"Inapt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that I was very far away, in a foreign country where they spoke a language which she did not understand. She saw first a paved yard, shaded by a big tree, with a building on the left and a garden at the back: a rough but not inapt description of Krall's stables, which my wife did not know and which I myself had not seen at the time when I wrote the note. She next perceived me in the midst of the horses, examining them, studying them with an absorbed, anxious and tired air. This was true, for I found those ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... man's sin, to admit of any satisfactory result from an adequate contemplation of nature.' [69:1] We have a Gillespie setting aside the Design Argument on the ground that the reasonings by which it is supported are 'inapt' to show such attributes as infinity, omnipresence, free agency, omnipotency, eternality, or unity,' belong in any way to God. On this latter attribute he specially enlarges, and after allowing 'the contrivances we observe in nature, may establish a unity of counsel, desires to be told' ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... an inapt phrase for the person whom the maid ushered into the room through this door. He was a small, thin, elderly man, bowed of figure and shuffling in gait. His coat and large, low-crowned hat, though worn almost to shabbiness, conveyed an indefinable sense of some theological standard, or pretence ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... most remarkable social phenomena of that country is the absolute subserviency which the political spirit of unbridled democracy yields to its decrees. The bees of the Barberini carved upon its architectural ornaments are no inapt symbol of the spirit and method of working of this busy theological hive, which sends its annual swarms all over the world to gather ecclesiastical honey from every flower ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... but I hardly gather it up into a good whole, which is very likely my fault; from hasty perusal, ignorance, or other Incapacity. Perhaps, on the other hand, he found the Subject too great for his Space; and so has left it disproportioned, which the German is not inapt to do. But one may be well thankful for such admirable fragments, perhaps left so in the very honesty that is above rounding them into a specious Theory ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... this system in part, he would speak of "unifying" this, that or the other stop, and this somewhat inapt phrase has now been adopted by other builders and threatens to ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... consorted with her, having state and ancientry even in their poorness; but Mrs. Condrip's interior, even by this best view of it and though not flagrantly mean, showed itself as a setting almost grotesquely inapt. Pale, grave and charming, she affected him at once as a distinguished stranger—a stranger to the little Chelsea street—who was making the best of a queer episode and a place of exile. The extraordinary thing was that at the ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... the brief summary: Alternations will be few and far between:— how differently from the methods of the poetry, the art, the choruses, we most of us love so much, not necessarily because our senses are inapt or untrained:—Smikrai hai metabolai. We shall allow no musical innovations, no Aristophanic cries, no imitations however clever of "the sounds of the flute or the lyre," no free imitation by the human voice of bestial or mechanical ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... the ride itself. And yet when you consider it as a means to an end, as a subtle, elastic, and infinitely useful craft, the method of writing is not uninteresting even to those who have to learn and not to teach it. The technique of composition has to do with words. We are most of us inapt with words; even when ideas begin to come plentifully they too often remain vague, shapeless, ineffective, for want of words to name them. And words can be taught—not merely the words themselves, but their power, their suggestiveness, their rightness or wrongness for ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... look to get yours soon. I am sorry to hear that the Custom House has proved fallible, like all other human houses and customs. Life consists of that sort of business, and I fear that there is a class of man, of which you offer no inapt type, doomed to a kind of mild, general disappointment through life. I do not believe that a man is the more unhappy for that. Disappointment, except with one's self, is not a very capital affair; and the sham beatitude, "Blessed is he that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Bleek, Luecke, Lange, belong to the same party; and Gieseler also in the main. Their doctrine is called the Deutsche Theologie. Bunsen must also perhaps be classed with them, though much freer and less biblical than the others. The writings of the late archdeacon Hare are perhaps no inapt English parallel to the tone ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... inapt, as applied to the first efforts of the early English, or Semi-Saxon literature, during the latter part of the twelfth and the whole of the thirteenth century. That deceptive dawn, or first glimpse of the coming day, is to be found in the work of Layamon. The old Saxon had revived, but ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... of the calendar is not an inapt illustration of the methods of science, and of the part which it has played in shaping the destiny of man. Out of the unregarded labors of thousands of forgotten men, and a few whom we now remember, has sprung every detail of that vast complex of machinery, method and measurement in which to-day ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... enter, yet each was checked by a consciousness that he did not belong to this country where he had been told strange customs prevailed. He was not at all sure but that an interference would be seriously inapt. Once or twice he had been on the verge of stealing back into the thicket for his rifle, yet the schoolhouse drama held him too firmly chained for this. Adopting now a middle course, he went up the four steps and entered with an innocent air of one having ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... was irretrievably lost, she relapsed into her former plaintive mood. But the twain were forthwith by her side with soft speeches and profuse promises, which, however ill she understood them, were not altogether inapt to allay a grief which had in it more of concern for her own hapless self than of sorrow for her lost lover. So, in course of time, the lady beginning visibly to recover heart, they began privily to debate which of them should first take her to bed with him; and neither being ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... and the pens were opened, all the "Gothic" hogs but two were found dead. The "Emperor's soldiers", with very few exceptions, were living; of the "Romans" half only were alive, and all had lost their bristles. Ridiculous as the manner of divination was, it furnished no inapt type of the miseries which the Gothic war was to bring upon all concerned in it, and not least upon that Latin population which was still so keen to open its ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin |
