestic picture he had foreshadowed to himself at twenty-five. But at sixty a man blows bubbles no longer—except that of his own conceit. The heart of Maverick was not dead in him; a kiss of Adele wakened a thrilling, delicious sensation there, of which he had forgotten his capability. He followed her graceful step and figure with an eye that looked beyond and haunted the past—vainly, vainly! Her "Papa!"—sweetly uttered—stirred sensibilities in him that amazed himself, and seemed like the phantoms of dreams he dreamed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... attempted, has been carried on to a very limited extent. Of its capability of submitting to culture, there can be little doubt. If the spawn were collected from its natural habitats in June, and planted in beds differently formed, but approximating as nearly as possible to its natural conditions, ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... therefore, with such feelings of content as she brought to it, was particularly welcome. Mrs. Jennings would have persuaded her, at its conclusion, to take some rest before her mother's arrival, and allow her to take her place by Marianne; but Elinor had no sense of fatigue, no capability of sleep at that moment about her, and she was not to be kept away from her sister an unnecessary instant. Mrs. Jennings therefore attending her up stairs into the sick chamber, to satisfy herself that all continued right, left ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... days! says Mr Carlyle, "actually prayed! It was a capability old London and its preachers and populations had; to us the incredibilest." Beyond a doubt the Puritans and the Covenanters prayed, and in such a manner and at such a length, that the strange doctrine on which Southey has founded his "Curse of Kehama," of the essential and irresistible force ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... not; but that is where I come in; it's what I'm for—to get rid of such things for you." That small, cool smile made Flora feel more than ever the immature barbarian of her simile. Clara sat throwing the protection of her superior knowledge and capability around her, like a missionary garment; but Flora could have laughed with relief. Then Clara merely supposed Kerr had been impertinent. Her little invasion had been really nothing but pure kindness and protection; and Flora couldn't but feel grateful ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... he is intoxicated with hope. The impetuosity of his character was then unchastened by the discipline to which it was subjected in after years. The very strength of his passion proved for a time a bar to its advance, suggesting, as it did, to the conscientious mind of Miss Barnard, doubts of her capability to return it with adequate force. But they met again and again, and at each successive meeting he found his heaven clearer, until at length he was able to say, 'Not a moment's alloy of this evening's happiness occurred. Everything was delightful to the last moment of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... cruise and operate and have his being in the safer and smaller seas; some day, when the nerve crash had subsided and the slow, wounded mind came back to itself, and its petty functions were once more resumed—its envious scheming, its covetous capability, its vicious achievement. For with him achievement could embody only the meaner imitations of the sheer colossal coups by which the great financiers gutted a nation with kid-gloved fingers, and changed their gloves after the operation ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... exquisite!—for commend us to the bygone, beautiful English garden—really a garden—not that mixture of park, meadow, and wilderness[3], brought up to one's very windows—which, since the days of the innovators, Kent, and his "bold associates," Capability Brown and Co., has obtained so largely—this was a garden! There might be seen the stately terraces, such as Watteau, and our own Wilson, in his earlier works, painted—the trim alleys exhibiting all the ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... he recognised the dialect as that of the Birwas—a native tribe occupying a considerable tract of the hinterland. He knew the language well—he had the Hun's typical capability of acquiring a knowledge ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... Lindsay's first reference to Egypt, let us glance at a few of the physical accidents which influenced its types of architecture. The first of these is evidently the capability of carriage of large blocks of stone over perfectly level land. It was possible to roll to their destination along that uninterrupted plain, blocks which could neither by the Greek have been shipped in seaworthy vessels, nor carried over mountain-passes, nor raised ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... on certain great subjects, which ... he continued to preserve throughout life."—Life, p. 646. "Mobility" is not the tendency to yield to every impression, to change with every impulse, but the capability of being moved by many and various impressions, of responding to an ever-renewed succession of impulses. Byron is defending the enthusiastic temperament from the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... teachers who seek to carry enlightenment into the lean lone land, gradually dissolved. The women with whom Chloe came in contact ceased to be Indians en masse; they became people—personalities—each with her own capability and propensity for the working of good or harm. With this realization vanished the last vestige of aloofness and reserve. And, thereafter, many of the women broke bread by invitation ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... on her eyes. "It's dreadful to have her around! How can I get rid of her?" she thought. Very often now the flame of jealousy flared up; it scorched her whenever she recognized Edith's "brains," whenever she noticed some gay fearlessness, or easy capability; whenever she watched the girl's high-handed treatment of Maurice: criticizing him! Telling him he was mean because he was always saying he "couldn't afford things"! Declaring that she wished he would stop his everlasting practicing—and apparently not caring a copper for him! If Edith said, "Oh, ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... Contrast Treviranus—"In every living being there exists a capability of an endless variety of form-assumption; each possesses the power to adapt its organisation to the changes of the outer world, and it is this power, put into action by the change of the universe, that has raised the simple zoophytes ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... floor. But I do know that the one who made the floor—and the one who sweeps it—is just as great as anybody in the world who may come and stand upon it, if each be doing his work with the same love, faithfulness and capability. ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... to have listened. But the fact was, that, for the time, all consciousness of free will and capability of action had vanished from his mind. His soul was but a black gulf into which poured the Phlegethontic ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... the Indians here at the present writing is very favorable, sickness is abating and their spirits are reviving. I think I have fully settled the fact of the Indians capability and susceptibility to arive at a good state of military disipline. You would be surprised to see our Regt. move. They accomplish the feat of regular time step equal to any white soldier, they form in line with dispatch and with great precission; and what is more they ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... that over Palgrave's shoulder she could see the bold crayon drawing of Martin, brown and healthy and muscular, without an ounce of affectation, an unmistakable man with his nice irregular features and clean, merry eyes. There was strength and capability stamped all over him, and there was, as well, a pleasing sense of reliability which gained immediate confidence. With the sort of shock one gets on going into the fresh air from a steam-heated room, she realized the contrast ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... certain favorable relation, not directly to be termed harmony, with reason. In the one case there arose a restful, positively pleasurable mood; here a shock is produced, an indirect and negative pleasure proceeding from pain. Since the sublime exceeds the functional capability of our sensuous representations and does violence to the imagination, we first feel small at the sight of the absolutely great, and incapable of compassing it with our sensuous glance. The sensibility is not equal to the impression; this at first seems contrary to purpose and violent. ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... Second Grade teacher was of the "progressive" school; she firmly believed that everybody, having been created equal, had to stay that way. She pointedly avoided giving Jimmy any opportunity to show his capability. ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... world in return had made him a baronet without any money! He was a very tall, thin, gray-haired, old man, stooping much, and worn with age, but still endowed with some strength of will, and great capability of making himself unpleasant. His son was a bald-headed, stout man, somewhat past forty, who was by no means without cleverness, having done great things as a young man at Oxford; but in life he had failed. He was a director of certain companies in London, at which he used to attend, ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... self-luminousness (or 'self-illuminatedness') we understand the shining forth or being manifest by its own existence merely to its own substrate; the terms 'shining forth', 'illumining', 'being manifest' in both these definitions meaning the capability of becoming an object of thought and speech which is common to all things, whether intelligent or non-intelligent. Eternity again means 'being present in all time'; oneness means 'being defined by the number one'. Even if you say that these attributes are only negative ones, i.e. equal ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... the confused scene, and proved that she was equal to the occasion. It was a sad pity that she had not imparted to her daughter a little of her own capability. She bade De Forrest, and the still stout and hearty ex-sailor, carry Hemstead at once to his room, while she and one of the maids assisted Miss Martell to hers. No opportunity whatever was given for any romantic and ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... society as though he had held a cure in a Westmoreland valley. He had worked hard, but his work had been altogether among the poor. He had no gift of preaching, and had acquired neither reputation nor popularity. But he could work;—and having been transferred because of that capability to the temporary curacy of St. Diddulph's,—out of one diocese into another,—he had received the living from the bishop's ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... feels, as well as the animal, we can clearly prove. Probably it feels less, and it may be each kind of plant differs from others in the amount, according to its higher or lower organism. Probably its amount of pleasure—its capability of enjoyment—is in a direct proportion to the pain which it endures; and it is highly probable that this double line of ratios runs in an ascending scale throughout the vegetable kingdom, gradually joining on to what is more ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... by thy eternal Word my Creator, Redeemer and Preserver! who hast in thy free communicative goodness glorified me with the capability of knowing thee, the one only absolute Good, the eternal I Am, as the author of my being, and of desiring and seeking thee as its ultimate end;—who, when I fell from thee into the mystery of the false and evil will, didst not abandon me, poor self-lost ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... what to do with me, he at last (for he was a kind man) installed me as under usher of the school; for, you see, my education had been good, and I was well qualified for the situation, as far as capability went: it was rather a bathos, though, to sink from a gentleman's son to an under usher; but I was not a philosopher at that time. I handed the toast to the master and mistress, the head ushers and parlour boarders, but was not allowed any myself; I taught Latin and Greek, and ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... man must have thought much over scenery before he begins fully to enjoy it. It is no youngling enthusiasm on hilltops that can possess itself of the last essence of beauty. Probably most people's heads are growing bare before they can see all in a landscape that they have the capability of seeing; and, even then, it will be only for one little moment of consummation before the faculties are again on the decline, and they that look out of the windows begin to be darkened and restrained ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of their compartment, a girl was waiting. A girl so small, she might have been a child except for a certain decision and capability about everything she did. She seized Jan, kissed her hurriedly and announced that she had got a nice little furnished flat for them till they should go to the country, and that Hannah had tea ready; this young person, herself, helped ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... scene, when I have you and Valentine! No, Di. It would certainly be very nice to have the background shifted now and then; to see Capability Brown's prim gardens melt into Alpine heights or southern vineyards, or even into Russian steppes or Hungarian forests. One does get a little tired of toujours Bayswater; and Mr. Sheldon; and crimped skate; and sirloin of beef, and the inevitable discussion as to ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... The eminent felicity of the Greek in this respect has been always acknowledged. "The joints of her compounded words", says Fuller, "are so naturally oiled, that they run nimbly on the tongue, which makes them though long, never tedious, because significant"{77}. Sir Philip Sidney boasts of the capability of our English language in this respect—that "it is particularly happy in the composition of two or three words together, near equal to the Greek". No one has done more than Milton to justify this praise, or to make manifest what may be effected by this marriage of words. Many of his compound ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... of hoist to be adopted, the capability of the hoist for general service has to be kept in mind. Platform hoists and derricks can be used for hoisting form lumber and reinforcing steel as well as for hoisting concrete, while bucket hoists cannot be so ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... to devote to such wearing work. There are usually some hours of agonising doubt, almost of despair,—so at least it has been with me,—or perhaps some days. And then, with nothing settled in my brain as to the final development of events, with no capability of settling anything, but with a most distinct conception of some character or characters, I have rushed at the work as a rider rushes at a fence which he does not see. Sometimes I have encountered what, in hunting language, we call a cropper. I had such a fall in ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... heat within a limited space, it can only be said that it opens the way into an extensive field for both pure and applied chemistry. It is not difficult to conceive of temperatures limited only by the capability of carbon to resist fusion. The results to be obtained with the large Brush machine above mentioned will be of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... 'heavy-looking, clumsy,' and 'a person she was sure she should never get on with.' He certainly did not seem to care much what impression he made upon his mother's visitor. He was at that age when young men admire a formed beauty more than a face with any amount of future capability of loveliness, and when they are morbidly conscious of the difficulty of finding subjects of conversation in talking to girls in a state of feminine hobbledehoyhood. Besides, his thoughts were full of other ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... matter to Mr Sedgwick, but he rather doubted our capability of performing the operation. He could not help us, as he was required to attend to our friends, while his man had to look after the plantations and animals, and indeed had ample work. He thought that fresh planks ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... other hand, there is the capability of being attracted, with all the personal relationships which spring from the power of admiring and loving another person. The interest in others does not expend its whole force on its primary objects,—mate ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... sitting two days for a Crayon Sketch such as may be engraved,—though this new sacrifice of patience will not be needed as matters are. It stands thus: there is no Painter, of the numbers who have wasted my time and their own with trying, that has indicated any capability of catching a true Likeness, but one Samuel Lawrence; a young Painter of real talent, not quite so young now, but still only struggling for complete mastership in the management of colors. He does crayon sketches in a way to please almost himself; but his oil paintings, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... best ones are different. Even those who are not quite the best are different. It is really a very rare scientist who joggles contentedly down without qualms, or without delays, to a hole in space. There is always a capability, an apparently left-over capability in him. What seems to happen is, that when the average human being makes up his mind to it, insists on being a scientist, the Lord keeps a remnant of happiness ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... except what congenial occupation can give. For society, long seclusion has in a great measure unfitted me, I doubt whether I should enjoy it if I might have it. Sometimes I think I should, and I thirst for it; but at other times I doubt my capability of pleasing or deriving pleasure. The prisoner in solitary confinement, the toad in the block of marble, all in time shape themselves to their ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... a man is not ashamed to learn. Many men are; they consider themselves so immensely wise that they look upon it as an impertinence in anybody to try to tell them anything they don't know already. Truly wise or truly great men—men with the capability in them for doing anything worthy in their generation—never feel this false and foolish shame. They know that most other people know some things in some directions which they do not, and they are glad to be instructed in them whenever opportunity offers. This wisdom ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... to be gifted with; by the exercise of such influence they took command over their subjects' sense of sight, and caused them to see whatever they desired that they should see. Sir Walter Scott describes the recognised capability of glamour power in ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... been the theme of every age and of every tongue. It is the test of youth and of the capability of progress. So long as a man can and does love, he is young and there is hope for him. Whoever saw a satisfactory definition of love? No one, simply because the science of physical chemistry is yet young, and it is only when moulded by the principles ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... question as the ideal type of philosophical language generally; to think that names in general, or (as they are fond of calling them) signs, are fitted for the purposes of thought in proportion as they can be made to approximate to the compactness, the entire unmeaningness, and the capability of being used as counters without a thought of what they represent, which are characteristic of the a and b, the x and y, of algebra. This notion has led to sanguine views of the acceleration of the progress of science by means which, I conceive, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... piscatory propensity had been severely punished by both Monsieur and Madame C——, who could not afford to encourage such an expensive Izaak Walton; but there was no managing the child. He seemed to possess an impish capability of eluding detection and angry denunciations. To be sure, circumstances were against any very strict guard being kept over the youngster. Madame C—— was a very weak woman, a very weak woman indeed,—she declared that such was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... mightier engine than any of man's invention; one that tyrants cannot always control, that kings cannot always manage. That engine is the human mind. Like the steam-engine, it is gathering power, and capability for the exercise of power, and the time will come when it will go crashing, with resistless energy, among thrones, overturning despotisms, upheaving dynasties, sweeping away those false theories of governmental institutions, ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... ohne Rast,"—favorite words with him. He liked to study the nature of the man who spoke them; because, I think, it was like his own,—a Titan strength of endurance, an infinite capability of love and hate and suffering, and over all (the peculiar identity of the man) a cold, speculative eye of reason, that looked down into the passion and depths of his growing self, and calmly noted them, a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... those days not only lacked the transportation facilities and improved agricultural appliances which have assisted the developers of the Northwest, but they did not even understand the nature and capability of the soil. The newcomers in western Missouri looked on the rich prairie land as worthless, and they almost invariably directed their course to the timber, where the soil was more easily broken up, and material for buildings was available. The first attempts to plough the prairie sod were ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... American monkeys in intelligence and docility, and the Coaita has perhaps the most gentle and impressible disposition; but the Parauacu, although a dull, cheerless animal, excels all in this quality of capability of attachment to individuals of our own species. It is not wanting, however, in intelligence as well as moral goodness, proof of which was furnished one day by an act of our little pet. My neighbour had quitted his house in the morning without taking Parauacu with him, and the little ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... a type that in the early days helped to build up the Church and give her stability. His nature must have been curiously complex; on the one hand, a man of action and with great capability of administration, often justifying his means by the end he had in view, and not being debarred from realising his schemes by any delicate scruples, he yet, on the other hand, presents in his letters ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... Rev. Mr. —— no, I will not tell his name—kept an account with one Jerome Ripley, a storekeeper, and on one page of this account-book, containing thirty-nine entries, twenty-one were for New England rum. It somewhat lessens in our notions the personal responsibility, or the personal potatory capability of the parson, to discover that there was an ordination in town during that rum-paged week, and that the visiting ministers probably drank the greater portion of Jerome Ripley's liquor. But I wish the store-keeper had—to save this parson's reputation among succeeding generations—called ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... occasions do inform against me, And spur my dull revenge! What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure, he that made us with such large discourse Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To rot in us unused. Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument; But greatly to find quarrel in a straw When honor's at the stake. How stand I then, That have a father killed, a mother ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... it necessary to color her statue, because she knew that the utmost capability of sculpture is the expression of form,—that, had she colored it, she would have brought it into competition with a Nature entirely beyond her in mere details, and made it a doll instead of a statue. Neither has she made it a travel-stained woman with a carpet-bag, because in history ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... in the habits and ways of the bishop.—His origin, age, capability, mode of living, labor, initiative, undertakings, and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... do not think he is like either Scott or Shakspeare. In him this French capability for rendering the outward is wrought to the highest point; and it is outwardness as pure from any touch of inspiration or sentiment as I ever remember to have seen. He is graphic to the utmost extreme. His horses and his men stand from the canvas to the astonishment of all beholders. All is ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... patriot, prisoner! See Garibaldi: despising the restraints of law; careless of the simplest conventionalities that go to make up an honest gentleman; doing both right and wrong—like a lion; everything in him leonine. All this was in Ristofalo's reach. It was all beyond Richling's. Which was best, the capability or the incapability? It was a question he would have liked to ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... I am and there I may be, but in either place I am not especially possible. You are; you can go out and make a definite, independent impression on life; that makes you possible in that you are forcing recognition of power and capability. I can't do that. The impression I make is one of incapability. For myself I am impossible, and ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... with a side glance at her daughter, who did not even appear to be trying to do so. Julia Barenna was darker than her cousin, quicker in manner, with an air of worldly capability which Estella lacked. Her eyes were quick and restless, her face less beautiful, but expressive of a great intelligence, which, if brought to bear upon men in the form of coquetry, was likely to be ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... rather have proceeded in the argument along the line of the Intellectual Virtues than of the Moral? To this it is possible to reply briefly, that in all instruction it is desirable to have regard to the capability of the learner, and to lead him by that path which is easiest to him. Wherefore, since the Moral Virtues appear to be, and are, more general and more required than the others, and are more seen in outward appearances, it was more convenient and more useful to proceed along that path than by ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... who was capable of cold-blooded murder at the prompting of an hallucination, and who now appeared equally capable of the utter annihilation of self at the service of his Imperial Master, meant what he said, Birnier did not doubt. Yet it was not anomalous. Logical in fact; the capability of supreme sacrifice for either of ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... who give this language to all that surrounds me? The world is but an instrument, to which we give sound at will. But what does it signify if it teaches us wisdom? The low voice that speaks in our breasts is always a friendly voice, for it tells us what we are, that is to say, what is our capability. Bad conduct results, for the most part, from mistaking our calling. There are so many fools and knaves, because there are so few men who know themselves. The question is not to discover what will suit us, but ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... are bred merely of our brain and of our blood. But I know that they are none the less messages from God. They tell us unmistakeably that we are the same persons that we were twenty years ago. They tell us that there is the same infection of nature, the same capability of sin, in us, that there was of old. That in our flesh dwells no good thing: that by the grace of God alone we are what we are: and that did his grace leave us, we might be once more as utter fools as we were in the wild days of youth. Yes: let ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... the earth with their kind. The manner in which some species are now becoming scarce and dying out, one after the other, appeared to me to favour the doctrine of the fixity of the specific character, showing a want of pliancy and capability of varying, which ensured their annihilation whenever changes adverse to their well-being occurred; time not being allowed for such a transformation as might be conceived capable of adapting them to the new circumstances, ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and godlike reason To fust in us unused. 557 SHAKS.: Hamlet, Act iv., ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... of humor. He had it, of course. He took pains to establish the true reading of that famous retort, "All I want out of you is common civility and damned little of that." He used to repeat with glee Lounsbury's witticism about "the infinite capability of the human mind to resist the introduction of knowledge." I wonder whether he knew of that other good saying of Lounsbury's about the historian Freeman's being, in his own person, a proof of the ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... power, as her father had ever been, and the temptation to rule as sole domineering mistress in her girlhood's home was great. But at that very instant the tall fine form of Philip Hamlyn passed across a pathway in the distance, and she turned from the temptation for ever. What little capability of loving had been left to her after the advent of Robert Grame was ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... all one-sided and inadequate. But they did see, in direct antagonism alike to the popular view and to the natural instinct of the animal man, that what is ordinarily called happiness does not represent the highest capability in humanity, or meet its indefinite aspirations; and that in degree as it is consciously made so, life becomes animalised and degraded. The whole scheme of Judaism, as first promulgated in all the stern simplicity of its ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... TLFC has taken on increasing international peacekeeping responsibilities, and took charge of a NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) command in Afghanistan in April 2007; the Turkish Navy is a regional naval power that wants to develop the capability to project power beyond Turkey's coastal waters; the Navy is heavily involved in NATO, multinational, and UN operations; its roles include control of territorial waters and security for sea lines of communications; the Turkish ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... be used when all other medication is contra-indicated. Drinking water should be pure, uncontaminated by animal or vegetable impurities, and given ad libitum, unless, in rare instances, it should cause vomiting or interfere with the capability of digesting food. If children are comatose or delirious, as they frequently are in typhoid fever, give water to them regularly, or force it upon them, if they refuse to take it, as I was obliged to do with a child of six years just recovering ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... the leadsman was present, but his pleasure was gone; he had been laughed at, and he had grown small in his own estimation, smaller than the fool, who had made quite a hit as a jester. Therefore he was despondent, felt uneasy at the thought of the future and doubtful of his own capability. And wherever he went he met the fool who was caricaturing him. He saw his faults enlarged, especially his pride and his boastfulness; all his secret thoughts and ...
— In Midsummer Days and Other Tales • August Strindberg
... much interested in the whole thing. It was a good deal of a surprise to me. It began when she heard about my bout with Sagorski. She was awfully keen about my gym work—you remember—at the Manor that night. She thought every man ought to develop his body to its fullest capability. I had Flynn out one night at Briar Hills. I didn't tell you about that—thought you mightn't understand—and we sparred six fast rounds. She kept the time and thought it was great. It was like going to a vaudeville show, she said, only a thousand times more exciting. She tried ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... it I whom they examined from morning till night, who am doomed to the same process day after day, and who wept so bitterly last night when I thought of my dear parents? Slumber, the unbroken silence, and rest had, in restoring my mental powers, added incalculably to the capability of reflecting, and, consequently, of grief. There was nothing to distract my attention; my fancy grew busy with absent forms, and pictured, to my eye the pain and terror of my father and mother, and of all dear to me, on first hearing the tidings of ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... becoming—the poet of woman. We do not mean, nor do we know, that his hold over women as his readers is greater than his command or influence over men; but that he has studied, sounded, painted woman in form, in motion, in character, in office, in capability, with rare devotion, power, and skill; and the poet who best achieves this end does also ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... it? That black, shiny, knotted lump among the gravel, small enough to be taken up in a dessert spoon. Look now, as it is raised and its coils drawn out. Three feet - six - nine, at least: with a capability of seemingly endless expansion; a slimy tape of living caoutchouc, some eighth of an inch in diameter, a dark chocolate- black, with paler longitudinal lines. Is it alive? It hangs, helpless and motionless, a mere velvet string across the hand. Ask the neighbouring ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... fragrant acid, or the leap down upon the railway-track under the crushing, pulping iron wheels?" sang the little voice. "I can give you Forgetfulness. I can bring you Death. Not that death of the body which, for all you know, may mean a keener, more perfect capability to live and suffer on the part of the Soul, stripped from the earthly husk that has burdened and deadened it. The Death that is Death in Life.... Here am I, ready to be your minister. Drink deep, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... lose himself in the locust swarm, to be prominent neither for good nor evil, even in the little clot of fifty, outwardly, almost identical locusts that formed his platoon. It braced him to the performance of hideous tasks; it restrained him from display of superior intellectual power or artistic capability. The world upheaval had thrown him from his peacock and ivory room, with its finest collection on earth of little china dogs, into a horrible fetid hole in the ground in Northern France. It had thrown not the average young Englishman of comfortable position, who had toyed with aesthetic ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... a priest of some capability; cure of Guerande, Brittany. In 1836, a constant visitor at the Guenics, he exerted a tardily acquired influence over Felicite des Touches, whose disappointments in love he fathomed and whom he determined to turn towards a religious life. Her conversion ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... passages that I think ever came from his pen. Commenting, in his Essay on Landscape Gardening (1828), on the proper domestic ornaments of the Castle Pleasaunce, he has this beautiful burst of lamentation over the barbarous innovations of the Capability men:—"Down went many a trophy of old magnificence, courtyard, ornamented enclosure, fosse, avenue, barbican, and every external muniment of battled wall and flanking tower, out of the midst of which the ancient dome, rising high above all its characteristic accompaniments, and seemingly ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... regarded the speaker in no little amazement. This was the second time he had escaped from the Missouri prison, which argued well for the man's keenness and capability, or else ill for the official ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... of the Kluchefskoi volcano, the monarch of Siberian mountains, whose sharp summit, with its motionless streamer of golden smoke, can be seen anywhere within a radius of a hundred miles. All other neighbouring beauties of scenery are merely tributary to this, and are valued only according to their capability of relieving and setting forth this magnificent peak, whose colossal dimensions rise in one unbroken sweep of snow from the grassy valleys of the Kamchatka and Yolofka, which terminate at its base. "Heir of the sunset ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... identified with the meager family life to be thrown away, and Tira found it "up attic" and brought it down to him. She waited, in a sympathetic interest, to see him try it, and when he did and swung across the kitchen with an angry capability, she caught her breath, in a new fear of him. The crutch looked less a prop to his insufficiency than like a weapon. He could reach her with it. He could reach the child. And then she began to see how his helplessness had built up in her a false security. He was on the way to strength ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... was the reason why she had never attracted Jack. Both their natures were strong and firm. Both had full control over themselves, although both of a passionate nature; both had the capability of making great sacrifices, even of life if necessary; both had ambition and a steady power of work. No wonder Jack had thought of her as a comrade rather than as a possible wife; while Harry, gentler and easily led, patient rather than firm, ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... prize that don't deserve or care for it. I wish I could give you your silly prize, cousin, but I can't; I have tried and I can't." And she went away, shaking her head mournfully, but always, it seemed to Esmond, that her liking and respect for him was greatly increased, since she knew what capability he had both to act and bear; to do and ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... any disrelish of this talk, carried on in his presence in a foreign tongue; but he was evidently not concerned about it in the least. He smoked his eternal cigarettes, and answered in monosyllables the remarks that Miller was making. He did not look bored, for that expression implies a capability of being interested; and that he seemed not to possess, at least so far as Noel's experience went, and ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... of the corpora cavernosa, which cause the stiffness of the phallus and its capability of penetrating the vagina, by certain special structures of their spongy vascular spaces, also shows a good deal of variety within the vertebrate stem. This stiffness is increased in many orders of mammals (especially the carnassia and rodents) by the ossification of a part ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... which, possessed by a body, gives it the capability of doing work. Kinetic energy is the work a body can do in virtue of its motion. Potential energy is the work a body can do in virtue of its position. The unit of energy is ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... owners and librarians, shall submit to the Congress a report stating whether this paragraph has achieved its intended purpose of maintaining the integrity of the copyright system while providing nonprofit libraries the capability to fulfill their function. Such report shall advise the Congress as to any information or recommendations that the Register of Copyrights considers necessary to carry out the ...
— Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code, Circular 92 • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.
... of the General Government. In a word, the original States went into this permanent league on the agreed premises of exerting their common strength for the defense of the whole and of all its parts, but of utterly excluding all capability of reciprocal aggression. Each solemnly bound itself to all the others neither to undertake nor permit any encroachment upon or intermeddling with another's ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... fortifications, as land defences, is sufficiently proved by showing their general capability of resisting an invader, even for a limited period; thus affording us time and opportunity to provide other means of security. But it must not be inferred that forts besieged en regle will necessarily fall after so many days. Such is far from being the case. The besieged have usually great advantages ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... disagreeable than such an interview, but he could not allow himself to be guilty of the cowardice of declining it. Of a personal quarrel with Burton he was not afraid. He felt, indeed, that he might almost find relief in the capability of being himself angry with any one. But he must positively make up his mind before such an interview. He must devote himself either to Florence or to Julia; and he did not know how to abandon the ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... the world never contained their equal. Their productive capability is the marvel even of this age of industrial miracles. And yet, with every nerve strained to its utmost tension; toiling, saving—at very death-grips with destiny—they are sinking year by year deeper into the Slough of Despond—into that most frightful of all Gehennas, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... when one person acts wrongly, another is at once suspected of a capability to do so likewise. There is my name and my address; I should like rather to go alone to see the house, because I always fancy I can judge better by myself of the accommodation, and I can stay as long as I like, and ascertain the sizes of all the rooms ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... the midst of all this study and this infant authorship the perusal of such masses of poetry could not fail to produce their effect. Of a youth whose mind, like mine at that period, possessed some general capability, without perhaps a single prominent and marked talent, a proneness to imitation is sure to be the besetting sin. I consequently, for a large portion of my earlier life, never read a work which struck my fancy, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and strode the country a mere scowling ruffian, with his uppermost emotions still stamped on his face. The calamity also bred an unsuspected sensitiveness in him, and he smarted often under the reflection of what others must be thinking. His capability towards vindictiveness proved very considerable. Formerly his anger against his fellow-men had been as a thunder-storm, tremendous but brief in duration; now, before this bolt of his own forging, a steady, malignant activity ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... and then to attend to his saw-mill. With regard to domestic arrangements, everything connected with household affairs went on in the same course year after year except that, as the daughters of the family improved in capability of work, Chloe the black girl, retrograded. They washed on Monday (with the assistance of a woman, hired for the day), ironed on Tuesday, performed what they called "the little baking" on Wednesday, and "the big baking" on Friday; cleaned the house on Saturday, and clear-starched ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... mentioned that on that day Lord Gladstone signed no fewer than sixteen new Acts of Parliament — some of them being rather voluminous — while three days earlier, His Excellency signed another batch of eight, of which the bulk was beyond the capability of any mortal to read ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... mothers and children serving in different or in the same departments. The South at first specialized on ducks, twills, denims, and such coarse work. Now, however, there is a growing tendency to diversify the product. The reason is found in the increasing capability of the workers, many of whom have by now spent many years of their lives in the mills, and whose fathers before them were operatives. Unless present conditions change and the South becomes the mecca ...
— The Fabric of Civilization - A Short Survey of the Cotton Industry in the United States • Anonymous
... towns revealed more fully than before, the capability of New Englanders to become democratic pioneers, under characteristic frontier conditions. Their economic life was simple and self-sufficing. They readily adopted lynch law (the use of the "birch seal" is familiar to readers of Vermont history) to protect their land titles in the ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... educated in the "humanities" since the Renaissance. They have never been truly incorporated in the mores of any society. Olbos was wealth, with grace, opulence, elegance, and generosity, and so wealth when not sordid or arrogant, the opposite of plutocratic. Arete was capacity, capability, and practical efficiency,—executive ability. Aidos was the opposite of "cheek." Sophrosyne was continence, self-control. Kalokagathie contained notions of economic, aesthetic, and moral good, fused into a single concept.[423] The eleutheros ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... standard of his dictating. She had a high, rich colour; but her complexion must always have been rough, and a pronounced little moustache crossed her upper lip, like an accent to the speech that was too distinct and uncompromising to be melodious. Her every limb and feature, however, was instinct with capability, and, in her presence, one must always be moved to marvel over that indescribable worship of disproportion that has grown to be the ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... was handsome, but Mrs. Theodora looked upon him with sour disapproval. He owned a stony little farm at the remote end of Ramble Valley and was reputed to be fonder of many things than of work. To be sure, Judith had enough capability and energy for two; but Mrs. Theodora detested a lazy man. She ordered Judith not to encourage him and Judith obeyed. Judith generally obeyed her aunt; but, though she renounced Bruce Marshall, she would have nothing to do with Eben King or anybody else and all Mrs. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery |
