"Incapacity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... kenels because, they Roal when you dont stick brix under, which teechus to be kind 'to our' fello animals and pleze Our masters—I will. Only include by adding that dogs like cake? which Shoes how like they are to boys who have kind masters that they strive to pleas in ewery way in Their incapacity as the righter of this ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... feel my incapacity more than on that strange night, when Emily was flying about with Martyn to all the doors and windows in a wild state of excitement, humming to ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... other. Your ears are accustomed to flattery, my brother. Daun did not flatter you, and you now see the consequences. But little hope remains. I shall commence the attack—if we do not conquer, we shall die together. I do not bewail the loss of your heart, but rather your utter incapacity and want of judgment. I tell you this plainly, for with one who has perhaps but a few days to live, there is no use of deception. I wish you more happiness than has fallen to my lot, and hope that your misfortunes and disappointments may teach you to act with more wisdom ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... allowed to pass, the clear policy of the Pretender was to permit the fears of Englishmen to go to sleep for a while, to endeavor to reorganize his plans and his party; to wait until a certain reaction should set in, a reaction very likely to come about because of the apparent incapacity and the unattractive character of George the First, and then at some timely hour, with well-matured preparations, to strike an energetic blow. George the First was only a year on the throne when the adherents of James got up a ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... of thanks was moved to Alderman Combe, I should move some short resolutions, which I shewed him, as an amendment: "1st, thanking the Alderman for his past honourable services: 2nd, sympathizing with him on his illness, and lamenting the cause of his incapacity to attend the House of Commons: and 3rd, respectfully calling upon him to resign his seat, to give the Livery an opportunity of electing an efficient Member of Parliament as their representative, in his stead." I asked Sir Richard if he would second ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... dead there was no other Caesar, no naturally indicated successor to the empire. The influence of the name of Caesar had spent itself in the crimes, madnesses, and incapacity of his descendants. Then began a general search for emperors; and the ambition to be created spread abroad amongst the men of note in the Roman world. During the eighteen months that followed the death of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... pueblo off the ordinary route. The mayoral of the diligence in the old times, the domestic servant of to-day, the senora who happens to sell you fish, or the senor who mends your boots, all strike the same note—an absolute incapacity for imagining that there can be any inequality between themselves and any other class, however far removed from them by the possession of wealth or education. Wealth, in fact, counts for nothing in the way ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... implies perfect love; and perfect love casteth out fear. It is always the fear of imposition, and a lurking intent to rule, that causes the woman to haggle over a word—it is absence of love, a limitation, an incapacity. The price of a perfect love is an absolute and ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... Anne's Gate, and from Dartmouth Street, just across the way, he will see a magnificent view of the Abbey Church with her small daughter, St Margaret, by her side. {11} As he approaches nearer, down Tothill Street, the ugly Western Towers, which we owe in the first instance to Wren's incapacity to understand Gothic architecture, in the second to his successor Hawkesmore's want of taste in ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... said to exist there. He spoke with great respect of Nicolai Nicolaievitch as a thorough man, full of energy and courage, one to be respected even as an enemy. The Tsar, on the other hand, he considered cowardly, false, and despicable. It was a proof of the incapacity of the bourgeois that they had tolerated such a Tsar. Monarchs were all of them more or less degenerate; he could not understand how anyone could accept a form of government which involved the risk of having a degenerate ruler. ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... stagnant, respectable people, one might say, who do nothing but conform to whatever rule is established about them and obstruct whatever change is proposed to them, whose chief quality is a sheer incapacity to imagine anything beyond their petty experiences, and let us tell them plainly, "It is time a lunatic married into your family." Let no one run away from this with the statement that I propose such a thing should be done, but it is, at any rate ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... proclaimed argument, worn threadbare in Congress, on the platform, in the pulpit, in the press, in poetry, in fiction, in impassioned rhetoric, is the reconstruction period. And yet the evils of that period were due far more to the venality and indifference of white men than to the incapacity of black voters. The revised Southern constitutions adopted under reconstruction reveal a higher statesmanship than any which preceded or have followed them, and prove that the freed voters could as easily have been led into the paths of civic righteousness as into those ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... German mind that the presence therein of Prussian officers would cajole the Poles into an action against Russia. If this were part of the motive (and probably it was), it would be a parallel to many another irony in the present campaign and its preliminaries, proceeding from the incapacity of the enemy to gauge the subtler and more profound forces of a civilization to ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... Wu-wang profited by the lessons given them by past history. Incapacity, excessive severity and undue weakness had created discontent and loosened the relations between the emperor and his vassals. Increase in the extent of the empire greatly added to this decline of central power. For ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... would live under the sense and thorough conviction of the greatness and incomprehensibleness of God, as being every way past finding out; and also under the conviction of our own darkness and incapacity to conceive aright of him, even as to what he ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... enthusiasm to resort to slave labor exclusively, partly on hire from their owners and partly by purchase. At the height of this regime, in 1851, the slave operatives numbered 158.[45] But whether from the incapacity of the negroes as mill hands or from the accumulation of debt through the purchase of slaves, the company was forced into liquidation at the close of ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... superficial examination of subjects. Is it possible to be skeptical in the matter of religion when we design to return to its principles, and look closely into the idea of the God who serves as its foundation? Doubt arises ordinarily from laziness, weakness, indifference, or incapacity. To doubt, for many people, is to dread the trouble of examining things to which one attaches but little interest. Although religion is presented to men as the most important thing for them in this world as well as in the other, skepticism and doubt on this subject can be for the mind but a ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... Delaware." The land is mostly held by descendants of the early settlers, who form a species of landed aristocracy. Lately, owing to the younger members of these families having become established in the newer states and on account of the death or incapacity of the older members left in possession, there has been a marked tendency to sell off these farms. However, "a large proportion of the farms in Delaware are not for sale at any price. Some of them have been in the same family for generations, and ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... because it sometimes serves to keep in the service incompetent men not guilty of specific wrongdoing. Having these facts in view the rule has been amended by providing that where the inefficiency or incapacity comes within the personal knowledge of the head of a department the removal may be made without notice, the reasons therefor being filed and made a record of the department. The absolute right of the removal rests ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... non-progressive aristocratic monarchy that prevailed in Christendom, rendered it incapable—without some destructive shock or convulsion—of any re-organization to incorporate or control these new factors. In the case of the British Empire an additional stress was created by the incapacity of the formal government to assimilate the developing civilization of the American colonies. Everywhere there were new elements, not as yet clearly analyzed or defined, arising as mechanism arose; everywhere the old traditional ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... massive walls of the great towers. I wished I could have had M. Viollet-le-Duc there by both his ears and knocked his head against the abomination he has created. He had a splendid opportunity, and through incapacity he lost it. ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... before writing his answer to the princess. Passing through his studio, where a few studies hung on the walls and, facing the easel, stood an unfinished picture, a feeling of inability to advance in art, a sense of his incapacity, came over him. He had often had this feeling, of late, and explained it by his too finely-developed aesthetic taste; still, the feeling was a very unpleasant one. Seven years before this he had given up military service, feeling sure that he had ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... this, certainly we could offer no direct confutation of the wonderful tale. In regard to alleged facts of this character, the wisest of men are, and always must be, mere children. But it would be monstrous to say, that this wild assertion derived any support from their admitted bewilderment and incapacity. This would be to attempt to found knowledge upon ignorance. The dim analogies resting on questionable facts, the bold assumptions and slippery arguments on which such daring hypotheses must be based, can be refuted, for the most part, only by reasoning in kind,—by ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... with incapacity, is a cheap method of answering their arguments; but a method which the rules of this house ought to exclude from our debates, as the general civility of the world has banished it from every other place of concourse ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... know that Thou art a Teacher sent from God'—but he stopped there. He is not the only one who compliments Jesus Christ, while he degrades Him from His unique position. Now, to this inadequate conception of our Lord's Person and work, Christ opposed the solemn insistence on the incapacity of human nature as it is, to enter into communion with, and submission to, God. And then He passes on to speak—in precise parallelism with the position that He took up when He likened Himself to the Ladder of Jacob's vision—of Himself as being the Son of Man that came ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... good natured, indolent, blundering, empty-headed swell; the chief character in Tom Taylor's dramatic piece entitled Our American Cousin. He is greatly characterized by his admiration of "Brother Sam," for his incapacity to follow out the sequence of any train of thought, and for supposing all are ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... notoriously associated with the early history of railways in the United States. It is not desired here either to insist on the occurrence of those scandals or to palliate them. The point is that the conditions which made those scandals possible (of which the incapacity on the part of the North-western lines to keep faith with each other may be regarded as symptomatic) were concomitants of a particular stage only in the development of the country. Competition must always exist in any ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... for believing that the authors of the telegram to you are among those who introduced and obtained the adoption of the Leavenworth resolution, and who are endeavoring to organize a force for the purpose of general retaliation upon Missouri. Those who so deplore my 'imbecility' and 'incapacity' are the very men who are endeavoring to bring about a collision between the people of Kansas and the ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... But the incapacity of the leader became evident from the moment when he began his enterprise. He loitered for a week at Jassy, holding court and conferring titles, and then, setting out for Bucharest, wasted three weeks more upon the road. In the meantime the news ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... disease to his offspring is common knowledge; some of his children are destroyed by the inherited disease before birth; others are born to a brief and sickly span of life; others attain maturity, seriously handicapped in the race of life by a burden of ill-health, incapacity and misery produced by the inherited taint; while still others apparently ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... John Mangles, who had smiled at the clumsiness of some maneuver. John took the hint, but mentally resolved that he would nevertheless hold himself in readiness in case the incapacity of the crew should endanger ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... shall presently lay open) proves nothing more, but that the mind cannot always adequately represent to the concrete, and transform into distinct images, abstract notions derived from the pure intellect. But this contradiction, which is in itself merely subjective (i.e. an incapacity in the nature of man), too often passes for an incongruity or impossibility in the object (i.e. the notions themselves), and seduces the incautious to mistake the limitations of the human faculties for the limits of things, as ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... fled from this charge because he loved him, fearing to offend him by taking upon him such an office, for which he was every way unqualified. Basil retorts with warmth, that his treachery towards himself was unpardonable, because he was acquainted with his friend's incapacity. Chrysostom answers, that he should never have betrayed him into that dignity, if he had not known his charity and other qualifications. In order to show that he had reason to shun that charge, he in his third book sets forth the ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... little careful in talking over plans and wishes with Bart; his spirit is generous beyond his pocket-power and he is a bit sensitive. He wants to do so much for the Infant, the home, and me, that when desire outruns the purse, he seems to feel that the limit lies somewhere within the range of his own incapacity, and that bare, camel-backed knoll outlining the horizon, as seen from the dining-room window, showing the roof of the abandoned barn and hen yards, and the difficulty of wrestling with it, ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... most capital consideration with regard to this, as to every object, is the extent of it. And here it is necessary to premise, this system of penalty and incapacity has for its object no small sect or obscure party, but a very numerous body of men,—a body which comprehends at least two thirds of that whole nation: it amounts to 2,800,000 souls, a number sufficient for the materials constituent of a great people. Now it is well ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... terms, nor neglect to render in some degree mutual the assistance so freely at their command, and that men in a Leicestershire field so punctiliously afford to each other. The point on which they so prominently fail in this particular is, to speak plainly, their habitual, neglect—or incapacity—at gateways. Given the rush and crush of three hundred people starting for a run and pressing eagerly through a single way of exit—to wit, an ordinary gate swinging easily and lightly, and requiring only that each ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... at once! I was much tempted to reply that he had better come and do it himself." Thus is made evident the lamentable relationship between the President, who could place no confidence in the enterprise and judgment of the military commander, and the general, who had only sneers for the President's incapacity to comprehend warfare. It so happened, however, that the professional man's sarcasm was grossly out of place, and the civilian's proposal was shrewdly right, as events soon plainly proved. In fact what Mr. Lincoln urged was precisely what General Johnston anticipated ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... with a couple of maps before him, writing orders. At the head of it sits Sergius, who is also supposed to be at work, but who is actually gnawing the feather of a pen, and contemplating Bluntschli's quick, sure, businesslike progress with a mixture of envious irritation at his own incapacity, and awestruck wonder at an ability which seems to him almost miraculous, though its prosaic character forbids him to esteem it. The major is comfortably established on the ottoman, with a newspaper in his hand and the tube of the ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... itself be respected, or even be treated with common decency, at home.' J. H. Burton's Hume, ii. 479. On the 30th of this month of April—four days after the conversation in the text—John Home recorded:—'Mr. Hume cannot give any reason for the incapacity and want of genius, civil and military, which marks this period.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... principles; that the woman should decide for herself, without referring to her husband, what she should eat for dinner. But after some efforts to attain sufficient personal will, she confessed her incapacity, and I therefore proposed to the husband that she should be kept in her room until she had regained her will. They went away hopeful, but he called a few days after to tell me that the experiment had failed. For after striving for many hours to decide between soles and plaice, she had burst into ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... hunger? Or where are there any that are so long solaced with the conversation of friends as tyrants are racking and tormenting? Now all this is owing to the baseness of the body and its natural incapacity for a pleasurable life; for it bears pains better than it doth pleasures, and with respect to those is firm and hardy, but with respect to these is feeble and soon palled. To which add, that if we are minded to discourse on a life of pleasure, these men won't give us leave to go on, but will ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... and well defined tactics of the Roman legion served the legion commander. The officer could not neglect them without failing in his duty. Of course they will not make him an exceptional leader. But, except in case of utter incapacity they will keep him from entirely failing in his task, from making absurd mistakes. Nor will they prevent officers of Bugeaud's temper from using their ability. They will on the contrary help them by putting under their command men prepared ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... degrees it lapsed into a condition of incapacity—a sort of secondary state,—do you see, till it acknowledged itself a species of creche for the Royal Academy. Certain it is that when I came into it the prevalent feeling among all the men was that their best work should ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... INSURRECTION IN PARIS.—The incapacity of the nobles to save the kingdom called out the energies of the class counted as plebeian,—the middle class between the nobles and serfs. It was not without competent leaders, chief of whom were Robert le Coq, bishop of Laon, and councilor of Parliament; ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... relations of space or emotions of wonder.' This is doubtless true; but the word 'neglect' implies mere intellectual misdirection, whereas in Aristotle, as in Goethe, it was not, I believe, misdirection, but sheer natural incapacity which lay at the root of his mistakes. As a physicist, Aristotle displayed what we should consider some of the worst of attributes in a modern physical investigator—indistinctness of ideas, confusion of mind, and a confident use of language which led to the delusive ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... dulness of hearers and incapacity to understand the doctrine of Scripture are not the only obstacles those will have to contend against who undertake to preach "the [oe]onian gospel." There are the interests and attractions of the present world, which, since the ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... all powerful will and fearing lest any stratagem of the Devil should be concealed therein, that might tend to draw me out of my proper place, or steal me out of my condition. The more I saw my own misery, incapacity and nothingness, the plainer it appeared that they rendered me fitter for the designs of God, whatever they might be. "Oh, my Lord," said I, "take the weak and the wretched to do thy works, that Thou mayest have all the glory and that man may attribute ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... tuberculous abscess is one of its characteristic features. The swelling may attain a considerable size without the patient being aware of its existence, and, as a matter of fact, it is often discovered accidentally. The absence of toxaemia is to be associated with the incapacity of the wall of the abscess to permit of absorption; this is shown also by the fact that when even a large quantity of iodoform is inserted into the cavity of the abscess, there are no symptoms of poisoning. The abscess varies in size from a small cherry to a cavity containing several pints of pus. ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... whole, Browning exhibits far fewer instances of this failure in his own style than any other of the great poets, with the exception of one or two like Spenser and Keats, who seem to have a mysterious incapacity for writing bad poetry. But almost all original poets, particularly poets who have invented an artistic style, are subject to one most disastrous habit—the habit of writing imitations of themselves. Every now and then in the works of the noblest classical ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... as germs, were among the solid particles strained off. Secondly, he proved that these germs were competent to give rise to living forms by simply sowing them in a solution fitted for their development. And, thirdly, he showed that the incapacity of air strained through cotton- wool to give rise to life, was not due to any occult change effected in the constituents of the air by the wool, by proving that the cotton-wool might be dispensed with altogether, and perfectly free ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... the House of Commons, afterwards created Earl of Wilmington. George II, on his accession to the throne, intended that Compton should be Prime Minister, but Walpole, through the influence of the queen, retained his place, Compton having confessed "his incapacity to undertake so arduous a task." As Lord Wilmington, he is constantly ridiculed by Sir Chas. Hanbury Williams. See his Works, with notes by Horace Walpole, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... never thought much of it. When it now thus became a reality, her whole soul was overcome by it: she fell to the ground and burst into a flood of tears. Whether she had a full right to the throne, she could not judge: what she felt was her incapacity to rule. But whilst she uttered this, a different feeling passed through her, as she has told us herself: she prayed in the depths of her soul that, if the highest office belonged to her legally, God might give her ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... box in a crevice of a rock above his head. They were greasy and worn with service. Johnson dealt, albeit his right hand was still uncertain,—hovering, after dropping the cards, aimlessly about Tommy, and being only recalled by a strong nervous effort. Yet, notwithstanding this incapacity for even honest manipulation, Mr. Johnson covertly turned a knave from the bottom of the pack with such shameless inefficiency and gratuitous unskilfulness, that even Tommy was obliged to cough and look elsewhere to hide ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a moment. The lad's power to state things in speech and his incapacity to put his thoughts in writing had often puzzled the tutor. "Why don't you put such reflections into verse, John? ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... unquestionably comprehended the peculiar conditions under which the Republican party had come to the control of the legislative branch of the Government, and fully realized the incapacity of the dominant element in that control for the delicate work of restoration and reconstruction—leading a conquered and embittered people back peacefully and successfully, without unnecessary friction, into harmonious ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... faculty or that, he loved to feel its influence as a whole, indivisible, impalpable, playing without sound or agitation around him like soft light and warmth and the fostering air. The deepest ignorance, the dullest incapacity, the cloudiest faculties of apprehension, were nothing to him in man or woman, provided he could only be sensible of that indescribable emanation from voice and eye and movement, that silent effusion of serenity around spoken words, which nature has given to some tranquillising spirits, and ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... spark from his pen: "There is something unspeakably pitiable and alarming," he writes in the Philanthropist, "in the state of that society where it is deemed necessary, for self-preservation, to seal up the mind and debase the intellect of man to brutal incapacity.... Truly the alternatives of oppression are terrible. But this state of things cannot always last, nor ignorance alone shield us from destruction." His interest in the question was clearly growing. But it was still in the gristle of sentiment waiting to be transmuted into the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... Archbishop's murder were Hackston of Rathillet, Russell of Kettle, and John Balfour of Burley, or, more correctly, of Kinloch. These three men were typical of the class who at this time began to come to the front among the Covenanters, and by their incapacity, folly, and brutality discredited and did their best to ruin a cause whose original justice had been already too much obscured by such parasites. It is impossible to believe that they, or such as they, were inspired by any strong religious feelings. Hackston and Balfour were men of ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... After the form was locked up, Wan Lee took advantage of Webster's absence to remove the quotation, and substitute a thin piece of lead, of the same size as the type, engraved with Chinese characters, making a sentence, which, I had reason to believe, was an utter and abject confession of the incapacity and offensiveness of the Webster family generally, and exceedingly eulogistic of ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... sheer incapacity to go further. Jenny had not always been easy to understand, but she was wholly ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... effected. The fact that along with the growth of the power-loom the number of hand-looms was long maintained, is evidence of the immobility of the hand-weavers, who kept up an irregular and ill-paid work through ignorance and incapacity to adapt themselves to changed circumstances.[189] In most of the cases where great distress has been caused, the directly operative influence has not been introduction of machinery, but sudden change of fashion. This was the case with the crinoline-hoop makers of Yorkshire, the straw-plaiters of ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... recorded. I assume also that the printers were not altogether above the mean passion, common to the day-labourers of Art, from Chaucer's Adam Scrivener down to the present carvers of marble, for modifying and improving the work of the master. The vain incapacity of a self-constituted critic will make him regard his poorest fancy as an emendation; seldom has he the insight of Touchstone to recognize, or his modesty to acknowledge, that although his own, it is none the less an ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... standing firmly upon his own legs. He had a longing, sometimes pathetic and sometimes humiliating, for the applause of his fellows and the sympathy of friends. With feelings so morbidly sensitive, and with such a lamentable incapacity for straightforward openness in any relation of life, he was naturally a dangerous companion. He might be brooding over some fancied injury or neglect, and meditating revenge, when he appeared to be on good terms; ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... inadequate to his support, that he condescended to solicit the appointment of a chirurgeon's mate to Africa, and applied to Mr. Barrett for a recommendation, which was refused him, probably on account of his incapacity. It is difficult to trace the particulars of that sudden transition from good to bad fortune which seems to have befallen him. That his poverty was extreme cannot be doubted. The younger Warton was informed by Mr. Cross, an apothecary ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... thought Darya Alexandrovna, looking back over her whole existence during those fifteen years of her married life, "pregnancy, sickness, mental incapacity, indifference to everything, and most of all—hideousness. Kitty, young and pretty as she is, even Kitty has lost her looks; and I when I'm with child become hideous, I know it. The birth, the agony, the hideous agonies, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... power, and motives, there would be some little show of sense in thus setting up the pretence of satisfying our judgments in all things, before we yield our credence to a religious system. But the first step we take brings with it the instructive lesson of our incapacity, and teaches the wholesome lesson of humility. From arrogantly claiming a right to worship a deity we comprehend, we soon come to feel that the impenetrable veil that is cast around the Godhead is an indispensable condition ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... mouths and dropped them on our pillows. Being of such an immature age, I laboured under the not uncommon delusion that to smoke looked manly, and therefore did my best to accommodate myself to my surroundings, but I failed signally, having been gifted with a blessed incapacity for tobacco-smoking. This afflicted me somewhat at the time, but ever since I have been ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... assume form. | |Incapacity of material—To retain form. | |Incapacity of the artisan. | |Changes in method of manufacture. |By adventition—|Changes in environment. |Changes of use. Modification of form—| |Lack of use. | Influence of new or ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... and he learned whatever he applied himself to with extreme facility. So remarkable a change was not in that age to be accounted for but by a miracle. It was asserted and believed that the Holy Virgin, touched with his great desire to become learned and famous, took pity upon his incapacity, and appeared to him in the cloister where he sat almost despairing, and asked him whether he wished to excel in philosophy or divinity. He chose philosophy, to the chagrin of the Virgin, who reproached him in mild and sorrowful accents that he had not made a better choice. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... both the chief of state and head of government note : in an unusual, out of cycle change in executive power, Congress on 11 February 1997 elected then Congress President ALARCON to be Interim President until August 1998 after ousting former President BUCARAM because of "mental incapacity;" ARTEAGA remained vice president cabinet : Cabinet appointed by the president elections: president and vice president elected on the same ticket by popular vote for four-year terms; election last held 19 May 1996; runoff election held 7 July 1996; note - because of the February 1997 unusual ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... inconsistent with the theory that we learn by experience the truth of the axioms, in the fact that they are conceived by the mind as universally and necessarily true, that is, that we cannot figure them to ourselves as being false. Our capacity or incapacity of conceiving depends on our associations. Educated minds can break up their associations more easily than the uneducated; but even the former not entirely at will, even when, as is proved later, they are erroneous. The Greeks, from ignorance of foreign languages, believed in an inherent connection ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... this is a very pretty, very poetical, and very convenient way of accounting for a phenomenon that, if examined with common care, suggests a solution more accurate and complete, if not exactly so complimentary. In sober truth, a positive incapacity clearly to point out the precise manner in which a conviction has been formed, is one of the commonest of logical deficiencies, and no more to be ascribed exclusively to the softer sex, than it is an attribute of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... place to be searched for, 785-l. Truth, Divine, given to the first men preserved by Masonry, 136-m. Truth, Divine, symbolized by the Star blazing in the distance, 136-m. Truth hidden under symbols and allegories, 246-l. Truth, incapacity to grasp, prevalent, 77-l. Truth: Indians taught Zoroaster, who taught Pythagoras Primitive, 617-l. Truth is a Divine attribute and the foundation of every virtue, 852-u. Truth is in God and is God under one of His phases, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... is no disparagement to a highly-cultivated and laborious staff of public servants to say that he was the greatest Inspector of Schools that we have ever possessed. It is true that he was not, as the manner of some is, omnidoct and omnidocent. His incapacity to examine little girls in needlework he frankly confessed; and his incapacity to examine them in music, if unconfessed, was not less real. "I assure you," he said to the Westminster Teachers, "I am not at all a harsh judge of ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... saw this day, open to be seen, was not so much sin as ignorance of how to live, squalor, filthy surroundings acquiesced in as the natural order, wonderful patience in suffering and deprivation, incapacity, ill-paid labor, the kindest spirit of sympathy and helpfulness of the poor for each other. Perhaps that which made the deepest impression on her was the fact that such conditions of living could seem natural to those in them, and that they could get so much ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... position they need for the exercise of their powers; others display an astonishing facility in securing honours and occasions they can then only waste; others, outside their specific gift, are the creatures of luck or the victims of modesty, tactlessness or incapacity. Most of the large businesses of the world now are in the hands of private proprietors and managed either directly by an owner or by directors or managers acting for directors. The quality of promotion or the recognition of capacity varies very much in these great concerns, but they are on the ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... this case, generally becomes more severe, and certainly more obnoxious. The broken spirit of the people makes submission a matter of course, so that there is no effectual resistance made to its power. Incapacity to pay comes at last, and defeats the end; but, between incapacity and resistance, the difference ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... in front, whose feet have known sunburn and frost but never a shoe, and a damsel or two in cotton homespun dress made of one piece from collar to hem, and pantalettes of the same reaching to the ankles—all standing and looking the picture of witless incapacity, and making no plea against tyranny! Is that a thing worth while to turn and look back upon? If the blow fell upon ourselves or our set, that would be different; but these illiterate and lowly ones—they are—you don't know—so dull and insensible. Yes, it may be ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... withstand a long siege. This was, practically, his sole achievement in the campaign. Outnumbered, outgeneralled, bankrupt in health as in reputation, he soon resigned his command, but not before he had given signs of "downright dotage."[54] He had, however, achieved immortality: his incapacity threw into brilliant relief the genius of his young antagonist, and therefore appreciably affected the fortunes ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... ought to be executed. If it is from idleness that the simplifiers pervert them, the energetic orchestral conductor is armed with the necessary authority to compel the fulfilment of their duty. If it is from incapacity, let him dismiss them. It is his best interest to rid himself of instrumentalists who cannot play ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... civil service, as well as for the armies in the field. Already has the report of General St. John, Commissary- General of Subsistence, of the operations of that department, just before the close of the war, exposed the hollowness of many sensational pictures intended to fix gross neglect or utter incapacity on ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... in every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of his being such an agent he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort. He has a sense of the merit of serviceability or efficiency and of the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitude or propensity may be called the instinct of workmanship. Wherever the circumstances or traditions of life lead to an habitual comparison of one person with another in point of efficiency, the instinct ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... with Thompson and Cooper, was a whaler. Not owing to any inherent incapacity, for he had taken his B.A. at an English university, and was, notwithstanding his rags and dirt, a remarkably fine-looking man; bearing a striking resemblance to Dixon, even in features. But as the wives of Napoleon's generals could never learn to walk on a ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... with pride the valor and the victories in the Crimea, let her remember it was the manhood in the ranks which achieved it. When all was over, war had slain its thousands,—but official incapacity its tens of thousands! ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... created even by a kitchen kettle when superheated, and on the exasperating shrieks of a steamboat's safety-valve in action, or the bellowing of a fog-horn, he may form some idea of the extent of his incapacity to conceive the thunderous roar of Krakatoa when it began to ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... working some ten hours a day at his hardest, riding every day with Denison, and all of them in high spirits. But optics, algebra, geometry, calculus, trigonometry, and the rest, filled him with misgivings for the future. 'Every day I read, I am more and more thoroughly convinced of my incapacity for the subject.' 'My work continued and my reluctance to exertion increased with it.' For the Sunday before the examination, this is the entry, and a characteristic and remarkable one it is:—'Teaching in the school morning and evening. Saunders preached well on ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... beginning, "Thus saith the Lord." No rational creature, certainly, would think of contesting a view of the Creator, or acting contrary to a command coming unmistakably from Him. But at this very point the difficulty begins; and in nothing did Cooper more resemble the Puritans than in his incapacity to see that there was any difficulty at all. It never occurred to him that there might possibly be a vast difference between what the Lord actually said and what James Fenimore Cooper thought the Lord said. It is hardly necessary ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... fears had been realised, and the death of that gallant and skilful sailor aroused a tongue which, in Great Britain, has a potency and influence, such as official insolence cannot withstand, nor official incapacity escape from. The spirit of the "Times" was up. The voice of the many loudly condemned the incompetency of the few. The conduct of the war had now become a matter of moment, and reforms, in the marine department ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... out of cycle change in executive power, Congress on 11 February 1997 elected then Congress President ALARCON to be Interim President until August 1998 after ousting former President BUCARAM because of "mental incapacity"; ARTEAGA remained vice president until March 1998 cabinet: Cabinet appointed by the president elections: president and vice president elected on the same ticket by popular vote for four-year terms; election last ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... whatever be the sort, the cost, or the consequence. Hence the glaring discrepancies in Greene's life, his faults, not to say his crimes, his sudden short-lived repentances, his supplications to his friends not to imitate his example, his incapacity to follow steadily one course or the other. His better self kept his writings free from vice, but was powerless to control his conduct. This struggle between the forces of good and evil is exceedingly well depicted in Greene's Repentances, under his own or fictitious names; of all ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... of mind and body; an aversion to the place I was in, or the thing I was doing, or rather to that which was passing before my eyes, for I was never doing any thing; I had an utter abhorrence and an incapacity of voluntary exertion. Unless roused by external stimulus, I sank into that kind of apathy, and vacancy of ideas, vulgarly known by the name of a brown study. If confined in a room for more than half an hour by bad weather or other ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... in the calm of my room, I had no qualms as to either the elopement or the suicide, hut I felt a revulsion of feeling towards Peter. His lack of moral indignation and purpose, his intractability in all that was serious and his incapacity to improve had been cutting a deep though unconscious division between us for years; and I determined at whatever cost, after this, that I would ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... hands on the telegraph dial will not respond to the electric battery, the telegram cannot be deciphered. But it would be foolish to deny the existence of the electric battery because the dial is unsatisfactory! In like manner, when, by physical incapacity, or inherited disease, the brain can no longer receive the impressions or electric messages of the Spirit, it is practically useless. Yet the Spirit is there all the same, dumbly waiting for release and another ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... is no more of an argument against combinations than the fact that steam may explode is an argument against steam. Steam is necessary and can be made comparatively safe. Combination is necessary and its abuses can be minimized; otherwise our legislators must acknowledge their incapacity to deal with the most ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... terminated had important political consequences, which were to culminate in one of the most curious and interesting revolutions of modern history. In the first place, it marks the termination of the Adelsvaelde, or rule of the nobility. By their cowardice, incapacity, egotism and treachery during the crisis of the struggle, the Danish aristocracy had justly forfeited the respect of every other class of the community, and emerged from the war hopelessly discredited. On the other hand, Copenhagen, proudly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... that the incumbent of this living is old and infirm, and that it is in my gift. Doctor, give me your hand; and assure yourself of it at his decease." Adams told him, "He was never more confounded in his life than at his utter incapacity to make any return to such noble and unmerited generosity." "A mere trifle, sir," cries the gentleman, "scarce worth your acceptance; a little more than three hundred a year. I wish it was double the value for your sake." Adams bowed, and cried from the emotions of his gratitude; when the other ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... which he commanded as of the country which he occupied. Nor was he a great general. He had been principally occupied in France in hunting and hanging the poor Protestants of Dauphiny and the Cevennes. He had never fought a pitched battle; and his incapacity led to the defeat of the Irish at ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... labors. They had all seated them-selves, and were looking from one to the other of the more important members of the guild with an air which betokened the momentary expectation of a crisis. The only exception was the man who had the violin; with the persistent, untimely industry of incapacity, he twanged the strings, and tuned and retuned the instrument, each time producing a result more astonishingly off ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... by the malecontent faction, and that Shere Singh has applied for the assistance of our troops to recover it; and the Delhi Gazette even goes so far as to assert that this prince, "disgusted with the perpetual turmoil in which he is embroiled, and feeling his incapacity of ruling his turbulent chieftains, is willing to cede his country to us, and become a pensioner of our Government." But this announcement, though confidently given, we believe to be at least premature. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... must realise that now. You must see now that your incapacity of being alone: your nature so exigent in its persistent claim on the attention and time of others: your lack of any power of sustained intellectual concentration: the unfortunate accident—for I like to think ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... manager. It was enough to make one think. Evan did think, and he began to open his mind to a wider criticism of the business. He began to wonder if he had been cut out for a bankclerk. Why had Robb repeatedly made anti-banking suggestions to him? Had he seen incapacity for clerical work in the Mt. Alban swipe? Did Jones discern a similar inaptitude for bank service and hint things for the teller's benefit? Was there a chance that he (Evan) possessed faculties that must die in the business of his mother's choice, and ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... known anything further—heard no word—made no inquiry. At that time, after my acquittal, my great-uncle, a well-to-do baker, settled a sum of money on the man who had been in his employ; the interest of it would support him in his incapacity to do a man's work and earn a decent livelihood. My uncle said then I was never again to darken his doors. He desired me to leave no address; to keep secret to myself my destination, and forever after my whereabouts. I obeyed to the letter—now enough of myself. ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... choose it become a true possession and an ever widening home. Among those "nobler loves and nobler cares" there is excitement without reaction, there is an unwearied and impersonal joy—a joy which can only be held cheap because it is so abundant, and can only disappoint us through our own incapacity to contain it. These delights of study and of solitude Wordsworth enjoyed to the full. In no other poet, perhaps, have the poet's heightened sensibilities been productive of a pleasure so unmixed with pain. The wind of his emotions blew right abaft; he "swam smoothly in the stream of ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... education, nor inherited from nature, any talent to reign, nor possessed any one quality that fitted him for a higher situation than the head of a regiment or a lady's drawing-room. He made himself justly suspected of a moral corruption, as well as of a natural incapacity, when he announced his approbation of the Revolution against his benefactor, the late King of France, who, besides a regiment, had also given him a yearly pension of one hundred thousand livres. Immediately after his unexpected accession to ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... the Hill, but with the prestige of being a Senior Classic. Nobody questioned his ability to teach Greek. In his own line, and not an inch beyond, the Governors were assured that Rutford was a success. In due time he accepted a Small House, so small that its autocrat's incapacity as an administrator escaped notice. Rutford waited patiently for a big morsel. He wrote a couple of text-books; he married a wife with money and influence; he entertained handsomely. It is true he became popular neither with masters nor boys, but his wine was as sound as his scholarship, ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... completed by March 11, by which date they were secure in their new line of defense, "prepared for such an emergency—the south bank of the Rappahannock strengthened by field-works, and provided with a depot of food," writes General Johnston. No further comment is needed to show McClellan's utter incapacity or neglect, than that for full two months he had commanded an army of one hundred and ninety thousand, present for duty, within two days' march of the forty-seven thousand Confederates, present for duty, whom he thus permitted ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... huge enterprise in "catering," and to a monopoly which has driven out of existence the smaller establishments, where alone the artist-cook can flourish. But it seems that the neglect of decent cooking is also due in this country to a racial incapacity and indifference which leads both men and women to despise "taking pains" about small things, and brings them into the world devoid of the desire to carry out with skill those small enterprises on which much of the sweetness and gaiety ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... from the ordinary laws of animal life, and peculiar to themselves;" of the rudiments of physiology, that he can ask, "what advantage of life could alter the shape of the corpuscles into which the blood can be evaporated?" Nor does the reviewer fail to flavour this outpouring of preposterous incapacity with a little stimulation of the odium theologicum. Some inkling of the history of the conflicts between Astronomy, Geology, and Theology, leads him to keep a retreat open by the proviso that he cannot "consent to test the truth of Natural Science by the word of Revelation;" ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... circumstances, with the means at his disposal. His confidence, too hastily bestowed, was repaid by ingratitude and contumely. Wright never spoke of his commander without using terms of disparagement, and dwelling on his incapacity. "He was gone to destruction," he said, "and would lose all who were with him." He repeated these words to me, and others even stronger, both in Melbourne and in Adelaide. McDonough, in his evidence before the Royal Commission, was asked, "What did you say as to Mr. ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... damage.[117] This notice is a condition precedent to the right to maintain an action for such injury or damage, and cannot be waived by the city or town.[118] Nothing will excuse such notice except the physical or mental incapacity of the person injured, in which case he may give the notice within ten days after such incapacity is removed, and in case of his death it may be given by his executors or administrators.[119] Formerly it was essential that the time, place, and cause ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... the bounds of edification, it cannot hold waking, a little sleep and slumber overtakes, till poverty and destruction come like an armed man. (2.) When a man hath drunk to excess of the creature and hath his heart engaged to it, he is in an incapacity to discern a friend from an enemy; whatever comes in with his predominant or idol will get fair quarters; though it may be, it will betray him. The love of the world when it stands centry at a man's heart, will keep out true friends. It will hold out Jesus Christ ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... Mr. Logan return'd an Answer to that Part of Canassateego's Speech which related to Him, and said, 'That not only upon the Account of his Lameness, of which the Indians themselves were Witnesses; but on Account of another Indisposition which about three Years since had laid him under an Incapacity of expressing himself with his former usual Freedom, he had been obliged to live retired in the Country. But that our first Proprietor, the Honourable William Penn, who had ever been a Father and true Friend to all the Indians, ...
— The Treaty Held with the Indians of the Six Nations at Philadelphia, in July 1742 • Various
... much for Captain Page. He took the loss of his first mate greatly to heart, and thus the incapacity of the second contributed considerably to increase his malady. Day after day he grew worse, and I began to fear much that his illness would end fatally. He was as good and kind a man as ever lived, ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... more beautifully than the Graces,—by so much more as Nature is fairer than all Art,—and that she had an inward pure coldness, beside which Diana's was only stone. Yet it was not indifference, like that of the wild huntress,—not an incapacity to feel, but only that her time had not come; when it should, she would melt as well as another. Now she stood still and calm. She did not once look at him. She had seen human beings before,—plenty of them. Something else attracted her,—thrilled her, evidently; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various |
