"Inept" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... King addressed them: 'Welcome, Heralds sage! And if from God I welcome you the more, Since great is God, and therefore great His gifts: God grant He send them daily, heaped and huge! Speak without fear, for him alone I hate Who brings ill news, or makes inept demand Unmeet for Kings. I know that Cross ye bear; And in my palace sits a Christian wife, Bertha, the sweetest lady in this land; Most gracious in her ways, in heart most leal. I knew her yet a child: she knelt whene'er The Queen, her mother, entered: ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... exercises which they look upon as a sort of purely masculine game—game meaning a respectable occupation devised to kill time in this man-arranged life which must be got through somehow. What women's acuteness really respects are the inept 'ideas' and the sheep-like impulses by which our actions and opinions are determined in matters of real importance. For if women are not rational they are indeed acute. Even Mrs Fyne was acute. The good woman was making up to her husband's chess-player simply because ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... the enterprise. He put in a goodly sum of money that never came back to him; and if he cooeperated but indifferently, or worse, he was not more inept than some of his associates. He was displeased to learn that the McComases had given enough to the guarantee-fund to insure them a box. And it offended him that, on the opening night, his former wife, one of a large and assertive party, should make her voice heard ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... try to sleep in the house, it ort to be opened up and sunned a little; you better let me have the key now," observed Judith, assuming airs of proprietorship over his inept masculinity. ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... tithe as excellent and practicable. But Charlie babbled on serenely, interrupting the current of pure fancy with samples of horrible sentences that he purposed to use. I heard him out to the end. It would be folly to allow his idea to remain in his own inept hands, when I could do so much with it. Not all that could be done indeed; but, oh ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... he had not interfered and told Monty to put her in a flat and be damned to her! It was she, he could have sworn it. At once, precisely as he wished he had let her alone, he hoped and quite as fervently that she had covered her tracks, that there would be no trial, nothing but inept conjectures and that forgetfulness in which all things, good and bad, lose ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... "The political world and this are separate worlds. This one belongs to the people who have to shoulder the load of everything, and the other is a world of villains, robbers, idiots, and fools. Really, it is difficult to find anything so vile, so inept, and so useless as a Spanish politician. The Spanish middle class is a warren of rogues and villains. I feel an enormous repugnance to brushing against it. That is why I came here now and then to talk to these people; not because these are good, no; the first and the last of them are ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... she said, "since you have seen me yourself in that inept and ridiculous role of living advertisement, of fashionable lay-figure; and the result has been just as I expected. Can you find any one who believes in my honesty of purpose? You have heard Mme. Fortin to-night? Yourself, neighbor —what did you ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... army headquarters at West Point, on guard to keep the British from advancing up the Hudson, was looking for the arrival, not of a British fleet, but of a French fleet, from the West Indies. For him these were very dark days. The recent defeat at Camden was a crushing blow. Congress was inept and had in it men, as the patient General Greene said, "without principles, honor or modesty." The coming of the British fleet was a new and overwhelming discouragement, and, on the 18th of September, Washington left West Point ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... He had already informed his host that he knew her. She greeted him with a mere touch of her hand, a touch made cold by intent, and with "With a free evening off one would have expected you would spend it with Laetitia," said disdainfully. It was a rude and inept thing to say (in the tone she said it) for the feeble creature, as she stigmatised him, had not yet screwed his fatuous idolatry to the point of proposal of marriage. But she intended it to be rude and to discomfort him and she was glad ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... though a great idea is felt to be present in the mind of the author, for which he works. The man who would say there is no feeling for symbol—no phantasy or Celtic glamour in these weird, puzzling, and yet on all sides suggestive tales would thereby be declared inept, inefficient—blind to certain qualities that lie near to grandeur in fanciful literature, or the literature ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... past the time when the professional politicians were treated as revered beings of whom an inept ritual description had to be given. But the substitute has only been a putting of them into the limelight in another and more grotesque fashion, far less ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... the horrible monster fastened on it; but its dying agonies had never vexed the reverie of a lover. Lucian saw no reason why the boys should offend him more than the spider, or why he should pity the dog more than he pitied the fly. The talk of the men and women might be wearisome and inept and often malignant; but he could not imagine an alchemist at the moment of success, a general in the hour of victory, or a financier with a gigantic scheme of swindling well on the market being annoyed by the buzz of insects. The spider is, no doubt, a very terrible brute with a hideous mouth ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... with Archie, Teddy, Gratton, and the rest, made his formal bows to Gloria's girl friends, and felt relief when the inept banalities languished and he was free to draw apart. Gratton, with slender finger to his shadowy moustache, bore down upon him. King did not like this suave individual; he had the habit of judging a man by first impressions ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... the market! thence you drew The taste which stamped you guide of the inept. - A North-sea pilot, Hildebrand yclept, A sturdy and a briny, once men knew. He loved small beer, and for that copious brew, To roll ingurgitation till he slept, Rations exchanged with flavour for the adept: And merrily plied him captain, mate and crew. At last this dancer to the Polar ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... granted that a hundred folios could not contain the hundredth part of all the limitations of human actions, and all the possible cases of a contentious casuistry; and it is also granted that human nature is not so inept as to be incapable of interpreting and limiting for itself such rules as 'Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... countless authors of different ages and countries, a total of around 50,000 epigrams, from most of which nothing at all was worth excerpting. There is no point in memorializing the names of the bad, except to note in passing that he found hardly anything so inept as the Delitiae, as they call them, of the German poets[5]—in this connection he gives special mention to the book of Lancinus Curtius[6], which contains ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... there is a disquisition on "Ugliness in Fiction." Probably the author of it has read "Liza of Lambeth," and said Faugh! The article, peculiarly inept, is one of those outpourings which every generation of artists has to suffer with what tranquillity it can. According to the Reviewer, ugliness is specially rife "just now." It is always "just now." It was "just now" when George Eliot ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... suited to its especial purpose,—the tonal utterance of Maeterlinck's rhymeless, metreless, and broken phrases. To have set them in the sustained arioso style of Tristan und Isolde would have been as impossible as it would have been inept. As it is, the writing for the voices in Pelleas never, as one might reasonably suppose, becomes monotonous. The achievement—an astonishing tour de force, at the least—is as artistically successful as it ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... book of the Quiches, tells us of four ages of the world. The man of the first age was made of clay; he was "strengthless, inept, watery; he could not move his head, his face looked but one way; his sight was restricted, he could not look behind him," that is, he had no knowledge of the past; "he had been endowed with language, but he had no intelligence, so he ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... the young man's face was so religiously averted. He let his hands come to anchor on what he was working at before he answered: "She's only a child, Oliver;" and then, watching his fingers making an inept movement with the clay, was ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... consisting in a deducing of the benefit, or hurt that may arise to him that is to be Counselled, by the necessary or probable consequences of the action he propoundeth; so may also the differences between apt, and inept counsellours be derived from the same. For Experience, being but Memory of the consequences of like actions formerly observed, and Counsell but the Speech whereby that experience is made known to another; the Vertues, and Defects ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... There was no mention of Johnny Simms. Alicia, elaborately ignoring all that was past, told Jamison that Babs and Cochrane were now an acknowledged romance and actually had plans for marriage immediately the ship returned to Earth. Jamison made the usual inept jests suited to ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... your task in order to do something with which you have no concern. Why throw yourselves into a conflict where, on whatever side you turn, you will find none but your natural, uncompromising, even necessary opponents? Are the financiers to be less hated by us than the army? What inept and criminal generosity is it that hurries you to save those seven hundred Pyrotists whom you will always find confronting you in ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... theirs; they only have it in keeping; they have bolted it out at a venture; we place it for them in credit and esteem. You lend them your hand. To what purpose? they do not think themselves obliged to you for it, and become more inept still. Don't help them; let them alone; they will handle the matter like people who are afraid of burning their fingers; they dare change neither its seat nor light, nor break into it; shake it never so little, it slips through their fingers; ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... province of a public-spirited landlord. They are the days when the spread of education had not even yet begun (for weal or for woe) its levelling work; days of cruel monopolies and inane prohibitions, and ferocious penal laws, inept in the working, baleful in the result; days of keel-hauling and flogging; when the "free-trader" still swung, tarred and in chains, on conspicuous points of the coast—even as the highwayman rattled at the cross-road—for the encouragement of the brotherhood; when it was naturally ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... began to study the man stretched out upon the ground close to her, and a sudden, surging regret went through her. If only it had been Lord Ronald lounging there beside her, how utterly different would have been her attitude! Foolish and inept he might be—he was—but, as he himself had comfortably remarked, a man might be worse. She trusted him implicitly, every one trusted him. It was impossible ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... ruminant brain might otherwise develop. The ruminant hoof and leg is well designed for swift and rough travel, for battles with distance, snow, ice, mud and flood, and for a certain amount of fighting, but they are inept for the higher manifestations ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... that wished only to hide itself meekly in its accustomed haunts; and its unobtrusive bearing seemed to say, the less said about the matter the better. What a storm of obloquy would have burst upon such inept diplomacy in America, or in England, or even in France. Not so here. Everybody was sore and sorry, but the newspapers and the journalists could raise no protest that counted. It is all explained by the fact that the people do not govern, have ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... brother; and there would be no point in keeping the incident for the benefit of Attila. That Gunnar should first detect the imposture, and should then recognise the heart of his brother, is a fine piece of heroic imagination of a primitive kind. It would have been wholly inept and spiritless to transfer this from Gunnar to Attila. The poet of Atlaml shows that he understands what he is about. The more his work is scrutinised, the more evident becomes the sobriety of his judgment. His dexterity in the disposing of his incidents is proved in every particular. While ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... that he was superseded and that she preferred Lebyadkin. This Lebyadkin, a stranger to the town, turned out afterwards to be a very dubious character, and not a retired captain as he represented himself to be. He could do nothing but twist his moustache, drink, and chatter the most inept nonsense that can possibly be imagined. This fellow, who was utterly lacking in delicacy, at once settled in his house, glad to live at another man's expense, ate and slept there and came, in the end, to treating the ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... our discussion of the war—or rather Leonard, for with her Leonard seemed to be the war. She made some remark deliciously inept—I wish I could remember it. I made a sly rejoinder. She sat bolt upright and a flush came into her Dresden-china cheek and her old ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... which, as a rule, children mutually enlighten one another about sexual matters, even more serious dangers may attach to the enlightenment of a child by an adult unsuited for this difficult task. Inept enlightenment may entail extremely serious consequences, and more especially it is likely to bring about the particular evil results that we are most eager to avoid, that is to say, it may direct the attention of the child ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... his Life of Browning, quotes the remarks of another critic to the following effect: "The poet's processes of thought are scientific in their precision and analysis; the sudden conclusion that he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept." ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... said it again, mildly. This latest attempt to seize them or harm them—if it was that—had been surprisingly inept. It was strange that creatures able to travel between the stars and put regiments and tanks out of action should fail so dismally to kill or kidnap Coburn, if they really wanted to. Could it be that they were not quite sincere ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... were developed in Western Europe during the period extending from about 1150 to 1450 or 1500, received in an unscientific age the wholly erroneous and inept name of Gothic. This name has, however, become so fixed in common usage that it is hardly possible to substitute for it any more scientific designation. In reality the architecture to which it is applied was ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... such inept questions respecting the Ayrshire property, but he did inquire who was Lizzie's solicitor. "Of course there will be things to be settled," he said, "and my lawyer had better see yours. Mr. Camperdown ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... the Breath of Life! By Chaos! By the Air! I have never seen a man so gross, so inept, so stupid, so forgetful. All the little quibbles, which I teach him, he forgets even before he has learnt them. Yet I will not give it up, I will make him come out here into the open air. Where are you, Strepsiades? Come, ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... stuffy," defended Judith with a flash. "It's a nice, crackling word, and I got it from Arnold Bennet, if you want to know. He uses it all the time. And I've got another, too—'inept'—and that's what you are now, Patricia Kendall. I'm ashamed of your extreme indifference to the beauties ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... individual ranges of judgment, else they correspond to no empirically determinable psychophysical processes. Each individual is a locus of possible aesthetic satisfactions. Since such a locus is our ultimate basis for interpretation, it is inept to choose, as 'the most pleasing proportion,' one that may have no correspondent empirical reference. The normal or ideal individual, which such a norm implies, is not a psychophysical entity which may serve as a basis of explanation, but ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... premise of a certain stability over a long run of time that men can hope to follow the method of reason. This is not because mankind is inept, or because the appeal to reason is visionary, but because the evolution of reason on political subjects is only in its beginnings. Our rational ideas in politics are still large, thin generalities, much too abstract and unrefined for practical guidance, except ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... arranged behind banks of flowers, were filled with people. In the air was the familiar buzz always present in a room where each person is trying to speak at the same time. On all sides one heard fragments of inept conversation. ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... Nowhere else in the world have women more leisure and freedom to improve their minds, and nowhere else do they show a higher level of intelligence, or take part more effectively in affairs of the first importance. But nowhere else is there worse cooking in the home, or a more inept handling of the whole domestic economy, or a larger dependence upon the aid of external substitutes, by men provided, for the skill that wanting where it theoretically exists. It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... it was evident the roof was going to remain intact. If those things had any sense they would be in the deepest sub-basement they could find, I figured. The Schrees must have been carrying them as helpless parasites for too many centuries to realize they could do without them, for them to be so inept. ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... to counterfeit and to imitate her, should be owed, in my belief, to Giotto, painter of Florence, for the reason that, after the methods of good paintings and their outlines had lain buried for so many years under the ruins of the wars, he alone, although born among inept craftsmen, by the gift of God revived that art, which had come to a grievous pass, and brought it to such a form as could be called good. And truly it was a very great miracle that that age, gross and inept, should have had strength to work in Giotto in a fashion so masterly, that design, whereof ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari |
