"Impotence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... while the Bill was reasonable and there was no reasonable doubt of the power of Congress to enact it, yet the attempt to pass it, if it were to fail, would do the cause infinite mischief. It would be an exhibition of impotence, always injurious to a political party. It would drive back into the Democratic Party many men who were afraid of negro domination; who looked with great dislike on the assertion of National power over elections, and whom other considerations would induce to act with the Republicans. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... himself the impotence of the private member. He had, as we have seen, been elected to Parliament by South Salford in 1906 as a Liberal. In Parliament he proposed a measure for the publication of the names of subscribers to ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... reach a billet of wood beside his bunk. He struck at Bull's head with it, but the stick was brushed out of his palsied fingers with a single gesture, and, while Uncle Bill groaned with fury and impotence, Bull continued the task of preparing him for bed. He straightened the old body of the terrible Campbell; he heated water in the tub and washed away stains and dirt; he took off the stained bandages and replaced them ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... limited to a week, or must risk suspicion by staying. Dollmann was away (according to von Brning), 'would probably be back soon'; but how soon? Beyond Norderney lay Memmert. How to probe its secret? The ardour it had roused in me was giving way to a mortifying sense of impotence. The sight of the Kormoran, with her crew preparing for sea, was a pointed comment on my diplomacy, and most of all on my ridiculous survey of the dykes. When all was said and done we were protgs of von Brning, and dogged by Grimm. Was it likely they ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... toward her by a strong impulse of his heart and body. He would have liked to squeeze her, strangle her, eat her, make her part of himself. And he trembled with impotence, impatience, rage, to think she did not belong to him entirely, as ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... went in Southey's favour. "The words of the men of Judah were fiercer than the words of the men of Israel," and Byron was reduced to silence. A challenge (sent through Kinnaird, but not delivered) was but a confession of impotence. There was, however, in Southey's letter to the Courier just one sentence too many. Before he concluded he had given "one word of advice to Lord Byron"—"When he attacks me again, let it be in rhyme. For one who has so little command of himself, it will be a great advantage that his temper should ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... the side of the bed. She had a long, strong, thin arm and it darted beneath and clutched. But it was not long enough to attain the corner where the kicking and screaming was going on. Her temper became fury before her impotence and her hideous realization of being made ridiculous by this baby of six. Two floors below the afterglow of the little dinner was going on. Suppose even far echoes of the screams should be heard and make her more ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... As if seeing his impotence, the hunter suddenly ceases speech, again setting himself to listen. Hamersley, without heeding him, is already ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... trembling and respectful lovers who deserve but cannot force her favors. The public is won by the bold, imperious talents—by the enterprising and the skillful. It does not believe in modesty, which it regards as a device of impotence. The golden book contains but a section of the true geniuses; it names those only who have ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... control, with the lesser capitalist states silenced; with the border states made or in the making; with the enemy reduced to economic impotence, and the unexploited portions of the world assigned for exploitation, the conference was compelled to face still another problem—the Socialist ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... inner impulse that had been stunned to impotence by his violence—stirred within her at his words and awoke. Yet it was scarcely of her own volition that she ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... could only be the hands also! If the hands could only reach out from where the brain pondered and foresaw! But they could not, and so he must trust Commines. Trust Commines! A little gust of anger at his impotence shook him and he shivered, dashing his hands upon the table; it was never safe to trust any one—never! But he was helpless, there was no escape, and in turn Commines must trust one other: trust him with execution, that is, with blind performance, not with knowledge. Beyond ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... are not banished from my mind. I was resentfully conscious of not being able to walk or express myself freely. Prayerful surges arose within me as I realized my bodily impotence. My strong emotional life took silent form as words in many languages. Among the inward confusion of tongues, my ear gradually accustomed itself to the circumambient Bengali syllables of my people. The beguiling scope ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... exhausted by the loss of the flower of their youth, demoralized by the reaction from feverish strife, the forces of disintegration had set in in the United States between 1783 and 1787. Law and order had almost perished and the provisional government had been reduced to impotence. A few wise and noble spirits, true Faithfuls and Great Hearts, led a despondent people out of the Slough of Despond till their feet were again on firm ground and their faces turned towards the Delectable Mountains of peace, justice, and liberty. ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... turn of affairs so flustered the inexperienced hunter that he altogether forgot to cock his gun. Twice he pulled desperately on the trigger, but with no result. Then, smitten with a sense of impotence, he hurled the gun ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of the world. If it succeed, the human race goes free again. If it fail—and God forbid!—then the whole world will lie in the grip of Flint and Waldron! With our other centers broken up and under espionage, our press forced into impotence—save our underground press—and political action now rendered farcical as ever it was in Mexico, when Diaz ruled, we ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... that, to men in their circumstances, were almost worse than death. It will not be surprising that the irritation of such a systematic persecution, superadded to a previous, 20 and hereditary hatred, and accompanied by the stinging consciousness of utter impotence as regarded all effectual vengeance, should gradually have inflamed the Kalmuck animosity into the wildest expression of downright madness and frenzy. Indeed, long before the 25 frontiers of China were approached, the hostility of both sides had assumed ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... encounter next? This issue— 'Twas nothing more than darkness deepening darkness, And weakness crowned with the impotence of death!— Your pupil is, you see, an apt proficient. (ironically) Start not!—Here is another face hard by; Come, let us take a peep at both together, And, with a voice at which the dead will quake, Resound the praise of your morality— Of this ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... all as we grow up in years, hours in which it is impossible to keep down the conviction that everything is vanity, that the life past has been vain from folly, and that the life to come must be vain from impotence. It is the presence of thoughts such as these that needs the assurance of a heaven to save the thinker from madness or from suicide. It is when the feeling of this pervading vanity is strongest on him, that he who doubts ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... gentleman of note In Rome, Maecenas,[20] somewhere wrote:— "Make me the poorest wretch that begs, Sore, hungry, crippled, clothed in rags, In hopeless impotence of arms and legs; Provided, after all, you give The one sweet liberty to live: I'll ask of Death no greater favour Than just ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... in outward form a youth, almost an infant, yet surprising all the world. The beauty of the Greek statues was a sexless beauty; the statues of the gods had the least traces of sex. Here there is a moral sexlessness, a kind of impotence, an ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with a divine beauty and significance of ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... only foreigners but Germans from other parts of Germany, are loud in their denunciations of the Berliners. "Frech" and "roh" are words often used about them. There is a surly malice of speech and manner among the working classes, that seems to indicate a wish to atone for political impotence, by braggart impudence to those whom they regard as superior. When we played horse as children, we champed the wooden bit, shied, and balked and kicked, and the worse we behaved the more spirited horses we thought ourselves. There is a certain social and political radicalism verging upon anarchy, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... the conviction of his impotence grew upon him he felt something like resentment toward the one who had thwarted his purpose; and so it naturally happened that when they met again at the supper-table, his cool and indifferent manner corresponded with that of Miss Mayhew to a degree that gave her ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... usually drove off at this time of the day; it brought home to him too keenly the many times when he himself had ridden back by the side of Lew Hervey from a day of galloping in the wind; it crushed him with a sense of the impotence into which his life had fallen. Indeed, unless some vital change came, her father must soon mourn himself into a grave. For the first time Marianne clearly perceived this. Oliver Jordan was wasting for grief over his lost freedom just as some ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... were furious, and represented to the Pope that he himself was the character intended by Simplicio, the philosopher whose opinions get alternately refuted and ridiculed by the other two, till he is reduced to an abject state of impotence. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... stoves, of slaves, and of honours; but how you let your imagination offer you banquets, perfumes, naked women, and applauding crowds! Your chastity is but a more subtle kind of corruption, and your contempt for the world is but the impotence of your hatred against it! This is the reason that persons like you are so lugubrious, or perhaps it is because they lack faith. The possession of the truth gives joy. Was Jesus sad? He used to go about surrounded by friends; He rested under the ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... go to his help, but I could do nothing, and the feeling of impotence began to rob me of such little ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... You never saw that red flood bearing the mangled breasts of women and the spattered brains of babes and sucklings. Oh! [He covers his eyes with his hands. The BARON turns away in gloomy impotence. At last DAVID begins to speak quietly, almost dreamily.] It was your Easter, and the air was full of holy bells and the streets of holy processions—priests in black and girls in white and waving palms and crucifixes, and everybody exchanging Easter eggs and kissing one another ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... back. And just then I felt the whole man sink under me. The breath was leaving his lungs and his chest was collapsing under my weight. Whether it was merely the expelled breath, or his consciousness of his growing impotence, I know not, but his throat vibrated with a deep groan. The hand at my throat relaxed. I breathed. It fluttered and tightened again. But even his tremendous will could not overcome the dissolution that assailed it. That will of his was ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... family, and thus providing himself with a son, Henry had also provided the country with the very type of powerful family which was to rule merely by pillage. An enormous and unnatural tragedy, the execution of one of the Seymours by his own brother, was enacted during the impotence of the childish king, and the successful Seymour figured as Lord Protector, though even he would have found it hard to say what he was protecting, since it was not even his own family. Anyhow, it is hardly too much to say that every human thing was left unprotected from ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... the verse 'Praestet fides,' and then it runs off the rails, taking no account of the shades, which are, however, quite perceptible, that the Gregorian melody introduces when the text declares the impotence of reason and the powerful aid of Faith; these adulterations are still more apparent, if you listen to the 'Salve Regina' after Compline. This is abridged more than half, is enervated, blanched, half its pauses are taken ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... Louis XIV and Louis XV there had been even greater hunger and misery; but the outbreaks, which were roughly and promptly put down, were only partial and passing disorders. Some rioters were at once hung, and others were sent to the galleys. The peasant or the workman, convinced of his impotence, at once returned to his stall or his plow. When a wall is too high one does not even think of scaling it.—But now the wall is cracking—all its custodians, the clergy, the nobles, the Third-Estate, men of letters, the politicians, and even the Government ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... is nothing more cruel than the impotence of genius to hold and keep those commonest joys and mere natural affections which dullards and worse than dullards rejoice in at their pleasure; the common human things, whose loss makes the great possessions of its imperial powers all ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Jesus admitted his impotence as a human being when he said, "I can of mine own self do nothing."[46] Even with the assistance of his Father he did not accomplish what he ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd
... impotence of the new nation exhibited toward England only in the western country. Because it drained almost the whole of the great inland valley, forming with its tributaries a network of ready-made highways, the Mississippi River assumed an importance to the trans-Alleghanian settlers which is ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... Victorien Sardou, which may not have been the naughtiest play of the 19th century, but was certainly the very naughtiest that any English manager in his senses would have ventured to produce. Nevertheless, being a very amusing play, it passed the licenser with the exception of a reference to impotence as a ground for divorce which no English actress would have ventured on in any case. Within the last few months a very amusing comedy with a strongly polygamous moral was found irresistible by the Lord Chamberlain. Plenty of fun and a happy ending will get anything licensed, ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... unprofitable applauses and no support. Their correspondence was always filled with complaints, the justice of which was always admitted by the Court of Directors; but this admission of the existence of the evil showed only the impotence of those who were to administer the remedy. The authority of the Court of Directors, resisted with success in so capital an instance as that of the resignation, was not likely to be respected in any other. What influence it really ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... these men were murdered the General Government could not even bring the murderers to trial for their crime. Its treaty had been broken by a handfull of its own citizens and it was powerless to punish them. It had to confess its impotence to the world, and paid Italy a specified sum of money. The Negro finds himself an unprotected foreigner in his own home. Whatever outrages may be perpetrated upon him by the people of the state in which he lives, he ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... countenances. The spectacle of so many vivid passions, of all these lovers' quarrels, these pleasing revenges, these cruel favors, these flaming glances, of all this ardent life diffused around them, only made them feel their impotence more keenly. ...
— Domestic Peace • Honore de Balzac
... a thrill smote through the bosom of the spy; but it was not wholly a thrill of dismay. There was little indeed in the appearance of the wretched sleeper, at that moment, to inspire terror; for apart from the condition of helpless impotence, to which his ungovernable appetites had reduced him, he seemed to be entirely unarmed,—at least Nathan could see neither knife nor tomahawk about him. But there was that in the grim visage, withered with age, and seamed with many a scar,—in the mutilated, but ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... his path with one gesture; there was no longer to be anything but painting left. One might murder one's parents, comrades, and women especially, and it would all be a good riddance. After this terrible fever he fell into abominable despondency, spending a week of impotence and doubt, a whole week of torture, during which he fancied himself struck silly. But he was getting over it, he had resumed his usual life, his resigned solitary struggle with his great picture, when one foggy morning, towards the end of October, he started and hastily set his ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... them out of his path and gone proudly on his way. But here he was helpless. For the first time in his strong, successful youth he realised that which his father had striven all his years to teach him, man's utter impotence before God. He was bound hand and foot, helpless, just as the door of success had flung open at his touch. He had paddled out bravely into the open sea of life after the rainbow gold, only to find it vanish and leave him lost in a world of mists and shadows. He remembered Dr. Leslie's ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... established by the Jesuits show the impotence of their system for the civilisation of the wild man. The territory where they carried on their chief labours exists on the eastern bank of the Parana, to the north of Uruguay and Corrientes, bordering on the Brazilian territory. After three hundred years of labour, they ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... the hesitation with which he had accosted the cardinal a quarter of an hour before, there might be read in the eyes of the young king that will against which a struggle might be maintained, and which might be crushed by its own impotence, but which, at least, would preserve, like a wound in the depth of the heart, ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... be every incentive to progress, with the least possible danger of unmerited destitution. And although large economic organizations will continue, as they are bound to do, there will be a diffusion of power which will take away the sense of individual impotence from which men and women ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... next day or two, and I had the business of the store to myself. I was glad of this, for it gave me leisure to reflect upon the various perplexities of my situation. As I have said, I was really scared, more out of a sense of impotence than from dread of actual danger. I was in a fog of uncertainty. Things were happening around me which I could only dimly guess at, and I had no power to take one step in defence. That Wardlaw should ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... putting himself at the service of others, while his own occupations claim his attention,—he refuses, I say, to aid others in getting a foothold, as he was aided in getting his own; and when, in the impotence of their isolation, these poor laborers are compelled to sell their birthright, he—this ungrateful proprietor, this knavish upstart—stands ready to put the finishing touch to their deprivation and their ruin. And you ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... conclusions on the everlasting theme, that even for the stone wall you are yourself somehow to blame, though again it is as clear as day you are not to blame in the least, and therefore grinding your teeth in silent impotence to sink into luxurious inertia, brooding on the fact that there is no one even for you to feel vindictive against, that you have not, and perhaps never will have, an object for your spite, that it is a sleight of hand, ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... indicated. No sooner, it appears, does man proceed to obtain "spiritual truth" tolerably pure, as tested by such writers, than he proceeds incontinently to adulterate it! This unhappy and uniform tendency is also a curious comment on the impotence of the internal spiritual oracle, as against the ascendency of ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... taking away of some kind of enemies increaseth the number. It is then most gracious in a prince to pardon when many about him would make him cruel; to think then how much he can save when others tell him how much he can destroy; not to consider what the impotence of others hath demolished, but what his own greatness can sustain. These are a prince's virtues: and they that give him other counsels are but ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... vexation, if not a curse (viii.). Centuries seem to separate these conceptions—the one expressing the exuberant enthusiasm with which the monarchy was initiated, the other—perhaps about Hosea's time (cf. Hosea viii. 4)—reflecting the melancholy experience of its essential impotence.[2] [Footnote 1: The Greek text of Samuel is often of great value. In 1 Sam. xiv. 18 it preserves the undoubtedly original reading, "bring hither the ephod, for he carried the ephod that day before Israel," instead of "Being hither ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... that moment, with an air of exasperating insouciant insolence, he came into the room and began chaffing with Valonne, and turning to her said something which set her wounded pride again all aflame, and burning with impotence and indignation she, as the strange guest, put her hand on his arm ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... than mine; and just so has the Lord dealt with me. When he slew me, then I trusted in him; when he gave me carnal ease and comfort, I forgot my Rock and rebelled. Often did I stumble too from legality, instead of looking at my own weakness and impotence, and trusting wholly in my Redeemer's strength. I was wroth with myself, wondered at myself, and thought it impossible I could be as I had been. I made strong resolutions, yea, vows, and became a slave in means ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... source of beauty is the suitability of their structure to their manner of life. In times when bodily strength in men was more essential to a warrior than now, it was held in so much more esteem. Impotence in both sexes, and barrenness in women, are generally contemned, for the loss of human ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... the same moment, with the very extremity of her own emotion, a cloud of impotence fell upon Marcella. She suddenly felt that she could do nothing—that there was nothing in her adequate to such an appeal—nothing strong enough to lift the weight of a human ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... impudence—" began the Count healthily, and then uttered a mighty groan of impotence. It was clear that he could not do justice to the occasion ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... had taken advantage of that moment of M. de La Tour d'Azyr's impotence to draw a pistol in his turn. "I think it will be better to burn his brains instead," he said. "Stand away from ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... through the glory of the day by the dusty road-side, begging bread from the passing throng; the crippled lay in their misery and impotence at the gateways of the temples, sustained by the occasional coins tossed by the more fortunate as they hurried by. Nervous and mental sufferers must range through the wilds of deserts and waste places, or share the ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... the moment she looked out, she gave a cry of astonishment, and stood staring. Gibbie had followed her as softly as swiftly, and looking out also, saw good cause indeed for her astonishment: the channel of the raging burn was all but dry! Instantly he understood what it meant. In his impotence to persuade, he caught the girl in his arms, and rushed with her from the room. She had faith enough in him by this time not to struggle or scream. He shot down the stair with her, and out of the front door. Her weight ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... I do say that those who love should not be ready to reproach; they should put a generous construction. You might have known, and you ought to have known, that I was struggling to find you, and torn with anguish at my impotence." ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... unmade at the will of these men behind the scenes, most of whom are quite unknown to fame. The creation of infant Emperors, allowed to bear the Imperial name in their infancy and youth, but compelled to abdicate on reaching manhood, was a common device for maintaining nominal Imperialism with actual impotence. ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... daring, and yet all now a ruin and a blank; an intellect at war with good, and the good had conquered! But the conviction neither touched the conscience nor enlightened the reason; he felt, it is true, a moody sense of impotence, but it brought rage, not despondency. It was not that he submitted to Good as too powerful to oppose, but that he deemed he had not yet gained all the mastery over the arsenal of Evil. And evil he called it not. Good and evil to him ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this philosophy, and those of revealed truth.... For this philosophy is professedly a scientific demonstration of the impossibility of that 'wisdom in high matters' which the Apostle prohibits us even to attempt; and it proposes, from the limitation of the human powers, from our impotence to comprehend what, however, we must admit, to show articulately why the 'secret things of God,' cannot but be to man 'past finding out.'"[O] Faith in the inconceivable must thus become the ultimate refuge, even of the pantheist and the atheist, no less than of the Christian; the difference ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... Lupin, struggling. "And then? What does this prove? Suppose one of us reduces the other to impotence: what will he have gained? You will not know what to do with me nor I with you. We shall stay here like ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... an aimless dissection of a caput mortuum—i.e., of the verbal husks of dead thoughts, whose value Formal Logic could neither establish nor apprehend, A real Logic, therefore, would most anxiously avoid all the initial abstractions which have reduced Formal Logic to such impotence, and would abandon the insane attempt to eliminate the thinker from the theory ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... favour known to have been extended to Chaucer by King Richard II. Probably no English sovereign has been more diversely estimated, both by his contemporaries and by posterity, than this ill-fated prince, in the records of whose career many passages betokening high spirit strangely contrast with the impotence of its close. It will at least be remembered in his favour that he was a patron of the arts; and that after Froissart had been present at his christening, he received, when on the threshold of manhood, the homage of Gower, and on the eve of his downfall showed most seasonable kindness ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... Power in silence drew My Lady's life away. I watched, dumb for dismay, The shock of thrills that quivered through Her wasted frame, and shook The meaning in her look, As near, more near, the moment grew. O horrible suspense! O giddy impotence! I saw her features lax, and change ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... hiccough now, but a pause from pure physical impotence, pending a doubtful struggle ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... in these two clauses more pointed and emphatic in the original than in our Bible, between man's impotence and God's power in the face of the fact of sin. The words of the first clause might be translated, with perhaps a little increase of vividness, 'iniquities are too strong for me'; and the 'Thou' of the next clause is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... remedy is to strike at the root of all these injuries—the political impotence of the injured. What diplomatic protests will never accomplish, a fair measure of Uitlander representation would gradually but surely bring about. It seems a paradox, but it is true, that the only effective ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... the world," he wrote in Nature, "that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make whether Orion is up there in heaven or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?" On the other hand, our evidence ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... possessed, or was supposed to possess, curative energy; and round which the kindness of some forgotten benefactor had built five rude porches. There lay a crowd of wasted forms, and pale, sorrowful faces, with all varieties of pain and emaciation and impotence marked upon them, who yet were gathered in Bethesda, which being interpreted means 'a house of mercy.' It is the type of a world full of men suffering various sicknesses, but all sick; the type of a world that gathers with an eagerness, not far removed from despair, round anything ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... sides and the long range of her heavy rifled guns, it was particularly desirable to anticipate her crossing the upper bar by the fleet itself crossing the lower. That done, the Tennessee was reduced to impotence. It was not done, for two reasons. First, the Navy Department did not send the ironclads which Farragut demanded; and second, the army in the Southwest, having wasted its strength in a divergent operation, ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... the Greco-Roman States; yet they fell, as I have just said, to slavery and ruin, not so much from the blows of the barbarians, as from the dissolving influence of a material civilization, resulting inevitably in public and private impotence ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... two needs is urgent, almost physical. For the last ten years, the government has not done its duty, or has ruled in a contrary sense. By turns or at the same time its impotence and injustice have been deplorable. It has committed or allowed too many outrages on persons, property, and consciences. All in all the Revolution did nothing else, and it is time that this should stop. Safety and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... declamation, perhaps impertinent and presuming, when I ought to confine myself to the scheme I submit to your consideration. It is, sir, in the first place, to disarm all the manifestly disaffected, as well of the lower as the higher class, not on the principle of putting them in a state of impotence (for this I observed before will not be the case) but to supply our troops with arms of which they stand in too great need. Secondly, to appraise their estates and oblige them to deposite at least the value of one half of their respective property in the ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... woman's folly. He appreciated, on the contrary, how entirely she had been a spoiled child of fortune all her life—a queen-regnant, to whom all things must submit themselves—and he felt how bitter must be this first sharp proof of her own impotence to secure the toy on which she had set her heart. It was these thoughts which made his voice almost gentle when he spoke again: "You must not think that I am ungrateful for your kind interest in my behalf. You can imagine, perhaps, how much I hate to part with Claremont, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... said, with a wild, guttural laugh, and reckless determination, impotence, and pain could be ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... is the work which you asked of me. I am happy, in thus dedicating it, to offer you a proof of the respectful affection you allow me to bear you. If I am reproached for impotence in this attempt to draw from the depths of mysticism a book which seeks to give, in the lucid transparency of our beautiful language, the luminous poesy of the Orient, to you the blame! Did you not command this struggle (resembling that of Jacob) by telling me that ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... The impotence of the pollen in certain atrophied flowers, as noticed by the same observer, is of much interest, especially in reference to the sexual relationship between the different forms in polymorphic flowers as ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... was bending in two and falling on his knees like a disjointed doll. Under the action of the chloroform, the fearsome brute sank into impotence, ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... there was no bitterness or fierce revolt, no angry sarcasm against an unjust world or stinging remorse for fault of his own. Defeat was his destiny, and he bowed to it as the old Greek heroes bowed to the decree of the gods, and laughed sometimes at the impotence of misfortune to fetter the free flight of his thoughts. And Elizabeth was his ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... spiritual aspirations, and had but little effect on personal struggles for truth or holiness. It was human and worldly, not lofty nor even reverential, except among the few who had deep religious wants. One of its characteristic features was the acknowledged impotence of the gods to secure future happiness. In fact, the future was generally ignored, and even immortality was but a dream of philosophers. Men lived not in view of future rewards and punishments, or future existence at all, but for the enjoyment of the present; ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... a previous experience of being defied by a nephew, but it had not accustomed him to the sensation. He was aware of an unpleasant feeling of impotence. Nothing is harder than to know what to do ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... indicative of decomposition, producing serious illness in those exposed for any length of time to its influence. We may add, among other sequelae, aside from death produced through primary and secondary effects, paralysis, loss of nerve power, impotence, haemorrhage, even ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... slowly towards him. There was something in his appearance which terrified Masters. He raised his fist to strike the door. He was a fighting man, but he felt a sudden sense of impotence. ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... appear to dread other injury from them than insult, to which, fool though he was, he was keenly alive. Human gad-flies that they were! they sometimes stung him beyond endurance, and he would curse them in the impotence of his anger. Once or twice Elsie had been so far carried beyond her constitutional timidity, by sympathy for the distress of her friend, that she had gone out and talked to the boys,—even scolded ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... impotence filled his mind, coupled with a raging passion at the danger to the girl beside him. And suddenly his lips ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... right? You gave it to me. Who gave me the power? You gave it to me. And I will cling to it with grim determination. Try to take it from me. You gave it to me—you with your malice, your ignorance, your stupidity! You with your wretched impotence! Right! Power! They have turned the earth into a sewer, an outrage, an abode of slaves. They worry each other, they torture each other, and they ask: "Who dares to take us by the throat?" I! ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... Where were the splendid fleets which were to have battered the English defence into impotence? Where was the Reserve, which was to have convoyed the transports across the narrow waters? Where were the transports themselves and the half million men, horses and artillery which to-day they were to land upon the stricken shores ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... been Jean Jacques' lot of late years, but the final revelation of his own impotence was overwhelming. When he began to stir about among his affairs, he was faced by the fact that the law stood in his way. He realized with inward horror his shattered egotism and natural vanity; he saw that he might just as well be in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that the most potent contribution towards bringing about Christian union will come not from the recognized leaders of the Churches, but from the soldiers on active service who have been impressed with the impotence of the existing system to bring about that condition which represents the ideal of Christianity, and the answer to our Lord's prayer, 'that all may be one ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... over three months, to the termination of the career of the pope who has been so far our companion. Not any more was the distracted Clement to twist his handkerchief, or weep, or flatter, or wildly wave his arms in angry impotence; he was to lie down in his long rest, and vex the world no more. He had lived to set England free—an exploit which, in the face of so persevering an anxiety to escape a separation, required a rare genius and a combination of singular qualities. He had finished his ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... the Irishman rules them. A highly intelligent professor said to me in Boston, 'We have solved the Irish problem here; we have an entirely independent Irish Government.' While we are complaining, in an almost passionate manner, of the impotence of mere cliques of idealists and dreamers, they are complaining, often in a very indignant manner, of the power of great gangs of bosses and bullies. There are a great many Americans who pity the Irish, very naturally and very rightly, for the historic martyrdom which their patriotism has endured. ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... married four times: her first husband was Giovanni Sforza, lord of Pesaro, whom she left owing to his impotence; the second, Alfonso, Duke of Bisiglia, whom her brother Caesar caused to be assassinated; the third, Alfonso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, from whom a second divorce separated her; finally, the fourth, Alfonso of Aragon, who ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... seething with unrest and filled with injustice, and they turn upon the Church and ask, "Why have you not changed all this? Are you not, in fact, neglecting your duty in not changing it? Or if you are not neglecting your duty, you must at least confess to your impotence. Your self-confessed business is to ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... seems to be connected, by the nearest and dearest relations, with his fellow-mortals, what a solitary creature, tried by the test of sympathy, the human being really is in the teeming world that he inhabits! Affording one more example of the impotence of human language to speak for itself, my misinterpreted words had found their way to the one sensitive place in Helena Gracedieu's impenetrable nature. She betrayed it in the quivering and flushing of her hard face, and in the appeal to the looking-glass which escaped her eyes ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... his mind upon Farmer Fleming's conception of his wealth, to feel the miserable smallness of what seemed legitimately his own; and he felt it with so poignant an emotion that at times his fears of death were excited by the knowledge of a dead man's impotence to suggest hazy margins in the final exposure of his property. There it would lie, dead as himself! ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the Catholics to poverty, ignorance, and impotence, and the aim was successful. Of the laws against priests, worship, education, and of the bars to commerce and the professions, I need not speak. In the matter of property, the fundamental enactments concerned the land, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... 'the Lord's chosen.' Samuel was staggered by the apparent failure of his errand. God had told him that he had provided a king from this family, and now they had passed in review before him, and none was chosen. Again he is made to feel his own impotence, and his question, 'Are here all thy children?' has a touch of bewilderment in it. God seldom shows us His choice at first; and both in thought and practice we get at the precious and the true by a process of exclusion, having often ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Two years ago the impotence of love, The vainness of a kiss, how barren a caress, Mayhap my soul to higher things have soarn, Nor clung to earthly loves and tender dreams, But ever up aloft into the blue empyrean, And there to master all the world of ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... "developing," his attempt at combining incompatible parts. His manner in this respect reminds one of two people who even in other ways are not unlike him in style—the brothers Goncourt; one almost feels compassion for so much impotence. That Wagner disguised his inability to create organic forms, under the cloak of a principle, that he should have constructed a "dramatic style" out of what we should call the total inability to create any style whatsoever, ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... civilized people—for instance, our neighbor, Japan, which in the short space of twenty years has reached a point where she has no reason to envy any one, her strength and ascendency being shown in the last war with China. I see the impotence of the Spanish Government to contend with certain elements which oppose constant obstacles to the progress of the country itself and whose destructive influence has been one of the causes of the uprising of the masses, and as the great and powerful North American nation has ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... that Hereafter, worse, they say, than here, Plunged headlong in, but, till dismissal waited, To wipe at last all sorrow from men's eyes, And make this heavy dispensation clear. Thus have I borne till now, and still endure, Crouching in sullen impotence day by day, Till some such out-burst of the elements Like this rouses the sleeping fire within; And standing thus upon the threshold of Another night about to close the door Upon one wretched day to open it On one yet wretcheder because one more;— Once more, you savage heavens, I ask of you— ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... much sense to pray; To toast our wants and wishes, is her way; Nor asks of God, but of her stars, to give The mighty blessing, "while we live, to live." Then all for death, that opiate of the soul! Lucretia's dagger, Rosamonda's bowl. Say, what can cause such impotence of mind? A spark too fickle, or a spouse too kind. Wise wretch! with pleasures too refined to please; With too much spirit to be e'er at ease; With too much quickness ever to be taught; With too much thinking to have common thought: You purchase pain with all that ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... the scars of the slaves! These I cursed, and those who in the hypocrisy of their souls, and their sanctimonious pretensions to Church freedom, received the gold tainted with the blood of the slave, to build up their Free Kirk! But why curse? What impotence! Why not leave the avenging bolt of wrath to that God, who "hath made of one blood all the nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... a man to do in a case of that kind? I could simply retire to my own apartments; but I did it in such a passion of wrath and impotence that I could have taken that stupid and credulous old woman by the shoulders and shaken her to reason. I was too angry and disheartened to speak a word; but while I was pacing up and down the room, and wondering what my next move should be, the manager of the hotel presented himself, ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... naturally, the factors of power and the colored people as, naturally, the subject class, no factor at all. It was these two things which produced that exhibition of barbarity on the part of the South and impotence on the part of the government which make us go to Roumania and the Byzantine ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... art and that of real life. The man who seeks his entire culture in art of any kind will soon find the old antagonism between speculation and action begin to appear. There will be a chasm, which he cannot fill, between his life in the closet and his life in the world; his impotence to carry his thought into act will limit and weaken the thought itself. But this ill result will equally ensue, whether the art in which he finds his nurture be that of the novelist or that of the poet. The novel-reader sees human action pass before ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... experiments over again, specially since they would have to be made upon living human beings, upon he young children of the rising generation, who cannot resent our folly, but whose distorted natures will be living proofs of our incapacity, of our impotence as educators, when the experiment tried for the thousand and first time fails yet again, as it always has done, and always will do to the world's end, while Human Nature remains ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... treaty was concluded on these conditions, and the Duke of Guise entered Paris, where he was expected by the Leaguers, and whence he expelled Henry III. on the 12th of May, by the insurrection of the barricades. A fortnight after this insurrection, which reduced Henry III. to impotence, and, to use the language of the Prince of Parma, did not even 'permit him to assist the Queen of England with his tears, as he needed them all to weep over his own misfortunes,' the Spanish fleet left the Tagus and sailed ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... imagination. And his daughter—what was to become of her after he was gone? Was there no escape from the invisible network which was drawn all round them. He sank his head upon the table and sobbed at the thought of his own impotence. ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... under the sting of some former lover's impotence. Her remark but gives color to the charge that, owing to the universal depravity of Rome and the smaller cities, men were so worn out by repeated vicious indulgences that it was no easy matter for a woman to obtain satisfaction at ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... fortune? Callow is the man who has never tasted of the cup of sorrow; and no man who has not suffered hardships is temperate in enjoying ease. Wilt thou, who shouldst have been a pillar of courage, show a sign of a palsied spirit? Born of a brave sire, wilt thou display utter impotence? Wilt thou fall so far from thy ancestors as to turn softer than women? Hast thou not yet begun thy prime, and art thou already taken with weariness of life? Whoever set such an example before? Shall the grandson ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... uneasiness. The capture of Duke Bernhard, the most brilliant of the German generals on the Protestant side, would be a heavy blow indeed to the cause, and leaving his supper untasted Malcolm walked up and down his cell in a fever of rage at his impotence to prevent so serious ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... round him. Then I got "real" angry, and told him De Cosson Bey kept a professional torture chamber, and that I would have him ground to sausage meat if he trifled with me another moment. Well knowing the impotence of my "hot air" blast, he simply smiled and took up his burthen of "finding" the bridge. This he soon accomplished, as it was about as easy to find as a saloon in the "Great White Way." The instructions accompanying the map stated that the Maison Antonion was on the left of the ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... little girl, Maryan had the question in mind continually: "Why do the lamps go out?" Now, like Hjalmar in "Princess Malenia," he feels every moment like exclaiming: Someone is weeping here near us! He had moments in which such nervous impotence attacked him that he did not feel capable of stirring a finger, or moving an eyelid. Accompanying this condition was a perfect understanding that all sentimental family-tenderness is a painted pot. It is known, of course, that in the world a multitude of maidens are always ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... Heredity had acted, the builders had planned things on too huge a scale, raising a series of magnificent piles whose purpose was to dwarf those of all other ages; but, as it happened, they were fated to remain lifeless and deserted, testifying with wondrous eloquence to the impotence of pride. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... great familiarity with the other sex, who entertain lascivious thoughts, continually exciting the sexual desires, always suffer a weakening of power and sometimes the actual diseases of degeneration, chronic inflammation of the gland, spermatorrhoea, impotence, and the like.—Young man, beware; your punishment for trifling with the affections of others may cost you a ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... she met Giovanni, she began to treat him with haughty coldness. But Giovanni smiled, and seemed well satisfied that she should at last give over what was to him very like a persecution. Her anger grew hotter from its very impotence. The world saw ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford |
