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More "Impotent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... worthy Hartman Schedel, God rest his soul, one wonders whether he has yet learned that Columbus discovered America. He had not yet heard of it when he finished his book, though Columbus had returned to Spain three months before. O most lame and impotent conclusion! But the fifteenth century, though it had an infinite childlike curiosity, had no nose for news. Nuremberg nodded peacefully on while a new world loomed up beyond the seas, and studied Michael Wolgemut's picture of Noah building the ark while Columbus was fitting out the Santa Maria ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... little more faded, a little more hesitant, but altogether, by no means unhappy. He was invited into her father's office for a long discussion. The result was that the two lovers fell into each others' arms while her father, trembling with impotent rage, hurled at them the ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... in a whisper. My voice sounded husky to me, and my throat felt parched. The child's impotent rage and hatred struck ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... impotent resentment, Paul Beaufoy looked up into the not unkindly eyes turned down to his. A physiognomist would have said it was a reckless face rather than an evil one. The blade had been lowered, but Jan's muscular hands still held his elbows behind his back in an iron grip; beyond him was Michault. ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... a hideous leer—oh, words are impotent to express the ugliness of that face! "Really, Monsieur, supposing I had stolen Miladi, you would be the last person I should inform of her whereabouts. You are simple, Monsieur. I had always heard that England was a country of arcadian innocence, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... imprisoned mind heard him in the depths of its dark, degrading purgatory. But the lips moved and a long groan made answer; a far-off wail, a despairing appeal caused the glance Francoise and her son exchanged to overflow with impotent tears, and drew from them both a simultaneous cry in which their sorrows met: Pecaire! the local word expressive ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... this would, I believe, solve the problem of sterility from hybridism. If you should ever hear of individual fowls or pigeons which are sterile together, I should be very grateful to hear of the case. It is a parallel case to those recorded of a man not impotent long living with a woman who remained childless; the husband died, and the woman married again and had plenty of children. Apparently (by no means certainly) this first man and woman were dissimilar in their sexual organisation. I conceive it possible that their offspring (if both had married again ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... "it can be. This chap"—I listened as might a prisoner in the dock to the argument of counsel, interested but impotent—"don't know enough to come in out of the rain, as the saying is. 'E's just the sort of chap this sort ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German prince that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign prince; your efforts are forever vain and impotent—doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies, to overrun them with the mercenary sons of rapine and plunder, devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... looks, As yet in their astonied hearing rung The strange sweet angel-tongue: The magi of the East, in sandals worn, Knelt reverent, sweeping round, With long pale beards, their gifts upon the ground, The incense, myrrh, and gold These baby hands were impotent to hold: So let all earthlies and celestials wait Upon thy royal state. Sleep, sleep, my ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... and in spite of himself, and as if bound to obey orders, the lad took a step forward again, when, to his utter amazement, the bison bulls, now not twenty yards away, stopped short, shook their heads at him, made some impotent tosses in the air, pawed up a little grass, and then turned altogether, and trotted back to take up their old position ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... "Mana" better than "god" or "spirit" may express that with which the partaker in the communal feast originally sought contact. "When you sacrifice," to quote some words of Miss Jane Harrison, "you build as it were a bridge between your mana, your will, your desire, which is weak and impotent, and |177| that unseen outside mana which you believe to be strong and efficacious. In the fruits of the earth which grow by some unseen power there is much mana; you want that mana. In the loud-roaring bull and ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... unbridled, ungoverned, uncurbed, riotous, impotent, saturnalian, rampant; licentious, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... in which we might follow him. We came upon his horse, quietly cropping the plants that grew at the foot of the cliff. The moon shining seawards, we were in shadow, so that had Vetch been looking from the brig, he would not have seen me as I raged up and down in impotent fury, nor my companions as they sat themselves down, troubled, like myself, but not ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... agony they endure and how very dark their odd convulsive species of existence is made, only that one man may buy forgetfulness by the glass. If I let my imagination loose, I can hear the immense army of the young crying to the dumb and impotent sky, and they all cry for bread. Mercy! how the little children suffer! And I have seen them by the hundred—by the thousand—and only helped from caprice; I could do no other. The iron winter is nearing us, and soon ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... alter it." But not on such terms, can I, for one, live. To know, to have some assurance—that is the one and only thing that matters at all. For if I once believed that God were careless, or indifferent, or impotent, I would fly from life as an accursed thing; whereas I would give all the peace, and joy, and contentment, that may yet await me upon earth, and take up cheerfully the heaviest burden that could be devised of darkness and pain, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... after them. When they had gone, he again knelt down close to the two coffins, his white locks falling about his face, raised his clasped hands to his tremulous but impotent lips, and kept gazing, gazing fixedly first at one of his dear departed and ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... brothers start from rest, And all their Furies wake within their breast: Their tortured minds repining Envy tears, And Hate, engender'd by suspicious fears: And sacred thirst of sway, and all the ties Of nature broke; and royal perjuries; And impotent desire to reign alone, 180 That scorns the dull reversion of a throne: Each would the sweets of sovereign rule devour, While ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... shelving shore, small, puny wavelets dashed in impotent fury, and the shingle sang unceasingly its dreary, syncopated monotone. High and dry, a few dingy boats lay canted wearily upon their broad, swelling sides,—a couple of dories, apparently in daily use; a small sloop ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... lest an infuriated hippopotamus should follow them. One harpoon had missed; the other had fixed the bull of the herd, at which it had been surely aimed. This was grand sport! The bull was in the greatest fury, and rose to the surface, snorting and blowing in his impotent rage; but as the ambatch float was exceedingly large, and this naturally accompanied his movements, he tried to escape from his imaginary persecutor, and dived constantly, only to find his pertinacious attendant close to him upon regaining the surface. This was not to last long; the howartis ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... through the loop formed by the lashing of his wrists behind him, he had recognized a Chinese training, and had resigned himself to the inevitable. The wooden gag was a sore trial, and if it had not broken his spirit it had nearly caused him to break an artery in his impotent fury. ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... their powers of attainment. Many envy and desire wealth, who can never procure it by honest industry or useful knowledge. They therefore turn their eyes about to examine what other methods can be found of gaining that which none, however impotent or worthless, will ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... the serious tales, such as those of the creation, he is spoken of respectfully, and there is no hint of the impish qualities which characterize him in other stories, in which he is powerful, but also at times impotent; full of all wisdom, yet at times so helpless that he has to ask aid from the animals. Sometimes he sympathizes with the people, and at others, out of pure spitefulness, he plays them malicious tricks that are worthy of a demon. He is a combination ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... Dorothy that Ilbrahim's brief and troubled pilgrimage drew near its close. The two former would willingly have remained by him to make use of the prayers and pious discourses which they deemed appropriate to the time, and which, if they be impotent as to the departing traveller's reception in the world whither he goes, may at least sustain him in bidding adieu to earth. But, though Ilbrahim uttered no complaint, he was disturbed by the faces that looked upon him; ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of Christianity was impotent to arrest the annual scenes of disorder; and, in some form or another—sometimes tolerated, sometimes the object of the Church's anathema—the tradition held its own down through the Dark Ages, and we meet with the substance of the Saturnalia, ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... the trout. For all these years the fishes have been trying to mount the waterfalls in order to ascend to the plateau above. Year after year, as the spawning-time came on, they leaped against the falls of the Gardiner, the Gibbon, and the Firehole Rivers, but only to fall back impotent in the pools at their bases. But the mightiest cataract of all, the great falls of the Yellowstone, they finally conquered, and in this way it was done: not by the trout of the Yellowstone River, ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... by tears Andre-Louis stumbled after them when they bore the body into the inn. Upstairs in the little room to which they conveyed it, he knelt by the bed, and holding the dead man's hand in both his own, he swore to him out of his impotent rage that M. de La Tour d'Azyr should pay a bitter price ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... of the song Anstice was back in the hideous past, back in the fatal Temple which had proved the antechamber to the halls of Death ... he heard again the chatter of native voices, smelt the odd, indescribable perfume of the East, felt the dread, the impotent horror of that bygone adventure in the ruined ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... of ourselves altogether insufficient for these things, we are weak and impotent; and our Saviour hath told us, "Without me ye can do nothing:" We are justified freely by God's grace, through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ; not justified by our own works. How great a contradiction is it to charge them with the contrary, that say, They ...
— A Sermon Preached at the Quaker's Meeting House, in Gracechurch-Street, London, Eighth Month 12th, 1694. • William Penn
... in their course; neither can we check any of those moral movements that gravitate with irresistible force towards their center of attraction: Justice. The moral world is governed by the same laws as the physical world, and all the power of man being impotent to suppress a single molecule of the spaces required for the gravitation of the universe, it is still less able to prevent the generation of the ideas that take shape in the mind and strive to attain to fruition in the field of ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... things on it were visible. When they passed the Scorpion and only just missed destruction from its menacing fangs, fear entered into the boy's heart. His mother had spoken truth. He was only partly a god, and he was very, very young. In impotent horror he tugged at the reins to try to check the horses' descent, then, forgetful of Apollo's warning, he smote them angrily. But anger met anger, and the fury of the immortal steeds had scorn for the wrath of a mortal boy. With a great toss of their ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... for a minute or two, then, with a smothered oath upon his lips, he turned slowly to the door and opened it. Before leaving the room, however, he said, in a voice half-stifled by impotent passion— ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... to this curse, Or ere some god appear to bear thy pangs On his own head vicarious, and descend With unreluctant step the darks of hell, And the deep glooms enringing Tartarus! Then ponder this: the threat is not growth Of vain invention—it is spoken and meant! For Zeus's mouth is impotent to lie, And doth complete the utterance in the act. So, look to it, thou! take heed! and nevermore Forget good counsel to ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... listened with a world of comprehension in her eyes more eloquent than speech, not attempting to arrest the fury of imprecation or the prophecies of vengeance which poured from his lips. Hers was that undoubting, undivided, implicit faith which is so dear to the wounded pride and impotent strength of a man in trouble who is conscious that what he longs to do would not be approved by law or sanctioned by religion. That faith spoke in her eyes, in her absorbed attention, in the few breathless sentences which escaped ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... and God's Church. He can shake it at times by the storms he raises; but vain are his attempts to overthrow it. The mark of Satan's fury is stamped on the roof of Franceses's lowly cell; but the relics of the canonised Saint now fill the chamber which, in his impotent rage, the tempter once sought to destroy. But this life of wonders, of trials, and of miracles, was drawing to a close. She who had been the holiest of maidens, of wives, and of widows, had all but finished ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... anarch, is passing. It is safer to be a soldier than a working-man. The chance for life is greater in an active campaign than in a factory or a coal-mine. In the matter of killing, war is growing impotent, and this in face of the fact that the machinery of war was never so expensive in the past nor so dreadful. War-equipment to- day, in time of peace, is more expensive than of old in time of war. A standing army costs more to maintain than it used to cost to conquer ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... alliance that insured great wealth, that promised a secure stepping-stone to political preferment, was apparently a substantial bulwark against the swelling billows of an unaccountable whim; yet he was impotent to resist the yearning tenderness which impelled him to forget all else, in one determined effort to rescue and shelter the life he had been the chief agent in imperilling. Clear eyed, keen witted, he did not for an instant deceive himself; and he knew that neither compassion for misfortune, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... published by the Secretary of the American Iron-Association, and by authority of the same. This Association—now four years old—is not a common trades-union, nor any impotent combination to resist the law of supply and demand. Its general objects, as stated in the constitution, are "to procure regularly the statistics of the trade, both at home and abroad; to provide for the mutual interchange of information and experience, both scientific and practical; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Jacques Cartier could not have been more cordial. The chief or Agouhanna, who was crippled in all his limbs, begged the captain to touch them, as if he had asked him for a cure. Then the blind, and those who were blind in one eye, the lame, and the impotent came and sat down near Jacques Cartier, that he might touch them, so thoroughly were they persuaded that he was a god descended to heal them. "The said captain, seeing the faith and piety of this people, recited the Gospel of St. John, namely: In principio, making the sign ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... finger negligently into the mane on the Horse Vivian's neck, and pulled himself slowly into the saddle. The policeman stood mysteriously impotent. Water dripped loudly from his clothes and ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... chair now is empty, And the impotent girl is away, While the night and the darkness covered Such a deed from the light ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... man is in some way violating the laws of his physical nature. He is secretly destroying himself. Yet, say his unconscious and admiring friends, 'He is falling a victim to his own diligence!' Most lame and impotent conclusion! He is sapping the very source of life, and erelong will be a mind in ruins or a heap of dust. Young man, beware of his example! 'Keep thyself pure;' observe the laws of your physical nature, and the most unrelaxing industry will ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... a-sneakin' up and settin' your dogs on me." Mother Borton again drew on an apparently inexhaustible vocabulary of oaths. "Oh, you're as bad as him," she shouted, "and I reckon you'd be worse if you knowed how." And she spat out more curses, and shook her fist in impotent but verbose rage. ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... prospect of a general convention of the States to consider the reorganization of a government which had reduced the Confederation to a condition fearfully close to anarchy, the country to ruin, and brought upon the thirteen sovereign independent impotent and warring States the contempt of Europe and ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... I love most is the stealing in of night, when the sky takes on that strange elusive purple; when eyes turn to the evening star and marvel at its brightness; when the Eiffel Tower becomes a strange, shadowy stairway yearning in impotent effort to the ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... proportions, towered over Christine's huddled body, his eyes terrible, his fists clenched and raised to strike. Then in that moment, at the very height of his awful fear and helpless hatred, the wonderful truth burst upon Robert, and he danced gleefully, full of cruel triumph, about the black, suddenly impotent figure, shouting: ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... filled itself with something that had not been there before, his impotent love. Hilda knelt down beside the bed and pressed her forehead against the hand upon the covering, the hand that had so little more ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... prayers for punishment have been impotent expressions of exasperation at our coolness, deliberation, and inflexible determination—qualities they had deluded themselves before the war into believing would prove all a sham before the first blast of frightfulness. They told themselves that, ...
— Fragments From France • Captain Bruce Bairnsfather
... twentieth century soldier and then we were turned by him into a waiting room. It was floored with marquetry, ceiled with brown and gold decoration—but modern enough—and walled in old tapestry. The room expressed the ornate impotent gorgeousness of a useless leisure class. Four or five tables, cases and stands, backed standoffishly against the tapestry on the walls, and the legs and bases of this furniture were great—unbelievably great, rococo gilded legs—legs that writhed ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... particular, a class of young men who nibble away an income of fifteen hundred francs with the same air with which their prototypes devour two hundred thousand francs a year in Paris. These are beings of the great neuter species: impotent men, parasites, cyphers, who have a little land, a little folly, a little wit; who would be rustics in a drawing-room, and who think themselves gentlemen in the dram-shop; who say, "My fields, my peasants, my woods"; who hiss actresses at the theatre to prove that they are persons ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... yours. But is it even mine? It is mine indeed to offer you, as I might take the coin from my neck, as I might break a live branch from a tree, and give it you. And yet not mine! I dwell, or I think I dwell (if I exist at all), somewhere apart, an impotent prisoner, and carried about and deafened by a mob that I disown. This capsule, such as throbs against the sides of animals, knows you at a touch for its master; ay, it loves you! But my soul, does my soul? I think not; I know not, fearing to ask. Yet when you spoke to ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of my Men Readers, and the bashful Grace in the Faces of my Women; but in all Cases which come into Debate, there are certain things previously to be done before we can have a true Light into the Subject Matter; therefore it will, in the first Place, be necessary to consider the impotent Wenchers and industrious Haggs, who are supplied with, and are constantly supplying new Sacrifices to the Devil of Lust. You are to know then, if you are so happy as not to know it already, that the great Havock which is made in the Habitations of Beauty ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... as I struggled to repress a sob, and hastily wiped away some tears, the impotent evidences of ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... of things. On the seacoast, vast losses uncompensated; on the frontier, Indian war and actual encroachment on our territory; everywhere discontent; resentments tenfold more fierce because they will be more impotent and humbled; national discord and abasement. The disputes of the old treaty of 1783, being left to rankle, will revive the almost extinguished animosities of that period. Wars in all countries, and most of all in such ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... span separated the foremost from the boy. And now the iron hook fell at his feet, and the fireman stood upon the step with the rescued lad in his arms, just as the pent-up flame burst lurid from the attic window, reaching with impotent fury for its prey. The next moment they were safe upon the great ladder waiting ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... still rubbing his cheek disconsolately and muttering impotent threats against his now unconscious assailant; but, he didn't do this until he was certain Larkyns could not hear good wishes ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... pages of Plautus we have all passed through a similar experience. In the beginning we have been vastly diverted by the quips and cranks and merry wiles of the knavish slave, the plaints of love-lorn youth, the impotent rage of the baffled pander, the fruitless growlings of the hungry parasite's belly. We have been amused, perhaps astonished, on further reading, at meeting our new-found friends in other plays, clothed in different names to be sure and supplied in part with a fresh stock of jests, but ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... progress of this astonishing revolution with impotent surprise. Stefano Colonna, who was absent on the eventful day, expressed his scorn of the mob and their leader. But a popular attack on his palace convinced him of his error and forced him to fly from the city. Within fifteen days the triumph of Rienzi seemed to be complete, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... those understandings I have been able to provoke: for anger and fury, though they add strength to the sinews of the body, yet are found to relax those of the mind, and to render all its efforts feeble and impotent. ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... is impotent; what worth to trim The bending sails! Look, I shall quaff a cup To Fate, while the wild ocean swallows up The shipwrecked youth, the man who ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... rich relations might have paid his debts or compounded for 'em. Besides, he had taken US in. He owed us immense sums all round. I would sooner have strangled him than had no return. If I sit here thinking of him," snarls the old man, holding up his impotent ten fingers, "I want to strangle him now." And in a sudden access of fury, he throws the cushion at the unoffending Mrs. Smallweed, but it passes harmlessly on one side of ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... continually with fierce eyes, and we felt that she was tortured by a wild longing for revenge. That seemed to us to be the most suitable punishment for the terrible torments that she had made Piedelot suffer, for impotent vengeance is ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... give license to impotent persons to beg within certain limits, and, if found begging out of their limits, they shall be set in the stocks. Beggars without license to be whipped or set in the stocks. All persons able to labor, who shall beg or be vagrant, shall be whipped and sent to the place of their birth. Parishes to ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... that poured from the North, and the Church of God alone stood safe and firm, with the rainbow of heaven around her, the stern warriors of Germany asserted their rights, or redressed their wrongs with the sword, and scorned to bow before the impotent decrees of a civil tribunal. A regular system of private warfare gradually sprang up, which falsely led every man of honor to revenge any real or fancied offence offered to any of his kindred. The most deadly enmity frequently existed between neighboring chiefs, and the ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... come, Dickie, flying to his chair, was greeted by a cold, unsmiling word, and a businesslike quotation from the menu. He felt as though he had been struck. His face burned. In the West, a fellow couldn't do that and get away with it! He tightened an impotent, thin fist. He filled the order and kept his distance, and, absurdly enough, gave Lorrimer's tip to another waiter and went without his own dinner. For the first time in his life a sense of social ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... the base of the Loewenburg. In the excitement of the chase he outstripped his followers, his quarry disappeared, and, overtaken by night, his surroundings, in the dim light, took on such an unfamiliar aspect that he completely lost all sense of direction. Up and down he paced in unrestrained yet impotent anger, feeling that he was under some evil spell. Maddened by this idea, he endeavoured to hack his way through the thick undergrowth, but the matted boughs and dense foliage were as effectual as prison bars. He was trapped, he told himself, in some ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... having expended her breath and exhausted her epithets, was fain to pause a moment, though both her fists were shaken in the prisoner's face, and the whole of her wrinkled countenance was filled with fierce resentment. Deerslayer looked upon these impotent attempts to arouse him as indifferently as a gentleman in our own state of society regards the vituperative terms of a blackguard: the one party feeling that the tongue of an old woman could never injure a warrior, and the other knowing that mendacity and vulgarity can only permanently affect ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... with much talk about Progress of the Species, Dark Ages, Prejudice, and the like; so that all were quickly enough blown out into a state of windy argumentativeness; whereby the better sort had soon to end in sick, impotent Scepticism; the worser sort explode (crepiren) in finished Self-conceit, and to all spiritual intents become dead.—But this too is portion of mankind's lot. If our era is the Era of Unbelief, why murmur under it; is there ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... however strange, is not incredible, will appear from this anecdote. Some obscure Greek, who was a litigant, had an altercation with him, in which he called out, "You are an old fool." [493] It is certain that a Roman knight, who was prosecuted by an impotent device of his enemies on a false charge of abominable obscenity with women, observing that common strumpets were summoned against him and allowed to give evidence, upbraided Claudius in very harsh and severe terms with his folly and cruelty, and threw his style, and ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... decaying corpses, the ghastly mutilations they had seen in the dead. There were tales, too, of "vengeance" wreaked on "the treacherous English." One story, in particular, of the fate of a Scottish Sergeant ... "der Hochlaender" they called him in this oft-told tale ... still makes me quiver with impotent rage when I ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... under the rapid progress of civilization, the population increased and the fields were cultivated. The nobility, reduced to moderation by the enfeebling consequences of extensive foreign wars, became comparatively impotent in their attempted efforts against domestic freedom. Those of Flanders and Brabant, also, were almost decimated in the terrible battle of Bouvines, fought between the Emperor Othon and Philip Augustus, king of France. On no occasion, however, had this reduced but ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... "Matter?" A sharp, impotent oath broke from him. Then he checked his impulse to rave. "Yes. See here, Nita," he went on, with a restraint which added deep impressiveness, "we've got to quit. We've got to get out—quick. Steve's hard on our trail. I've seen ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... feature of him here; you would never dream that this Book treated of him at all. A pale sickly shadow in torn surplice is presented to us here; weltering bewildered amid heaps of what you call 'Hebrew Old-clothes;' wrestling, with impotent impetuosity, to free itself from the baleful imbroglio, as if that had been its one function in life: who in this miserable figure would recognize the brilliant, beautiful and cheerful John Sterling, with his ever-flowing wealth of ideas, fancies, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... we cannot take it for granted that it is intended for Alexander, and still less that it is the work of Lysippus. It is difficult to imagine that the favored and devoted artist of the mighty conqueror would choose to portray his great master in a painful and impotent struggle with disease and death. This consideration makes it extremely improbable that it was executed during the lifetime of Alexander, and the whole character of the work, in which free pathos is the prevailing element, and its close resemblance in style ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... cool and capable, was now sharpened like a hunted beast's. His imagination was preying on him and I could picture its torture. He, who had been always at the top directing the machine, was now only a cog in it. He had never in his life been anything but powerful; now he was impotent. He was in a hard, unfamiliar world, in the grip of something which he feared and didn't understand, in the charge of men who were in no way amenable to his persuasiveness. It was like a proud and bullying manager suddenly forced to labour in a squad of navvies, and worse, for there ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... in Domremy. My family had fled to those distant regions from the neighborhood of Paris in the first years of the century. In politics they were Armagnacs—patriots; they were for our own French King, crazy and impotent as he was. The Burgundian party, who were for the English, had stripped them, and done it well. They took everything but my father's small nobility, and when he reached Neufchateau he reached it in poverty and with ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... passionate flame of impotent anger. He had insulted her, trampled down the pride of her untamed youth, brushed away the bloom of her maiden modesty. And there was nothing she could do to make him pay. He was too insensitive to be reached by words, no matter how she pelted ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... Maulevrier. He might ostensibly leave Fellside before Lesbia's return, yet lurk in the neighbourhood, and contrive to meet her every day. If Maulevrier encouraged this folly, they might be married and over the border, before her ladyship—fettered, impotent as she ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... funeral oration on Louis XIII. summed up briefly but significantly the result of Richelieu's gigantic efforts to consolidate the regal power. "Sixty-three kings," it said, "had preceded him in rule of the realm, but he alone had rendered it absolute, and what all collectively had been impotent to achieve in the course of twelve centuries for the grandeur of France, he had accomplished in the short space of thirty-three years." It was against that absolute power incarnate in Richelieu, which from the steps of the throne hurled men to the earth with its bolts rather than governed ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... was, hearing nothing but the echo of her laugh, unable to think save of the truth that was driven so cruelly into my mind. The first realising of things that cannot be undone brings to a young man a fierce impotent resentment; that was in my heart, and with it a sudden revulsion from what I had desired, as intemperate as the desire, as cruel, it may be, as the thing which gave it birth. Nell's laughter died away, and she was silent. Presently ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... an adequate, socially acceptable manner, and therefore has to resort to constant deceit and lying, and in which those inhibitions determined by social, ethical, and aesthetic considerations are equally impotent. The marked egotistic trend which constantly comes to the surface in the habitual liar when he attempts to play the part of the hero and central figure in the most fantastic, bizarre, and impossible ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... decidedly opposed to any rash movement, and against the idea of secession at this time. I did so because I think that Lincoln's administration will fail, and be regarded as impotent for good or evil within four months after his inauguration. We are to meet ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... her savagely, and would have liked to strike her, to beat out his passion on her white breast and shoulders. But she had spoken only the truth when she said he dare not touch her. With impotent oaths he sought to let off the anger that boiled in him. He feared to think, and every word she had uttered made him think in spite of himself. The events of sixty hours had destroyed what little of good there was in the man. Save only the idolatrous ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... that Mrs. Kerr the departed could have given her young daughter-in-law a few wrinkles had she met her—wrinkles of the most unprofitable kind upon her fair face; but as it was, Mrs. Kerr senior lay quietly afar off from No. 30 Welham Mansions, impotent to reform, and Osborn lay thinking his thoughts in silence while Marie, having dressed to petticoat and camisole, wreathed up her ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... at the beginning of each quarter of the year, so traversing till doomsday, being impotent of staying in one place, and finding some ease by so purning [journeying] and changing habitations. Their chameleon-like bodies swim in the air near the earth with bag and baggage; and at such revolution of time, ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... me rend impotent, Cul-de-jatte, goutteux, manchot, pourvu qu'en somme Je vive, c'est assez; je suis ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... vowing the most intense vengeance upon the college boys. The occurrence naturally caused him to cast back his thoughts to that other trick-the locking him into the cloisters, in which Jenkins had been a fellow-victim—and he doubled his fists in impotent anger. "This comes of their not having been flogged ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... to furnish positive proof of a future life for us. But this negation fully admitted is no evidence of our total mortality. Science is impotent to give any proof reaching to such a conclusion. However badly the archery of the sharp eyed and strong armed critics of disbelief has riddled the outer works of ordinary argument, it has not slain the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... and intellectual advantages that had been transplanted from Europe. On the contrary, we had been taught to regard them as most unfortunate in the circumstances under which [11] they so gloriously conquered their merited freedom. We saw them free, but perfectly illiterate barbarians, impotent to use the intellectual resources of which their valour had made them possessors, in the shape of books on the spirit and technical details of a highly developed national existence. We had learnt also, until this new interpreter of history had contradicted ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... Roman and Grecian races had become impotent and decrepit. The high destiny of man lay not with them, but with the younger race, for whom all earlier civilizations had but prepared ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... conjunction.' Thereupon I instantly clasped the Succubus with passion by the light of a thousand million of stars, and I wished in clasping her to feel the nature of those thousand million creatures. Then by this great effort of love I fell impotent in every way, and heard a great infernal laugh. Then I found myself in my bed, surrounded by my servitors, who had had the courage to struggle with the demon, throwing into the bed where I was stretched a basin full of holy water, and saying fervent ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... the Channel carrying Sir John French's little army to the Continent, while the boasted German fleet, impotent to menace the safety of our transports, lay helpless—bottled up, to quote Mr. Asquith's phrase, "in the inglorious seclusion of ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... people who offer vague commonplaces, or what they call "hopes;" she was spared also that savage disappointment to which many are doomed who in their trouble find that all philosophy fails them, and the books on their shelves look so impotent, so beside the mark, that they narrowly escape being ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... the door shut on him and paced up and down in an impotent fury of passion. "The dirty little blackleg! He'd like to bracket me in the same class as himself. He'd like to imply that I—By Heaven, if he opens his lying mouth to a hint of such a thing I'll horsewhip the ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... the baronet, with a sneer of contempt, "only you have mistaken your man. I am no subject for your craft—not to be deceived by your hypocrisy—and laugh to scorn your ominous but impotent croaking. Only before you go, remember the conditions I have offered the scoundrel who robbed me; and if the theological intricacies of your crooked creed will permit you, try and get him to accept them. It will be better for him, and better for you too. Do this, and ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... been brought to nought by the craft of an idle and vicious young man, and the wickedness of a faithless duena, working upon the weakness of an artless and inexperienced girl. Heaven save us all from such enemies as these, against whom the shield of prudence and the sword of vigilance are alike impotent to defend us! ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... a tiny set of almshouses, whose lowly gables line the road under the castle hill. They were built by Andrew Windsor, of the parish of Bentley in Hampshire, in 1619, and were intended, as an inscription on the wall informs you, "For the Habitation and Relief of eight poor Honest Impotent Old Persons." Even with four epithets, the almoners seem ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... boldest beauties round, The varied valley, and the mountain ground Wildly majestic: what is all the pride Of flats with loads of ornament supplied? Unpleasing, tasteless, impotent expense, Compared with Nature's rude magnificence. Oft on some evening, sunny, soft, and still, The Muse shall hand thee to the beech-grown hill, To spend in tea the cool, refreshful hour, Where nods in air the pensile, nest-like bower; Or where the Hermit hangs his straw-clad ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... Rovere, Duke of Urbino, commanded a considerable army as general of the Church, and was now acting for Venice. Why he effected no diversion while the Imperial troops were marching upon Rome, and why he delayed to relieve the city, was never properly explained. Folk attributed his impotent conduct partly to a natural sluggishness in warfare, and partly to his hatred for the house of Medici. Leo X had deprived him of his dukedom, and given it to a Medicean prince. It is to this that Cellini probably refers in the cautious ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... 'that the trouble came at once. Of course we can never put down the reason in black and white, but all India will understand. And it is better to have a sharp short outbreak than five years of impotent administration inside the Border. It costs less. Grish Chunder De has reported himself sick, and has been transferred to his own province without any sort of reprimand. He was strong on not having taken over ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... of contempt that scarecrow gave him out of his unquenchable eyes. He seemed to live only by the force of infuriated and impotent despair. Suddenly he gave a gasp and fell forward writhing in the agony of cramp in all his limbs; a not unusual effect of the heat of a camp-fire. It resembled the application of some horrible torture. But he tried to fight against the pain at ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... terrace, impotent, watching him as he crossed the lawn and made for the fields. It was a terrible day for her. She felt that she couldn't go to church in her usual way, but stayed at home tortured by the most hopeless and tragic anticipations of evil. At lunch time he had ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... the royal party. He calmly replied, 'It is some days since this invention has been spread among the deputies; I was aware of it from the first; but from its being utterly impossible to be listened to for a moment by any one, I did not wish to afflict you by the mention of an impotent fabrication, which I myself treated with the contempt it justly merited. Nevertheless, I did not forget, yesterday, in the presence of both my brothers, who accompanied me to the National Assembly, there to exculpate myself from an imputation at which my nature revolts; and, from ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... that I am changed, that right and wrong grow dark to me, that hypocrisy seems the atmosphere fit for earth. No; it is since the discovery that demands the vengeance. It is useless, sir," he continued impetuously,—"useless to argue with me. Were I to sit down, patient and impotent, under the sense of the wrong which I have received, I should feel, indeed, that debasement which you ascribe to the gratification of what you term revenge. I should never regain the self-esteem which the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he paced the floor of his little bed-chamber, fuming and swearing to himself in a mild, impotent fashion—and in some dread of the door. Such words and sentences as these fell from his lips:—"Nobody!" "Keeps me on the place!" "Because she's tender-hearted!" "I will fire her!" "Can't talk back to me!" "Damned Irisher!" And so on and so forth until he quite wore himself ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... the Colonel and his Lieutenant took place three days after that first one, in which the unexpected presence of a lady had prevented Ivan from giving his opponent so much as a suggestion of his vantage-point. It came about thus. When Brodsky, already in a state of impotent wrath at the audacity of his officer's reproof, received from Ivan's orderly the full sum of Petrovna's debt, together with a highly imprudent letter from Mademoiselle Irina, who did not scruple to mention ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... and threw myself back upon the divan. Karamaneh stretched out her hands toward me, and I shall never forget the expression which flashed into those glorious eyes; but, seeing me intolerant of her appeal, she drew back and quickly turned her head aside. Even in this hour of extremity, of impotent wrath, I could find no contempt in my heart for her feeble hypocrisy; with all the old wonder I watched that exquisite profile, and Karamaneh's very deceitfulness was a salve—for had she not cared she would not have ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... knew well in those early hours of Wednesday, the 5th, that the end had already come. He also knew the value of even a few hours' hopeless resistance, not perhaps to the material side of the Allied strategy, but to the support of those moral forces lacking which men are impotent in maintaining a challenge. Not only all that Wednesday, the 5th, but all the Thursday, the 6th, he maintained a line against the pressure of the invaders with his imperfect and ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... after another in the head of the girl and confused and tortured her, impotent as she was to set up against them some definite, all-conquering desire. Though she was in an anxious and compressing her lips. Smolin rose from his chair, made a step toward her and bowed respectfully. She was rather pleased with this low ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... though he had escaped from the house of his meditated crime, he was still in great peril. Doubtless Julius had given full information to the police of his name and residence, and even now they might be in pursuit of him. He ground his teeth when he thought of this, and clinched his fist in the impotent desire for vengeance. ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... with memories and conquered his qualms. He felt that it would be easy work and pleasant to drag James Finlay to earth and trample the life out of him. The thought of the insults of the brutal men who held Una and his own impotent struggles with the belt which bound him made him fierce enough. But the mood passed. His mind reverted to the subject which had never, all day, been far from his thoughts. He recalled each detail of his walk back to Dun-severic ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... rose quickly to her feet, gave an astonished glance at the grate, which was once more enveloped in impotent ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... the middle of the forenoon. Until then he was to be harassed by doubts and fears that would not be easy to suppress in his present unquiet frame of mind. While he was obliged to stand idle and impotent, the very foundation of all the future happiness of the girl he loved might be irreparably shattered. Silent, deadly, purposeful forces were working toward that end. Her mother would, no doubt, prepare her in a way for the crash, but there always would be the memory of the ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... ranchmen of the Frio country put forth Easter blossoms of new hats and gowns as faithfully as is done anywhere, and the Southwest is, for one day, a mingling of prickly pear, Paris, and paradise. And now it was Good Friday, and Tonia Weaver's Easter hat blushed unseen in the desert air of an impotent express car, beyond the burned trestle. On Saturday noon the Rogers girls, from the Shoestring Ranch, and Ella Reeves, from the Anchor-O, and Mrs. Bennet and Ida, from Green Valley, would convene at the Espinosa and pick up Tonia. With their Easter hats and frocks ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... Merenptah, seized Canaan and laid waste the land of Israel. A few years later, Rameses III. led his fleet and his army to the Syrian coast and defeated the Asiatics in a great sea-battle. He failed to hold the country, however, and after his death Egypt remained impotent for two centuries. Then, under Sheshonk I., of Dynasty XXII., a new attempt was made, and Jerusalem was captured. Takeloth II., of the same dynasty, sent thither an Egyptian army to help in the ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... woman, and child in the country. Surely, then, the statement which we make at the outset, that the coal trade of the United States is in the hands of monopolists; and that competition, where not killed, is almost impotent to keep down prices, is one ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... his finger on the clean lozenge of the painted window one day when we three were alone together in the hall. "Here went your lucky guinea, Jacob," said he. And when Mr. Henry only looked upon him darkly, "O!" he added, "you need not look such impotent malice, my good fly. You can be rid of your spider when you please. How long, O Lord? When are you to be wrought to the point of a denunciation, scrupulous brother? It is one of my interests in this dreary hole. I ever loved experiment." Still Mr. Henry only stared upon him with a glooming ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... name of Donald and to the name of Jack, for they had found out where the foods were poured, and each took his station and waited there, Donald at the first of the course for his, Jack at the second station, while all the impotent fools ran round and round after the man ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fit of impotent rage, made a dash to reach the fireplace, but his feet were hampered by the ulster, and he would have fallen heavily had not the doctor caught him ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... meeting of ministers and elders to be held in Glasgow, November 21, 1638, five months hence, to re-organize the General Assembly. A cloud of war immediately darkened the heavens. Had the king's wrath been lightning, the meeting-place would have been struck; but his rage was impotent. ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... His own will he begat us (Jas. 1:18): Our regeneration is a creative act on the part of God, not a reforming process on the part of man. It is not brought about by natural descent, for all we get from that is "flesh." It is not by natural choice, for the human will is impotent. Nor is it by self-effort, or any human generative principle. Nor is it by the blood of any ceremonial sacrifices. It is not by pedigree or natural generation. It is altogether and absolutely the work ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... of Muley Abul Hassan in fulfilling treaty stipulations passed unresented during the residue of the reign of Henry the Impotent, and the truce was tacitly continued without the enforcement of tribute during the first three years of the reign of his successors, Ferdinand and Isabella of glorious and happy memory, who were too much engrossed ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... hearken to any plans for capturing the starving garrison by means of progressive trenches. While Generals Botha, Meyer, and Erasmus, with less than three thousand men, were holding the enemy at the Tugela, Joubert, with three times that number of men to guard impotent Ladysmith, declined to send any ammunition for their big guns, voted to retreat, and finally fled northward to Colenso, deserting the fighting men, destroying the bridges and railways as he progressed, and even leaving his own ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... turned, and saw what trap he had blundered into; then stood transfixed, impotent, alternately scarlet with rage and white with the vital shame of discovery. M. Beaucaire remarked, indicating the silent figures by a polite wave of the hand, "Is it not a compliment to monsieur that I procure ...
— Monsieur Beaucaire • Booth Tarkington
... of impotent fury mingled with compelled admiration and respect made his face about as unpleasant to look at as she had ever seen it. But she liked to look. His confession of her strength made her feel stronger. The sense of strength was a new sensation with her—new and delicious. Nor could ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... less solid where power is entrusted to a corporate body, for, as Turgot once said, "La morale des corps les plus scrupuleux ne vaut jamais celle des particuliers honnetes."[11] In both cases, public opinion is relatively impotent. In the case of direct Government action, on the other hand, the views of those who wish to uphold a high standard of public morality can find expression in Parliament, and the latter can, if it chooses, oblige the Government to ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... Disgusted with their impotent efforts to make their brain the common sewer of Joe Miller, I at last started up, with difficulty bridled my anger, and addressing myself to the lady said, 'Shall we retire to your tea table, Miss Wilmot?' 'Ay, do, do!' replied the father in God. 'Try, Liddy, if you can entertain Mr. Trevor: ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... pride and ambition had combined to rear. A brilliant alliance that insured great wealth, that promised a secure stepping-stone to political preferment, was apparently a substantial bulwark against the swelling billows of an unaccountable whim; yet he was impotent to resist the yearning tenderness which impelled him to forget all else, in one determined effort to rescue and shelter the life he had been the chief agent in imperilling. Clear eyed, keen witted, he did not for an instant deceive himself; and he knew that neither compassion for misfortune, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... her off from her penetrating bows like a spent wave. But baffled though she was for the moment, Georgie had been aware that Mrs Quantock seethed with revolutionary ideas: she deeply resented this confiscation of what was certainly her property, though she was impotent to stop it, and Georgie knew just what she felt. It was all very well to say that Lucia's schemes were entirely in accord with the purposes of the Guides. That might be so, but Mrs Quantock would not cease to think ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... so was never fostered by natural selection. But in many species of animals of intermediate strength, that by cooperation might be able to resist attack or overcome enemies that they would singly be impotent against, the cooperative instinct became strongly developed. Notably in such case was man; and we find group consciousness, tribal loyalty, continually enhanced by the killing off of the tribes in which it was feebler. The dominant races in man's internecine struggles have been those of passionate ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... away with no play of that sort at his expense. He warned himself that he was no simple fool to be played with. And if Nancy wanted the man—But he broke away from under the lash of impotent fury, and turned to a channel of thought which was bound to serve a nature such as his in his ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... Dumb with impotent rage, P. Sybarite climbed back on his stool, while George sat down at his desk, lighted a Sweet Caporal (it was after three o'clock and both the partners were gone for the day) and with a leer watched the bookkeeper carefully slit the envelope ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... their equally stately and dignified readers. The Gray Seal, the leech that fed upon society, the murderer, the thief, the menace to the lives and property of law-abiding citizens, the scourge that for years New York had combated in the no more effective fashion than that of gnashing its teeth in impotent fury, had suddenly reappeared with a fresh murder to his credit. And New York had ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... held a bed of justice and forced their registration; but his weak nature was tiring of the struggle. Turgot was unpopular on all sides, and Louis never supported a truly unpopular minister. "Only M. Turgot and I love the people," he cried, in his impotent despair; and then he gave way. Malesherbes, the principal supporter in the royal council of the Controller General of the Finances, was the first to go. Thereupon Turgot wrote the king a long and harsh letter, blaming him for Malesherbes's resignation. "Do not forget, sir," said ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... hairs. And at these visions of theirs we have mocked, and held them for idle and vain, unreal and unaccomplishable. What have we accomplished with our realities? Is this what has come of our worldly wisdom, tried against their folly? this, our mightiest possible, against their impotent ideal? or, have we only wandered among the spectra of a baser felicity, and chased phantoms of the tombs, instead of visions of the Almighty; and walked after the imaginations of our evil hearts, instead of after the counsels of Eternity, until our lives—not in the ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... government issued orders for stopping all neutral ships, laden with provisions, bound for the ports of France, thus declaring that country in a state of blockade. The National Convention of France had, indeed, set the example of this by an act of the same tendency, doubly rash, because impotent. But this, however strong a plea for retaliating upon France, was none for making America suffer. Corn, indeed, formed the chief export of the United States, and to prohibit them from shipping it at all—for the new regulation amounted in fact to this—was a grievance ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... throughout the Universe. Varied are the physical forms and varied are the mentalities of our almost innumerable races of beings, but in Civilization we are becoming one, since those backward people who will not co-operate with us are rendered impotent to impede our progress ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... he had found Ezram's body—so huddled and impotent in the dead leaves—he remembered the solace of tobacco. He hunted through his pockets, found his pipe and a single tin of the weed, and began to inhale the fragrant, peace-giving smoke. When he raised his eyes again he found the girl ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... watched the progress of this astonishing revolution with impotent surprise. Stefano Colonna, who was absent on the eventful day, expressed his scorn of the mob and their leader. But a popular attack on his palace convinced him of his error and forced him to fly from the city. Within fifteen days the triumph of Rienzi seemed to be complete, when the proudest nobles ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... together through the night; on, on. Near to the great city; near to the welcome, dark or bright, awaiting the journey's end. Blacker grew the night, wilder shrieked the wind in angry protest against the defiant, fiery, resistless monster upon whom its rage fell impotent. Now pausing; now rushing on with a shriek and a roar; nearer, nearer to the scene of the new life, dawning grimly upon the fair girl, ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... without dollars? His purpose might be strong, but poverty, a Brobdingnagian giant, laid its hand on his shoulder, crushing him down, holding him there, impotent, until the stocky man and his cohorts of the private detective office should come over and get him—to send him to the little island he had thought of when crossing ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... to be avoided. With this spirit of ignorant or lawless admiration the novelty of yesterday is eclipsed by the novelty of to-day; other things being equal, the later instance of disproportion always outbids the earlier. For so this spirit is ever taking to things which are impotent to reward the attention they catch. And thus men of such taste, or rather such want of taste, naturally fall in with the genius of sensationalism; which, whatever form it takes on, soon wears that form out, and has no way to sustain itself in life but by continual ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... applications; I was induced to ascribe his perpetual ennui to the pain or disagreeable sensation of a diseased liver. The other young gentleman shot himself in his bed-room, and I was informed that there was found written on a scrap of paper on his table, "I am impotent, and therefore not fit to live." From whence there was reason to conclude, that this was the hallucinatio maniacalis, the delirious idea, which caused him to destroy himself. The case therefore belongs to mania mutabilis, and not to ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... his boyish days, it seemed as if he could perceive the figure of his grandmother sitting by the roadside and throwing stones at the procession as it went by. He could almost fancy the old woman aiming, in her impotent wrath, at that baneful influence which had trampled down her life, and with it, all she had gathered round her to make ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... loss of both physical and mental power. Not only the voluntary muscles become impotent, but the involuntary ones lose in effectiveness. Digestion is partly or wholly suspended. "Scared stiff" is a popular and truthful expression. The bodily rhythm is lost, the breathing becomes jerky and the ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... mind! Susan could have given a mad laugh at the suggestion. Madness seemed very near sometimes, between the anguished aching of her heart, and the chaos of shame and grief and impotent rebellion that possessed her soul. She was sickened with the constant violence of her emotions, whether anger or shame shook her, or whether she gave way to desperate longings for the sound of Stephen Bocqueraz's voice, and the touch of his hand again, she was ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... other's arms, declaring their mutual love. Raphael who also had become rich resolved to espouse Pauline; but frightened by the shrinkage of the "magic skin" he fled precipitately and returned to Paris. Pauline hastened after him, only to behold him die upon her breast in a transport of furious, impotent love. [The Magic Skin.] ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... gains the victory. I venture to submit that the new forms now at work in the world are not forms that will do their work by halves. When once the age shall have mastered them, they will be either one thing or the other—they will be either impotent or omnipotent. Their public exponents at present boast that they will be omnipotent; and more and more the world about us is beginning to believe the boast. But the world feels uneasily that the import of it will be very ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... women, had long ago taken possession of him. This philosophic attitude was the product of his egoism. He felt himself the center of life and it became his nature to revolt against all evidences of life that existed outside himself. In this manner he grew to hate, or rather to feel an impotent disgust for, whatever ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... so many roughly handled writers, that so far as literature was concerned a partial cause might be impotent or mischievous criticism; the satirizing of individuality, the lack of whole-seeing in contemporary estimates of poetry and kindred work, the knowingness affected by junior reviewers, the overgrowth of meticulousness in their peerings for an opinion, as if ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... cried Hortensius Martius, suddenly jumping to his feet and beginning to pace up and down the room in an outburst of impotent wrath. "This is miserable, cowardly, abject! What? Would ye allow that stranger, that son of slaves, to thwart your plans by his treachery? Are we naughty children that can thus be sent, well-whipped and whining to bed? Up, my lords, this is not the end! Caesar is not ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... left entirely to the care of themselves, which they might have done effectually, had they been united in their councils; but the usual disputes between their governors and assemblies, defeated every salutary plan that was proposed. Pennsylvania, the most powerful of the three, was rendered quite impotent, either for its own defence or that of its neighbours, by these unhappy contests; though, at last, the assembly of that province, sensible of the danger to which they were exposed, and seeing the absolute necessity of providing a standing military ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... to both belligerents, should dream of entering the lists with either singly, was perhaps hopeless; but through the indifference of Congress the navy of a people, then second only to the English as maritime carriers, was left so utterly impotent that it counted for naught, even as an additional embarrassment to those with which the contending powers were already weighted. When, therefore, in retaliation for the seizures made under the French ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... fact been set by the Texas Railway Commission. The Court found that the Interstate Commerce Commission had not exceeded its statutory powers. The constitutional objection to the Commission's action was stated thus: "That Congress is impotent to control the intrastate charges of an interstate carrier even to the extent necessary to prevent injurious discrimination against interstate traffic." This objection the Court met, as follows: "Wherever the interstate and intrastate transactions of carriers are so related that the government ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... shout, with the exception of the 'Skimmer of the Seas.' The latter leaned against the top with folded arms, listening to their impotent efforts ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... fifty years furnishes a living proof that Representative Government is impotent to discharge all the functions we have sought to assign to it. In days to come the nineteenth century will be quoted as having witnessed ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... it; for I have made up my mind that it is not worth a fifth part of the enormous labour it has cost me. I assure you that all that is worth your doing (if you have time for so much) is glancing at Chapter VI., and reading parts of the later chapters. The facts on self-impotent plants seem to me curious, and I have worked out to my own satisfaction the good from crossing and evil from interbreeding. I did read Pangenesis the other evening, but even this, my beloved child, as I had fancied, quite disgusted me. The devil take the whole book; and yet now I am ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... being left alone, and of being horribly disgusted by tobacco chewing and tobacco spittle, I have suffered considerably. The sight of slavery in Virginia, the hatred of British feeling upon the subject, and the miserable hints of the impotent indignation of the South, have pained me very much; on the last head, of course, I have felt nothing but a mingled pity and amusement; on the other, sheer distress. But however much I like the ingredients of this great dish, I cannot but come back to the point ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... up at the same hotel, where I found an opportunity of telling her all her lover had said. I arrived in Reggio before her, but I could not speak to her in that city, for she was always in the company of her potent and impotent lord. After the fair, during which nothing of importance occurred to me, I left Reggio with my friend Baletti and we proceeded to Turin, which I wanted to see, for the first time I had gone to that city with Henriette I had stopped only long enough ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... to be the usual winter pause over the greater part of the war area, but round about here, there are the most awful massacres; 550,000 Armenians have been slaughtered in cold blood by the Turks, and with cruelties that pass all telling. One is quite impotent. ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... Dr. Hook, with reserves according to each man's point of view, yet came forward in his defence. The Board was made to feel that they had been driven by violent and partisan instigations to commit themselves to a very foolish as well as a very passionate and impotent step; that they had by very questionable authority simply thrown an ill-sounding and ill-mannered word at an argument on a very difficult question, to which they themselves certainly were not prepared with a clear and satisfactory answer; that they had made the double ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... (after hesitation). I do not hold with you, That a man's oath can bind him to his God To do what else were wrong. Yet, since you swear Your purpose is not bloodshed, and my will Is impotent to stay your choice, and chiefly Because I am cast down and sick at heart, And without any trust in God or man, I do consent to ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... briefly but significantly the result of Richelieu's gigantic efforts to consolidate the regal power. "Sixty-three kings," it said, "had preceded him in rule of the realm, but he alone had rendered it absolute, and what all collectively had been impotent to achieve in the course of twelve centuries for the grandeur of France, he had accomplished in the short space of thirty-three years." It was against that absolute power incarnate in Richelieu, which from the steps of the ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... the medieval Parliaments, and their self-destruction in the Wars of the Roses. Unless we realise how very largely the barons were the Parliament, it is difficult to understand how it came about that Parliament was so utterly impotent under the Tudors. The Wars of the Roses killed off the mighty parliamentarians, and it took a hundred years to raise the country landowners into a party which, under Eliot, Hampden, and Pym, was to make the House ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... enemies don Ramon had in the Council—meddlers, dona Bernarda called them—idiots who swallowed everything in print provided it were against the King and religion—attacked the cacique persistently, censuring everything he did. Don Ramon's henchmen would tremble with impotent rage. "That charge must be answered! Let's see now: somebody go and ask ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... person ought to prosecute that revenge from which the person who was injured desisted, I shall not preserve what Mr. Savage suppressed; of which the publication would indeed have been a punishment too severe for so impotent an assault. ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... boastful sham we can not afford to abandon our naval programme. Our voice is now potent for peace, and is so potent because we are not afraid of war. But our protestations upon behalf of peace would neither receive nor deserve the slightest attention if we were impotent to make them good. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... heels of his boss. And when they had passed, the tent began to belch forth men who walked with heads and shoulders a little bent, talking together under their breaths of this man who dared defy the Committee to its face, and whose daring was as impotent as the breeze that still pulled at the flapping corner of the cloth sign over the door of ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... power within the natural limits of vision? At any rate, some persons seem to have opened more eyes than others, they see with such force and distinctness; their vision penetrates the tangle and obscurity where that of others fails, like a spent or impotent bullet. How many eyes did Gilbert White open? how many did Henry Thoreau? how many did Audubon? how many does the hunter, matching his sight against the keen and alert senses of a deer, or a moose, or a fox, or a wolf? Not outward eyes, but inward. We open another eye whenever we see beyond ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... of this war on the field of battle, to France indeed it can bring only one end. For her there is no future save that of a military empire. Her life blood is dried up. This war will sweep away all power of recuperation. She will remain impotent to increase her race, sterile of new forces for good, her young men's blood gone to win the barren fields of Alsace. Her one purpose in the new Europe will be to hold a sword, not her own, over the struggling form of a resurgent Germany in the interests of ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... All the resolutions in the world, passed under a furore of misstatement and misconception, even by such a noble body of men as Third-Corps veterans, will not re-habilitate Joseph Hooker's military character during these five days, nor make him other than a morally and intellectually impotent man from May 1 to May 5, 1863. Loyalty to Hooker, so-called, is disloyalty to the grand old army, disloyalty to the seventeen thousand men who fell, disloyalty to every comrade who fought at Chancellorsville. I begrudge no man the desire to blanket facts and smother truth ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... all for the opinion that "nature" gave men an appetite the satisfaction of which would be peaceful and satisfactory, but that human laws and institutions have put it under constraints which produce agony.[1143] The truth is that license stimulates desire without limit, and ends in impotent agony. Renunciation produces agony of another kind. Somewhere between lies temperance, which seems an easy solution, but there is no definition of temperance which is generally applicable, and, wherever the limit ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... knew that he was alone; that there was no human being within miles to help the man caught in the hand of that mischance but himself, so frantically willing, but so impotent. ...
— The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch • Henry Wallace Phillips
... and impotent I stand, As fettered by an unseen hand; Break thou the strong and subtle band, And ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... vehemence there unusual, declared that he saw 'the finger of God in this second Reformation,' and, pursuing the prophetic vein and manner, denounced 'woe to those who should presume to lift up their hands and voices in vain and impotent attempts to stem the flood of light that was ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... hideous folds almost on the recumbent body. Then, aroused to the horror of their nearness, he seized a torch and made at the slimy heap. The fire conquered them. They slid off the ground, with forked tongues darting out in impotent malice. But others, squirming through the water, wriggled up; and the boy, maddened by the danger, stood his ground, torch in hand, defending ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... held the upper hand, old Robinson was more than chagrined; he was furious. His rage, however, was impotent; there was no immediate remedy at hand. Theodore, equally baffled, returned to his attitude ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... am I? I have smattered law, smattered letters, smattered geography, smattered mathematics; I have even a working knowledge of judicial astrology; and here I stand, all London roaring by at the street's end, as impotent as any baby. I have a prodigious contempt for my maternal uncle; but without him, it is idle to deny it, I should simply resolve into my elements like an unstable mixture. I begin to perceive that it is necessary to know some one thing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... contracted in spite of herself; her small eyes, ordinarily dull, sparkled with rage; her compressed lips became bloodless: she stiffened her manacled hands. Then, as if she had regretted this mute manifestation of rage and impotent hatred, she conquered her emotion, and ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... carefully taken apart. He took up a sort of hollow cylinder, called a barrel, in which the spring is enclosed, and removed the steel spiral, but instead of relaxing itself, according to the laws of its elasticity, it remained coiled on itself like a sleeping viper. It seemed knotted, like impotent old men whose blood has long been congealed. Master Zacharius vainly essayed to uncoil it with his thin fingers, the outlines of which were exaggerated on the wall; but he tried in vain, and soon, with a terrible cry of anguish and rage, he threw it through the ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... only when we accept such a reading of the facts as this that we escape from that worst of nightmares which reaches its climax in hurling its foolish defiance at the Most High, challenging His right to punish the instruments of His own will, those "helpless pieces of the game He plays," impotent ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... and could not possibly be told, but to-morrow she shall learn all. Farewell, Ivan Ivanovich, my head aches, and I am going back to the house to lie down." Tushin looked at Vera, asking himself how any man could be such a blind fool as Volokov. Or is he merely a beast, he thought to himself in impotent rage. He pulled himself together, however, and asked her if she had any ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... humiliating and degrading to see my marriage from my husband's point of view, and when I remembered that I was bound fast to the man who talked to me like this, and that he could claim rights in me, to-night, to-morrow, as long as I lived, until death parted us, a wild impulse of impotent anger at everybody and everything made me drop my head on to the ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... of my love I fold Your little shoulders close about: Ah—could my love keep out the cold And shut the creeping sorrows out! Rough paths will tire your darling feet, Gray skies will weep your tears above, While round you still, in torment, beat The impotent ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... thousand resolutions as to reading, writing, and employment for his mind. He attempted to learn whole pages by rote, and to fatigue himself to rest by exercise of his memory. But his memory would not work; his mind would continue idle; he was impotent over his own faculties. Oh, if he could only sleep while these horrid weeks ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... heart, So impotent to tell the tale Of love's delight, of envy's smart, Of passion, and ambition's bale, Of ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... my just punishment. I was wishing to perfect His work, and, in my blindness, I thought that in the admirable chain of laws which preside over life at the surface of the earth, and maintain it ever in freshness, there was wanting a link which I, feeble and impotent worm, was to supply. Provision had been made for this beforehand, but in a way so wonderful, that the possibility of such a law had not so much as dawned upon the human understanding."[112] Here is a ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... exclamation, I call him [the outcrie] because it vtters our minde by all such words as do shew any extreme passion, whether it be by way of exclamation or crying out, admiration or wondering, imprecation or cursing, obtestation or taking God and the world to witnes, or any such like as declare an impotent affection, as Chaucer of the Lady Cresseida by exclamation. O soppe of sorrow soonken into care, O caytife ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... If we recognise our helplessness, God is our help. If we conceit ourselves to be strong, we are weak; if we know ourselves to be impotent, Omnipotence pours itself into us. We read once that Jesus Christ healed 'them that had need of healing.' Why does the Evangelist not say, without that periphrasis, 'healed the sick'? Because he would emphasise, I suppose, amongst other things, the thought that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... came also a sense of hopeless, impotent rebellion against the unreasonableness of it all. There were scores of men no better than I whose punishments had at least been reserved for another world and I felt that it was bitterly, cruelly unfair ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... in kingly mood, Would he ever have endued Canvas with the peerless thing, In the grace that it did bring, And the light that o'er it flowed, With the pureness that it showed, And the pureness that it meant? Could he skill to make it seen As he saw? For this, I ween, He were likewise impotent. ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... deeper, and stay under longer than usual; at the flash of our rifles they would go down, and in a few minutes would be again on the surface sixty rods from us, laughing aloud, as it were, with their clear and quavering voices, at our impotent attempts to shoot them. ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... shadow of a hedge. I seem to remember talking, wanderingly, to myself during that last spurt. I was also very thirsty, and bitterly regretful I had drunk no more water. It is a curious thing that I felt angry with my wife; I cannot account for it, but my impotent desire to ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... and they had loyally fulfilled his expectations. With both he held private consultations, and each accepted his version of the facts without a single unnecessary or disquieting question. They knew they could trust Andrew. But what did surprise him was the calmness into which the impotent indignation of Frank and Jean subsided. Within three days they were converted from volcanoes to icebergs. It was a condition too frigid to give him unalloyed delight, yet all things considered he could not but ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... word. Perhaps one, to wit, "clever." I suspect that Dreiser, writing so of his own creed, would be tempted to make it "stupid," or, at all events, "unintelligible." The struggle of man, as he sees it, is more than impotent; it is gratuitous and purposeless. There is, to his eye, no grand ingenuity, no skilful adaptation of means to end, no moral (or even dramatic) plan in the order of the universe. He can get out of it only a sense of profound and ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... he broke out at length in impotent rage. "This is not the first trouble in which he ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... conjecture. Not only the evil which I dreaded might not have happened, but some alleviation of his misery was possible. Could I arrest his footsteps and win his attention, I might be able to insinuate the lessons of fortitude; but if words were impotent, and arguments were nugatory, yet to sit by him in silence, to moisten his hand with tears, to sigh in unison, to offer him the spectacle of sympathy, the solace of believing that his demerits were not estimated by so rigid a standard by others as by himself, that one at least among ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... man not overburdened with emotions, told with a sob in his voice how, at the terrible Rowan Rock, Jim Mason had stood, impotent, dumb, big-eyed, watching Betsy—Betsy, the friend and partner of the last ten years—slipping over the ice-cold surface, silently appealing to the hand that had never failed her ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... excited lassitude. His nerves were all tremulous, he must needs do everything vehemently, and felt the while as if he were being whirled along, passive, in the grip of some force outside himself One moment he was dreaming himself capable of miracles, the next he was limp with weariness and utterly impotent. And naturally, as soon as he had food inside him, weariness won and he was overwhelmed with great waves of languor. He hardly dragged himself up to his attic ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... come back from merciful nothingness and peace to this burning anguish, not to be borne, of body and mind. "I had died," he thought—"it was done with," and a wild, impotent rage, as against some brutality ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... new joy, against which she was powerless to fight, was filling her life. It was absurd, impossible, not to be thought of, and yet all the time his insistence delighted her. He had so much the air of one who has always his own way. She felt her powers of resistance becoming almost impotent, and she watched their dissipation with secret joy. How was it possible to resist a lover so confident, so authoritative, especially when her whole heart was filled with a passionate longing to throw everything else to the winds and to place her hands in his. Perhaps by to-morrow, ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... gained except the putting on record an implacability that was confessedly impotent. This was the very lunacy of malice. Mortifying it might certainly seem for the members of a supreme court, like the General Assembly, to be baffled by those of a subordinate court: but still, since each party must be regarded as representing far larger interests than ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... stretches of silence, and yet how strange a wind! It seemed to have no effect at all upon the sea, which rolled in sluggishly with snake-like motion, throwing up on the dim colourless beach a thin fringe of foam, baring its teeth at the world in impotent discontent. ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... the youth who, cracking his whip joyously, and followed by half a score of dogs, cantered on his rude pony down the Tilford Lane, and thence it was that with a smile of amused contempt upon his face he observed the comedy in the field and the impotent efforts of the servants ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... attempted to pay their quotas in their paper money, which was not received at par outside the States. Congress had no power of coercion. According to the second of the Articles, each State in the Confederation retained its sovereignty, freedom, and independence. Congress could only make impotent appeals. Governor Randolph, of Virginia, pictured the Congress as saying to his State: "May it please your high mightinesses of Virginia to pay your just proportionate quota of the national debt; we humbly supplicate that it may please you to comply with your federal ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... But when he begins to feel that the shore is receding from him, that his strength is going, that the footing for which he pants is still far beneath his feet,— that there is peril where before he had contemplated no danger,—then he begins to beat the water with strokes rapid but impotent, and to waste in anxious gaspings the breath on which his very life must depend. So it was with poor Georgey Longestaffe. Something must be done at once, or it would be of no avail. Twelve years had been passed by her since first she ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... whole chateau was thus transformed in obedience to the whims of a young woman, old Gardinois continued to lead the narrow life of a discontented, idle, impotent 'parvenu'. The most successful means of distraction he had discovered was espionage. The goings and comings of his servants, the remarks that were made about him in the kitchen, the basket of fruit and vegetables brought ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... bravi who hunted Lorenzaccio to death at Venice. Like this was Pietro Paolo Baglioni, whose fault, in the eyes of Machiavelli, was that he could not succeed in being 'perfettamente tristo.' Beautiful, but inhuman; passionate, but cold; powerful, but rendered impotent for firm and lofty deeds by immorality and treason; how many centuries of men like this once wasted Italy and plunged her into servitude! Yet what material is here, under sterner discipline, and with a nobler ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... of the Senses—live The Ideal life free Thought can give; And, lo, the gulf shall vanish, and the chill Of the soul's impotent despair be gone! And with divinity thou sharest the throne, Let but divinity become thy will! Scorn not the Law—permit its iron band The sense (it cannot chain the soul) to thrall. Let man no more the will of Jove withstand, And Jove the bolt ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man. But I cannot conceive any existence under heaven (which in the depths of its wisdom tolerates all sorts of things) that is more truly odious and disgusting than an impotent, helpless creature, without civil wisdom or military skill, bloated with pride and arrogance, calling for battles which he is not to fight, and contending for a violent dominion which he can ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... but also a spark. Falling on ice, a spark is impotent, falling on powder, an explosion is inevitable. Wendell Phillips had already been aroused to sympathy with Garrison and hatred of slavery, and news of the murder of Lovejoy fell upon his heart like a spark on a powder magazine. When Boston ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... philanthropist. Dr. Beecher, however, was at the pains to be present at the first lecture given at Julien Hall. But he betrayed no real interest in the subject. He had no time to devote to anti-slavery, had, in fine, too many irons in the fire already. To this impotent apology of the great preacher of immediatism in his dealing with all kinds of sin, except the sin of slave-holding, for not espousing the cause of the slave, Mr. Garrison ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... penniless, Miss Avondale." He had spoken thus abruptly in the faint hope that the revelation might equalize their present condition; but somehow his confession, now that it was uttered, seemed exceedingly weak and impotent. Then he blundered in a different direction. "Your eyes were the only kind ones I had seen since I landed." He flushed a little, feeling himself on insecure ground, and ended desperately: "Why, when I left you, I thought ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... after. Close behind him went the female osprey, uttering wild screams, flapping her wings against his very beak, and endeavouring to distract his attention from the chase. It was to no purpose, however, as the eagle full well knew her object, and disregarding her impotent attempts, kept on in steady flight after her mate. This continued until the birds had reached a high elevation, and the ospreys, from their less bulk, were nearly out of sight. But the voyageurs could see that the eagle was on the point of overtaking ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... pilgrimage drew near its close. The two former would willingly have remained by him, to make use of the prayers and pious discourses which they deemed appropriate to the time, and which, if they be impotent as to the departing traveller's reception in the world whither it goes, may at least sustain him in bidding adieu to earth. But though Ilbrahim uttered no complaint, he was disturbed by the faces that looked upon him; so that Dorothy's entreaties, and their own conviction ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... benefit of posterity. We Christians, however, are expectantly to await the coming of the Saviour. His coming will not be to our injury or shame as it may be in the case of others. He comes for the salvation of our unprofitable, impotent bodies. Wretchedly worthless as they are in this life, they are much more unprofitable when lifeless and perishing ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... of all things: Plato, attacking the standpoint of his nation, had declared that God is the measure, and Philo repeats his maxim with a new intensity. It means for him that man's mind is a fragment or particle of the Divine universal mind, which, however, is impotent till called into activity by the further Divine gift of inspiration. Knowledge and happiness, therefore, come not through God, but from God.[190] "The Divine Word streams down from the fount of wisdom, and waters the plants of virtuous souls."[191] "To ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... looked at me. Her eyes narrowed to slits and stabbed me with their spite. Her dark face grew turgid with impotent anger. As I stood there she was like to have killed me. Then like a flash her expression changed. With a dirty bejewelled hand she smoothed her tousled hair. Her coarse white teeth gleamed in a gold-capped smile. There ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... vengeance. A torrent of invective leaped readily to her lips. "Outrage," "ingrate," "insult," were the first three distinguishable epithets applied to her sister or her sister's words; then, "See if Mr. Van Antwerp will tolerate such conduct. I'll write this very day," was the impotent threat that followed; and finally, utterly defeated, thoroughly convinced that she was powerless against her sister's reckless love of "fair play at any price," she felt that her wrath was giving way to dismay, and turned and fled, lest Nellie should see ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... would be unavailing; and shaking with impotent rage, he turned into the path which, after five weary miles, would lead him once more ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... had the power to make their lie a truth! We can paint the body writhing vainly against its unjust bonds; but who can paint the loathing, agonised soul in a mental situation so ghastly? For my part I feel it in my heart of hearts; but am impotent to convey it ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... that were once the affair of competing private concerns, claim the same attention. Government by hustings' bawling, newspaper clamour, and ward organization, is more perilous every day and more impotent, and unless we are prepared to see a government de facto of rich business organizers override the government de jure, or to relapse upon a practical oligarchy of officials, an oligarchy that will certainly ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... race for life, until but a single span separated the foremost from the boy. And now the iron hook fell at his feet, and the fireman stood upon the step with the rescued lad in his arms, just as the pent-up flame burst lurid from the attic window, reaching with impotent fury for its prey. The next moment they were safe upon the great ladder waiting ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... rich Heirs and Musicians Away, and in Troops to the Jubile jog; Leave Discord and Death, to the College Physicians, Let the Vig'rous whore on, and the impotent Flog: Already Rome opens her Arms to receive ye, And ev'ry Transgression her Lord will ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... situation he could not master, of an adversary as strong as Fate. By a word something had been snatched from him that he now knew was as dear to him as life, that was life, that was what made it worth continuing. And he could do nothing to prevent it; he could not help himself. He was as impotent as the prisoner who hears the judge banish him into exile. He tried to adjust his mind to the calamity. But his mind refused. As easily as with his finger a man can block the swing of a pendulum and halt the progress of the clock, Harris with a word had ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... 'as you say, it cannot amount to much. You are impotent, bound hand and foot in honour. You know me to be a man falsely accused, and even if you did not know it, from your position as my rival you have only the choice to stand quite ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... basis of life, and more important than the tavern. Agreed: but that does not say that the tavern was not an excellent corrective influence to the villa, and that its disappearance has not had a vulgarising effect on artistic work of all kinds, and the club has been proved impotent to replace it, the club being no more than the correlative of the villa. Let the reader trace villa through each modern feature. I will pass on at once to the circulating library, at once the symbol and glory ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... breathless, wrapped in her rusty black shawl, with her shadow flitting far out over the level bog amid the slanted beams, she looked a not inappropriate messenger of woe, symbolically impotent and insignificant; a little dark speck in the wide westering light; a feeble stir of life creeping on the verge of a vast silent solitude; and full, withal, of baseless fears and futile plots, concerning ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... heart with anxieties which had their origin in the general turmoil and decay, I succumbed to the fierce fever. After some few days of pain, and many of dreamy delirium replete with ecstasy, the manifestations of which you mistook for pain, while I longed but was impotent to undeceive you—after some days there came upon me, as you have said, a breathless and motionless torpor; and this was termed Death by ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... which employed their tens of thousands could easily dispense with the services of any particular miner. The miner, on the other hand, however expert, could not dispense with the companies. He needed a job; his wife and children would starve if he did not get one.... Individually the miners were impotent when they sought to enter a wage contract with the great companies; they could make fair terms only by uniting into trade unions to bargain collectively." It was of this state of affairs that President Taft spoke when he favored the modification of the common law "so ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... ultra-violet projector and swung it into the thickest ranks of the enemy. In the beam many of the monsters died, but the Terrestrial ray was impotent compared with the weapons of the Titanians, and Stevens, snapping off the beam with a bitter imprecation, shot the visiray out toward the bare, black cone of the extinct volcano and studied it ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... I sometimes think that my sympathy with you was not wholly unselfish, but that I felt that, if I had ever written anything which has a chance of a prolonged existence, I should wish it to be read, not by any distracted and impotent communities of British race, but by America, one and indivisible. And, gentlemen, this is not unnatural, for amid all the divisions or distractions of your history, your literature has ever been patriotic and national. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... her—that I was passing out of touch of all these things that ruled her life, into some terrible unknown. From things I said she could infer such clumsy concealments as I made. She felt my socialism, felt my spirit in revolt against the accepted order, felt the impotent resentments that filled me with bitterness against all she held sacred. Yet, you know, it was not her dear gods she sought to defend so much as me! She seemed always to be wanting to say to me, "Dear, I know ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... at me. Her eyes narrowed to slits and stabbed me with their spite. Her dark face grew turgid with impotent anger. As I stood there she was like to have killed me. Then like a flash her expression changed. With a dirty bejewelled hand she smoothed her tousled hair. Her coarse white teeth gleamed in a gold-capped smile. There was honey ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... two children don't stop talking over my affairs, I'll tell papa," she said in impotent rage, for the McAlister code of honor scorned brute force, and she dared not give her young sister the shaking ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... Harlan's manner the consciousness of power, the determination to command. At a stroke, it seemed, Harlan had wrenched from him the right to rule. He felt himself being relegated to a subordinate position; he felt at this minute the ruthless force of the man who stood before him; he felt oddly impotent and helpless, and he listened to Harlan with a queer feeling of wonder for the absence of the rage that should have ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... my astonishment, even more energetic than my own. There had been much in her stern nature to impress me with the belief that, to her, death would have come without its terrors;—but not so. Words are impotent to convey any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which she wrestled with the Shadow. I groaned in anguish at the pitiable spectacle. I would have soothed—I would have reasoned; but, in the intensity of her wild desire for life,—for life—but for ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... case dealt with the poisoning of an old, impotent husband by his young wife. The latter was not suspected by anybody, but at her examination drew suspicion to herself by her unctuous, pious appearance. She was permitted to express herself at length on religious themes and showed ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... of old age had not been absent. Some day he would feel, perhaps suddenly—the thought of it sent through him a shiver of impotent revolt against the human destiny—the clutch of ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... for all the forces of reaction to unite against the revolutionary proletariat. Take, again, the emancipation of women. Plato, Mary Wolstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill produced admirable arguments, but influenced only a few impotent idealists. The war came, leading to the employment of women in industry on a large scale, and instantly the arguments in favour of votes for women were seen to be irresistible. More than that, traditional sexual ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... Protestant subjects. Catharine, inured to treachery and hardened in vice, was apparently a stranger to all compunctious visitings. A life of crime had steeled her soul against every merciful impression. But she was very apprehensive lest her son, less obdurate in purpose, might relent. Though impotent in character, he was, at times, petulant and self-willed, and in paroxysms of stubbornness spurned his mother's counsels and exerted his ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... Another took the same road, and smashed to atoms almost at the pierhead, so near, and yet so far from human aid, that the voices of both crews could be heard by the helpless, distracted spectators—white-lipped men, wailing women, who clustered there by the rocks in impotent agony. One struggling drowning man fought hard—it is said that the outermost of a chain of rescuers once even touched his hand. But no help was possible, no human power could have drawn those helpless men from that raging cauldron; against such wind no rocket could fly, near these ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... she went out, but her biting kiss had not hurt me. My heart was full of hope and joy. This girl's impotent jealousy had convinced me of the reality of my happiness. I was beloved, and I loved again; and could the venomous tongue of a jealous woman incense me against an angel like Flamma? True love is like pure gold, and the acid of calumny does ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... and my ever-faithful mind, Which loathes the present in its memoried past, So wound my spirit, that on all I cast An envied thought who rest in darkness find. My heart Love prostrates, Fortune more unkind No comfort grants, until its sorrow vast Impotent frets, then melts to tears at last: Thus I to painful warfare am consign'd. My halcyon days I hope not to return, But paint my future by a darker tint; My spring is gone—my summer well-nigh fled: Ah! wretched me! too well do I discern ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... very mild, for it disappeared of its own accord. When cramming in England I occasionally went home with a prostitute, but did not care much about them and could not afford good ones. On one occasion I was impotent. It may have been through drink, but it disgusted me with myself. I liked seeing the women naked, and always insisted that they should strip, especially the breasts, which I liked large and full. I had not learned to kiss on ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... fancy my companions had the same difficulty, but I found it nearly impossible to restrain myself from breaking out into blind rages about nothing in particular. But the cursed sand-ridges made one half silly and inclined to shake one's fist in impotent rage at the howling desolation. Often I used to go away from camp in the evening, and sit silent and alone, and battle with the devil of evil temper within me. Breaden has told me that he had the same trouble, and Godfrey had fearful pains ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... bear's nostrils and he was filled with fear and tempted to flee, but still he could hear deep groans and sighs. Coming to the edge of the water he peered out through the bushes and discovered the mighty moose helpless and impotent, mired in a treacherous spring bog. His legs were entirely buried in the mud, which came up on his sides. He was covered with foam and sweat, and so weak with thrashing and wrenching, that he could hardly ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... and the number of their adherents what they could not effect by their arguments, the people obtained a dangerous influence in the public debates, and the natural struggle of such discordant interests retarded the execution of every salutary measure. A government so vacillating and impotent could not command the respect of unruly sailors and a lawless soldiery. The orders of the state consequently were but imperfectly obeyed, and the decisive moment was more than once lost by the negligence, not to say the open mutiny, both of the land and sea forces. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... a panic. The Russian detachment of Colonel Kazagrandi, after having twice defeated the Bolsheviki and well on its march against Irkutsk, was suddenly rendered impotent and scattered through internal strife among the officers. The Bolsheviki took advantage of this situation, increased their forces to one thousand men and began a forward movement to recover what they had lost, while the remnants of Colonel Kazagrandi's detachment were retreating on Khathyl, ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... he been defeated in this, his withdrawal then to await the result at Fisher's Hill would have been justified, but it does not appear that he made any serious effort of all to dislodge the Confederate cavalry: his impotent attempt not only chagrined me very much, but occasioned much unfavorable comment throughout ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... Emblem of justice, by the sons of Greece, Who guard the sacred ministry of law Before the face of Jove! a mighty oath! The time shall come, when all the sons of Greece Shall mourn Achilles' loss; and thou the while, Heart-rent, shalt be all-impotent to aid, When by the warrior-slayer Hector's hand Many shall fall; and then thy soul shall mourn The slight on Grecia's bravest ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... a little consolatory, at a time when the whole rage of an oligarchical tyranny, though impotent against the English as a nation, meanly exhausts itself on the few helpless individuals within its power. Embarrassments accumulate and if Mr. Pitt's agents did not most obligingly write letters, and these letters ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... something pathetic in the haggard face and the expressions of impotent rage. His heart softened when his father bared his shame to him and cried out against the fate which had brought them ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... emergency. Sir Guy Carleton now commanded the British at New York and Washington feared that this capable Irishman might soothe the Americans into a false security. He had to speak sharply, for the people seemed indifferent to further effort and Congress was slack and impotent. The outlook for Washington's allies in the war darkened, when in April, 1782, Rodney won his crushing victory and carried De Grasse a prisoner to England. France's ally Spain had been besieging Gibraltar ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... bronchos in his far-away boyhood. Only this difference; then he had no sense of danger; now he knew the danger, and defied it. If he killed himself, so much the better; if he killed others, so much the better still. The world was a place without purpose; a chaos of blind, impotent, struggling creatures, who struggled only because they did not know they were blind and impotent. Life was a farce and death a big bluff set up that men might take ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... ages passed, and Peter's impotent ragings were repeated; then once more they brought bread and water, and Peter wondered, was it twice a day they brought it, or was this a new day? And how long did they mean to keep him here? Did they mean to drive him mad? He asked these questions of the ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... cracking his whip joyously, and followed by half a score of dogs, cantered on his rude pony down the Tilford Lane, and thence it was that with a smile of amused contempt upon his face he observed the comedy in the field and the impotent efforts of the servants ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... saw directly how humiliating this must be for her and why it was necessary that she should find something to do. Henry Clairville, her natural and proper protector, could not apparently help her, the Englishman was fully as impotent, and Ringfield at once decided, while listening to the conversation, to seek her again and offer her a part of his stipend, the first instalment of which had been paid over by Poussette that morning. ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... at the antelope, and then strove to get free from the horns which the swart vitpense dragged out, and then stood up shivering by its assailant, which, far from thinking of attacking again, lay upon its side, biting the grass and tearing at the ground in its impotent fury. ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... date; Who numbereth the innumerable sand, Who weighs the wind and water with a weight, To Whom the world is neither small nor great, Whose knowledge foreknew every plan we planned. Searching my heart for all that touches you, I find there only love and love's goodwill Helpless to help and impotent to do, Of understanding dull, of sight most dim; And therefore I commend you back to Him Whose love your ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... "surplus value". And these epidemics of "graft" that broke out upon the body politic—they were not accidental or sporadic things, and they were not to be remedied by putting any number of men in jail; they were to be understood as the system whereby an industrial oligarchy had rendered impotent a political democracy, and had fenced it out from the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... in words a description of scenes of grandeur. Ink, at the best, is impotent in such matters; even paint fails to give an adequate idea. We can do no more than run over a list of names. From this commanding point of view Mont Blanc is visible in all his majesty—vast, boundless, solemn, incomprehensible—with ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... in pain, then they would moan a little, as if gathering strength to break out in indignant protest; and finally, roar out in rebellious anger, giving Robert the idea of an imprisoned monster of gigantic strength which had been harnessed whilst it slept, but had wakened at last to find itself impotent against its Lilliputian captor—man. ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... friendship, commerce, and mutual defence with Massassoit, the great Sachem of the neighbouring Indians. Some years previously (1619) the Colony of Virginia had received her first Governor General from England, who had instructions to convoke a general legislature. With all his impotent stammering, slobbering, weeping, buffoonery, and pedagoguism, James had an indistinct idea that it was as necessary to hear the voice of the people as the voice of the king. He chose rather to direct than to suppress the expression of opinion. But the Governor General of Virginia was ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... Louis XIII. summed up briefly but significantly the result of Richelieu's gigantic efforts to consolidate the regal power. "Sixty-three kings," it said, "had preceded him in rule of the realm, but he alone had rendered it absolute, and what all collectively had been impotent to achieve in the course of twelve centuries for the grandeur of France, he had accomplished in the short space of thirty-three years." It was against that absolute power incarnate in Richelieu, which from the steps of the throne hurled men to the earth with its ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... a causeless entity—a thing that was never begotten and lacks power to propagate. They would deny the possibility that its course through the world could be other than colorless, humdrum. Now words thus immaculately conceived and fatefully impotent, words that shamble thus listlessly through life, there are. But many words are born in an entirely normal way; have a grubby boyhood, a vigorous youth, and a sober maturity; marry, beget sons and ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... as the hot blood surged to her face and paced frantically back and forth in a fume of primordial hate. Her small fists clenched till pink nails bit deep into soft, pink palms. Her nostrils dilated, quivering; her eyes flashed, and the breath hissed through her lips in deep sobs of impotent rage against the woman who had robbed her of this man's love and whose name was upon his lips in the first ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... and as no other person ought to prosecute that revenge from which the person who was injured desisted, I shall not preserve what Mr. Savage suppressed; of which the publication would indeed have been a punishment too severe for so impotent an assault. ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... not only forever to silence his foes, though it accomplished this, for henceforth no man ventured to meet him in public discussion; nor yet did Jesus desire further to humiliate his enemies. In the presence of the people he had already shown them to be ridiculous, contemptible, impotent, and insincere. His real motive was to ask a question, the answer to which would embody the chief of all his claims, namely, the claim that he is divine. It was of supreme importance that this claim should be made at exactly this time. He knew that the rulers ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... remain quietly in the place she, as the governing intelligence, commanded. They too were rebels, nervous rebels, controlled by forces still stronger than the governing intelligence. She felt trapped, impotent, as though her hands were tied; as though only her whirling thoughts were unfettered. Again she took up the hat, but her hands so trembled that she could not hold the needle steady. It made fierce jabs into the hat. Stormily unhappy, she ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... merits of the dispute between Denmark and the German powers about Schleswig-Holstein, few persons who judge by the event can doubt that an isolated intervention of England on behalf of Denmark against the combined forces of Austria and Prussia would have been absolutely impotent to effect the object that was desired, and that even if France had consented to join in the struggle it would have led to a military disaster hardly less than that of the war of Sedan. If, contrary to all probability, the combined forces of France and England had proved stronger than ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... the tough and rough old sinner felt himself drawn to the son of his loins and sole continuator of his new family, with softnesses of sentiment that he could hardly credit and was wholly impotent to express. With a face, voice, and manner trained through forty years to terrify and repel, Rhadamanthus may be great, but he will scarce be engaging. It is a fact that he tried to propitiate Archie, but a fact that cannot ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "A lame and impotent conclusion in the form of many other shells that evoked no reply; and beyond his feeble demonstration Tyler did nothing. It seemed to me that a determined dash at the bridge would have carried it. I was fretting and fuming about when ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... by the reader, the feelings of her sex, and, perhaps, some lingering seeds of kindness, predominated. More than once she felt tempted to brave the awful and instant danger that awaited such an offence, and to raise her feeble, and, in truth, impotent voice in warning. So strong, indeed, and so very natural was the inclination, that she would most probably have put it in execution, but for the often repeated though whispered remonstrances of Paul Hover. In the breast of the young bee-hunter himself, there was a singular union ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... mortification which followed, when, in reply to their hail, the words 'the Hercules of Boston, in the United States,' were twanged across the water in unmistakable Yankee tones. Here was 'a lame and impotent conclusion.' England was at peace with the United States; and if the character of the stranger corresponded with her hail, she would prove after all no prize. The captors, however, were of course not to be put off without examination; and a boat was immediately ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... away by a rush of overwhelming sympathy—when her eyes fell on the great, impotent hulk of a man who lay propped up against his pillows. A nurse slipped past her in the doorway and paused ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... at her for a minute or two, then, with a smothered oath upon his lips, he turned slowly to the door and opened it. Before leaving the room, however, he said, in a voice half-stifled by impotent passion— ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... one is the hero of one's own dreams, but at times I have dreamt a dream entirely in the third person—a dream with the incidents of which I have had no connection whatever, except as an unseen and impotent spectator. One of these I have often thought about since, wondering if it could not be worked up into a story. But, perhaps, it would be too ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... feet with a smothered expression of physical agony and stood for an instant pressing his hand convulsively upon his brow, his eyes, full of savage but impotent fury, were fixed upon the detective; but this emotion soon passed away and yielded to a vague, bewildered expression, as he sank back into his seat, overcome by the ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... waters, I fought with him, and struggled for the mastery. I rained blows upon his body, and he returned them with interest. I tried to plunge with him into the dark waters that were bubbling around us, but he held me back as if I were a child; and in impotent rage I wept at my weakness. Slowly our perilous situation again forced itself upon my mind. I became conscious that a platform, brittle as the thread of life, was all that separated me from a watery grave; and I fancied the wind was murmuring our requiem as it passed. Hope died within ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... mad!" She sprang to her feet, wringing her hands in impotent wrath. "You never used to be ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... from their windows, gazed on the huge watery masses breaking beneath their eyes, they could not but admire the magnificent spectacle of the ocean in its impotent fury. The waves rebounded in dazzling foam, the beach entirely disapppearing under the raging flood, and the cliff appearing to emerge from the sea itself, the spray rising to a height of more than ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... the real salt sea, and so do flat, old scows, honest and rough and sea-going. Any boat in the bay is superior to the effeminate ferry. Even the boat to Sacramento has a bit more atmosphere. As for tug boats, they are little, but O-my as they pull the great, impotent barges after them. Pilot boats have quite an air making the big, dignified steamers look foolish being yanked here and there. The tidy fisherman's motor boats look rather unimaginative, all tied in rows at Fisherman's ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... contraband traders, fraudulent bankrupts, thieves and assassins. In every asylum were collected magazines of stolen or smuggled goods. From every asylum ruffians sallied forth nightly to plunder and stab. In no town of Christendom, consequently, was law so impotent and wickedness so audacious as in the ancient capital of religion and civilisation. On this subject Innocent felt as became a priest and a prince. He declared that he would receive no Ambassador who ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... which will beset thy way, And hearty cheers which thrill thy heart to-day, Are but expressions impotent to tell, Our fealty to the Queen ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... of Moses declares how sorely he was tempted; yea, and what opinion he had conceived of God; that is, That God was either impotent, and could not deliver his people from such a tyrant's hand; or else, That he was mutable, and unjust in his promises. And this same, and sorer temptations, assaulted the people; for in anguish of heart, they both refused God and Moses. And what means did God use to comfort them in that great ...
— The Pulpit Of The Reformation, Nos. 1, 2 and 3. • John Welch, Bishop Latimer and John Knox
... when Stampoff urged him to seize the vacant throne, and his gorge rose at the thought that Joan had been driven from his arms in order that this pygmy might secure the annual pittance that would supply his lusts in Paris. At that moment Alec was Berserk with impotent rage. His mother's complicity in the banishing of Joan denied him a victim on whom to ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... Cleigh, boiling with impotent fury, had gone to bed, not to sleep but to plan; some way round the rogue, to trip him and regain the treasures that meant so much to him. Like father, like son. When he saw what was going on in ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... religion which does not blend together in indissoluble union these two, the majesty and the lowliness, the power and the love, the God inaccessible and the God who has tabernacled with us in Jesus Christ, is sure to be almost an impotent religion. Deism in all its forms, the religion which admits a God and denies a revelation; the religion which, in some vague sense, admits a revelation and denies an incarnation; the religion which admits an incarnation and denies a sacrifice; all these have ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... doing of the servants, who should continue to serve their believing masters, while they were no longer under the yoke of compulsion. This word is used elsewhere in the New Testament but once (Acts. iv. 3.) in relation to the 'good deed' done to the impotent man. The plain import of the clause, unmystified by the commentators, is, that believing masters would not fail to do their part towards, or encourage by suitable returns, the free service of those who had once been under ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... attempts to solve industrial problems. In this rough estimate I do not count San Francisco's own poor, of which there are some but not many, but only those who have drifted in from the outside. I would include, however, not only those who are economically impotent, but also those who follow the weak for predatory ends. In this last category I place a large number of saloon-keepers, and keepers of establishments far worse, toward which the saloon is only the first step downward; a class of so-called lawyers, politicians and agents of bribery ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... strongly hoped to get away soon; on several occasions he made efforts, but only to be disappointed. At different times at least two captains had consented to afford him a private passage to Philadelphia, but like the impotent man at the pool, some one always got ahead of him. Two or three times he even managed to reach the boat upon the river, but had to return to his horrible place under the floor. Some were under the impression that he was an exceedingly unlucky man, and for a time captains feared to ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... the man's violence Jean had rushed to her sister's aid and was beating him with wildly impotent hands, calling despairingly to Lollie, to Swimming Wolf, even to Gregg. Then like a young tigress she sprang at him from behind trying to get a hold on his neck so that she ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... first, I knew no more about it than the dead—and I'll fly, and I'll go abroad out of the reach of the confounded hells, and I'll bury myself in a forest, by Gad! and hang myself up to a tree—and, oh—I'm the most miserable beggar in all England!" And so with more tears, shrieks, and curses, the impotent wretch vented his grief and deplored his unhappy fate; and, in the midst of groans and despair and ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Christian. A little more stupidity, a little more worldliness, a little more mental dishonesty in me, or perhaps a little more kindness and management in others, would have kept me in my old state, which was acknowledged and would still be acknowledged as Christian. To try to disown me now, is an impotent superciliousness. ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... between the pauper and the vagabond, were more clearly defined in a statute of 1572. By this Act the justices in the country districts, and mayors and other officers in towns, were directed to register the impotent poor, to settle them in fitting habitations and to assess all inhabitants for their support. Overseers were appointed to enforce and superintend their labour, for which wool, hemp, flax, or other stuff was to be provided at the expense of the inhabitants; and houses of correction ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... have they been powerless to bless and to keep. The cruel tyrant has tortured the parent in torturing the child; while there has been no power to deliver. And in the presence of human want or suffering how impotent has the strongest human love oft proved to be! Not so the love of our heavenly FATHER: His resources and His power are as inexhaustible as His love; and they are blest and kept indeed whom He ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... worship upon the Scottish Church; Episcopal government had been imposed, Episcopal worship it was hoped would follow. In both of his aims, however, though sought by such different methods, Charles was doomed to disappointment. As impotent as was the royal command, though backed by every form of deprivation of right and of cruel persecution, to secure the acceptance by Scotland of an Episcopal Church, so impotent was the service, conducted by royal hirelings and conforming curates, to inspire ...
— Presbyterian Worship - Its Spirit, Method and History • Robert Johnston
... hell-cat!" he screamed, stretching out his shattered hand in an agony of impotent fury. Blood rained from it on the stone flags. Suddenly he started ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... the State. The guarantee for good government is even less solid where power is entrusted to a corporate body, for, as Turgot once said, "La morale des corps les plus scrupuleux ne vaut jamais celle des particuliers honnetes."[11] In both cases, public opinion is relatively impotent. In the case of direct Government action, on the other hand, the views of those who wish to uphold a high standard of public morality can find expression in Parliament, and the latter can, if it chooses, oblige the Government ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... engagement to another day. When it was over he fell on the sofa, limp and exhausted. He lay there till dinner time, thinking over what Pancha had said, and what she could do, assuring himself it was only bluff, the impotent threatenings of a discarded woman. He felt certain that the champion she had alluded to was her one-time admirer, the bandit. This being the case, there was nothing to be feared from him, in hiding in the wilderness. It would be many a day before ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... Ere God inspired Himself Into the clay thing Thumbed to His image, The vacant, the naked shell Soon to be Man: Thoughtful He pondered it, Prone there and impotent, Fragile, inviting Attack and discomfiture: Then, with a smile— As He heard in the Thunder That laughed over Eden The voice of the Trumpet, The iron Beneficence, Calling His dooms To the Winds of the world— Stooping, He drew On the sand ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... looked upon by the ignorant masses as a dire misfortune. They rebelled against every change, and placed no belief in the promises made by the authorities to better their condition. They were terrorized by the severity of the measures taken against them, and, impotent to carry on a struggle against authority, they threw themselves into the arms of Hasidism, which preached the merging of self in a mystic solidarity. This meant the cessation of all growth, social as well as religious. Superstition established itself as sovereign mistress, ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... death; and at midnight, while her lover was wandering, mad with the horror of impotent fear, around the white walls of the convent, Sister Maddelena, for love of Michele, gave up her life. How, was never known. That she was indeed dead was only a suspicion, for when Biscari finally compelled the civil authorities to enter the convent, claiming that ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... The head of Gascoyne became silvery white, but Time seemed impotent to subdue the vigour of his stalwart frame, or destroy the music of his deep bass voice. He was the idol of numerous grandchildren as well as of a large circle of juveniles, who, without regard to whether they had or had not a right to do so, styled ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... inheritance of Ardayre was a further incentive to hate! If only some means could be discovered to remove John, and soon! But while Ferdinand thought these things, watching his so-called brother from across the room, he knew that he was impotent. Poisons and daggers were not weapons which could be employed in civilised Paris in the twentieth century! If they would only ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... ignored the Danish sympathies displayed abroad, especially in the English press, went her own way and invaded the Duchies, dragging in her train Austria, her confederate and her dupe. Palmerston, who controlled our foreign policy at the time, waited till the last moment, blustered, found himself impotent to move without French support, and left Denmark smarting with a sense of betrayal which lasted till 1914. By such bungling Morier knew that we were incurring enmity on both sides and lowering our reputation for courage as ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... engulf the stately structure pride and ambition had combined to rear. A brilliant alliance that insured great wealth, that promised a secure stepping-stone to political preferment, was apparently a substantial bulwark against the swelling billows of an unaccountable whim; yet he was impotent to resist the yearning tenderness which impelled him to forget all else, in one determined effort to rescue and shelter the life he had been the chief agent in imperilling. Clear eyed, keen witted, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... noble idealisms. It was as though some bully, seizing his best marbles, had said: "I'll give you these back if you hand over this week's pocket-money!" His attitude to the bully could not truthfully be described as one of homage or reverence; rather was it one of anger and impotent rebellion. ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... acquaintance with the pages of Plautus we have all passed through a similar experience. In the beginning we have been vastly diverted by the quips and cranks and merry wiles of the knavish slave, the plaints of love-lorn youth, the impotent rage of the baffled pander, the fruitless growlings of the hungry parasite's belly. We have been amused, perhaps astonished, on further reading, at meeting our new-found friends in other plays, clothed in different names to be ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... poetry, the argument, if argument it may be called, is still more lame and impotent. "A poet," it is said, "may describe the beauty and the grandeur of nature, the flowers of the spring and the harvests of autumn, the vicissitudes of the tide and the revolutions of the sky, and praise his Maker in lines which no reader shall lay aside." ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... country. The new Pharaoh, Merenptah, seized Canaan and laid waste the land of Israel. A few years later, Rameses III. led his fleet and his army to the Syrian coast and defeated the Asiatics in a great sea-battle. He failed to hold the country, however, and after his death Egypt remained impotent for two centuries. Then, under Sheshonk I., of Dynasty XXII., a new attempt was made, and Jerusalem was captured. Takeloth II., of the same dynasty, sent thither an Egyptian army to help in the overthrow ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... had heard the horrid yell of malignancy which arose, and echoed through the black chamber of that region of wickedness and misery, it would have made you shrink into nothingness with terror. They fairly gnashed on me with their teeth in impotent rage. At length old Adams got upon a whiskey-still—they have such things in hell—the pattern was got from there when introduced here, and made a speech to his associates. From what he said, I ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... broke out at length in impotent rage. "This is not the first trouble in which he has ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... quoth they, must have had a cause, and that cause must have been a First Cause, or cause number one, because nothing can exist of itself. Oh, most lame and impotent conclusion! How in consistency can they declare nothing can exist without a cause in the teeth of their oft repeated dogma that God is uncaused. If God never commenced to be He is an uncaused existence, that is to say, exists without a cause. The difference ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... woman nestled herself in the fold of his arm, with her head turned away from him, that he might not kiss her so often. The man sat upright, his eyes wide open, watching them sleeping with a kind of impotent despair. They were together; and yet they were not together. He had recovered them; nevertheless, he had not recovered them. Those Boches, the devils, they had kept something; they had only sent their bodies back. All night long, whenever ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... outposts, to adopt the tactics of stationary defence, varied by occasional sallies forth from our cantonments to pursue assassins or to punish depredators by destroying houses and crops, is to assume a somewhat impotent and undignified attitude, hardly creditable in the case of a mighty empire worried by mere highland caterans. The Indian Government, therefore, finds itself placed in a dilemma: to advance or to stand still is equally difficult; nor is any practicable ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... rest, Henry left the Gascon capital on August 10, and on September 15 ended his inglorious campaign at Nantes. Although he was unable to assert himself against the faithless Poitevins, the barons of the province were equally impotent to make head against him. On reaching Brittany, Hubert once more stopped further military efforts. After a few days' rest at Nantes, Henry made his way by slow stages through the heart of Brittany. It was ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... it still is your luck to be left in the ruck, and of fame you're an impotent seeker, If you fruitlessly aim at a Senate's acclaim when you can't catch the eye of the Speaker, If whenever you rise you observe with surprise that the House is perceptibly thinner, And your eloquent pleas are ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... tense with impotent resentment, Paul Beaufoy looked up into the not unkindly eyes turned down to his. A physiognomist would have said it was a reckless face rather than an evil one. The blade had been lowered, but Jan's ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... element, they have acquired sufficient intensity to enable them to come to expression. Thus, the force of expression of the wish-fulfillment is diffused over a certain sphere of association, within which it raises to expression all elements, including those that are in themselves impotent. In dreams having several strong wishes we can readily separate from one another the spheres of the individual wish-fulfillments; the gaps in the dream likewise can often be explained ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... appetite first induced man to taste of a dead carcass; or what motive could suggest the notion of nourishing himself with the flesh of animals which he saw, the moment before, bleating, bellowing, walking, and looking around them. How could he bear to see an impotent and defenceless creature slaughtered, skinned, and cut up for food? How could he endure the sight of the convulsed limbs and muscles? How bear the smell arising from the dissection? Whence happened it that he was not disgusted and struck with horror when he came to handle the bleeding flesh, ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... and certainly of the Bedouin, is usually a local deity whose power and whose activity is limited to some particular region, as, for instance, a mountain or a plain. Thus the god of Abraham might have inhabited and absolutely ruled the plain of Mamre and been impotent elsewhere. But this, had Moses for a moment harbored such a notion, would have been dispelled when he thought of Joseph. Joseph, when his brethren threw him into the pit, must have been under the guardianship of the god of ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... loved me although I was poor. About half-way to the horse-paddock, I was overtaken and passed by Arthur H——, one of the two brothers reported to be starting the sawmill; and I afterward remembered that, though we saluted each other, and exchanged impotent criticisms on the weather, I had by this time obtained such ascendency over the meddlesome and querulous part of my nature that I had never once thought of asking him ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... senility. He promises the world a literature, an art, that shall be new because his forest is untracked and his town just built. But what the newness is to be he cannot tell. Certain words were dreadful once in the mouth of desperate old age. Dreadful and pitiable as the threat of an impotent king, what shall we name them when they are the promise of an impotent people? "I will do such things: what they are yet ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... Accordingly the impotent, insolent Donothingism in Practice and Saynothingism in Speech, which we have to witness on that side of our affairs, is altogether amazing. A Corn-Law demonstrating itself openly, for ten years or more, with 'arguments' to make the angels, and some other ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... setting, before they could change partners, and continue their august dance again, whether in War or Peace. No end to the industrious wonder of the Gazetteer mind, to the dark difficulties of the Diplomatic. What bafflings, agonistic shufflings, impotent gazings into the dark; what seductive fiddling, and being fiddled to! A most sad function of Humanity, if sometimes an inevitable one; which ought surely at all times to be got over as briefly as possible. To be written of, especially, with a maximum of brevity; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... resolutions as to reading, writing, and employment for his mind. He attempted to learn whole pages by rote, and to fatigue himself to rest by exercise of his memory. But his memory would not work; his mind would continue idle; he was impotent over his own faculties. Oh, if he could only sleep while these horrid ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... family. You respect their feelings, smile and smile, and are villain enough to be civil with your lips, and hide the poison of asps under your tongue, till you have a chance to relieve your o'ercharged heart by shaking your fist in impotent wrath at his retreating form. You will receive the reward of your hypocrisy as you richly deserve, for ten to one he will drop in again when he comes back from his office, and arrest you wandering in Dreamland in the beautiful twilight. Delighted to find that you are neither reading nor writing,—the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... suddenly the first stupor of the excursionists passed away, and was succeeded by a frantic and impotent energy. They all ran about upon the plateau of rock in an aimless, foolish flurry, like frightened fowls in a yard. They could not bring themselves to acknowledge that there was no possible escape for them. Again and again they rushed to the edge of the great ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... truth is that the conversion of one of the most violent anti-Catholics must strike everybody as a strong argument in favour of the measure, and they know not by how many and by whom his example may be followed. The Orangemen are moving heaven and earth to create disturbances, and their impotent fury shows how low their cause is sunk. The Catholics, on the contrary, are temperate and calm, from confidence in their strength and the progressive advance of their course. But although I think the ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... foul-mouthed railer," said Alasco, shaking with impotent anger; "it is well known that I have approached more nearly to projection than any hermetic artist who now lives. There are not six chemists in the world who possess so near an approximation ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... solve the problem of sterility from hybridism. If you should ever hear of individual fowls or pigeons which are sterile together, I should be very grateful to hear of the case. It is a parallel case to those recorded of a man not impotent long living with a woman who remained childless; the husband died, and the woman married again and had plenty of children. Apparently (by no means certainly) this first man and woman were dissimilar in their sexual organisation. I conceive it possible that their offspring (if both had married ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Are we schoolboys? What do I care for that Robak? Now we will all be Robaks, that is, worms, and proceed to gnaw at the Muscovites! Hem, haw! spies! to explore! Do you know what that means? Why, that you are impotent old beggars! Hey, brothers! It is a setter's work to follow a trail, a Bernardine's to gather alms, but my work is—to sprinkle, sprinkle, sprinkle, ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... be the impotent condition of those men of great hereditary estates, who indeed dislike the designs that are carried on, but whose dislike is rather that of spectators than of parties that may be concerned in the catastrophe of the piece. But riches ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Parliement beganne and holden at Westminster, the 8th daie of Maye, in the 14th yeare of the raigne of the Queen's Majestie, that nowe is, one Acte was made, intytuled, "An Acte for punishment of Vacabonds, and for releife of the Pooere, and Impotent." And whereas, at a Session of the Parliament, holden by prorogacon, at Westminster, the eight daie of February, in the 28th yeare of her Majestie's raigne, one other Acte was made and intytuled, "An Acte for settinge of the Poore to work, and for the avoydinge of idleness." ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... as they see her stand In majestic pride serenely, And gnash with the impotent rage of hate, Creeping up slowly, meanly; While she cries, "Come forth from your covered dens, All your hireling legions send me, I'll bare my breast to a million swords, Whilst God ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... greatest of all? Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift, That I doubt his own love can compete with it? Here, the parts shift? Here, the creature surpass the Creator—the end what Began? Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man, 270 And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone can? Would it ever have entered my mind, the bare will, much less power, To bestow on this Saul what I sang of, the marvelous dower Of the life he was gifted and filled with? to make such ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... whirling hats knotted into the ends of dingy handkerchiefs, relaxed their enmities in a common rush for the projecting ladder behind the dray and collided with Zussmann on the way. A one-legged, misery-eyed hunchback offered him penny diaries. He shook his head in impotent pity, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... bound up with the success of that movement. The man who rejoices in it and strives to further it is alive; the man who shudders and raises impotent hands against it is merely dead, even though the grave yet yawns for him in vain. He may make dead laws and preach dead sermons and his sermons may be great and his laws may be rigid. But as the wisest of men saw twenty-five centuries ago, the things that are great ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... a way directly to the heart, they rouse, they influence. It is superfluous to go about to prove this innate power over us of things of time and sense, to make us think and act. The name of religion, on the other hand, is weak and impotent; it contains no spell to kindle the feelings of man, to make the heart beat with anxiety, and to produce activity and perseverance. The reason is not merely that men are in want of leisure, and are sustained in a distressing continuance of exertion, by their duties ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... only have an inheritance, but that the law has established a right of acquiring possession in the property of another by prescription. The passage stands thus:—"If there be a person who is not a minor," (a man ceases to be a minor at fifteen years of age,) "nor impotent, nor diseased, nor an idiot, nor so lame as not to have power to walk, nor blind, nor one who, on going before a magistrate, is found incapable of distinguishing and attending to his own concerns, and who has not given to another person power to employ and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to make such an inquiry be any thing else than to ask whether the world has been, on the whole, arranged to suit our tastes. The problem thus presented is utterly inscrutable on every hypothesis. Theology is as impotent in presence of it as science. Science, indeed, withdraws at once from such questions; whilst theology asks us to believe that this "sorry scheme of things" is the work of omnipotence guided by infinite ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... Or ere some god appear to bear thy pangs On his own head vicarious, and descend With unreluctant step the darks of hell, And the deep glooms enringing Tartarus! Then ponder this: the threat is not growth Of vain invention—it is spoken and meant! For Zeus's mouth is impotent to lie, And doth complete the utterance in the act. So, look to it, thou! take heed! and nevermore Forget good counsel to ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... Bishops, Deans, and other High Churchmen; and to appear, once in the quarter at the least, at some melodrame, opera, pantomime, or other light scenical representation; in short, we will gratify the love of insolence and power; we will enjoy the old orthodox sport of witnessing the impotent anger of men compelled to submit to civil degradation, or to sacrifice their notions of truth to ours. And all this we may do without the slightest risk, because their numbers are, as yet, not very considerable. Cruelty and injustice must, of course, exist; but why connect them with danger? ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... doubt that Mrs. Kerr the departed could have given her young daughter-in-law a few wrinkles had she met her—wrinkles of the most unprofitable kind upon her fair face; but as it was, Mrs. Kerr senior lay quietly afar off from No. 30 Welham Mansions, impotent to reform, and Osborn lay thinking his thoughts in silence while Marie, having dressed to petticoat and camisole, wreathed up her long and ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... then to regard Unions of low-skilled workers as quite impotent so long as they are beset by the competition of innumerable outsiders? Can combination contribute nothing to a solution of the sweating problem? There are two ways in which close combination might seem to avail low- skilled workers ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... postponement of the measure till the new Parliament. But there are measures of urgency, measures of fundamental import, above all, measures which cut across the ordinary lines of party, and with which, in consequence, our system is impotent to deal, and on these the direct consultation of the people would be the most ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... singular import burst from the Navajoes as they beheld these new proofs of their discomfiture. The warriors unslung their lances, and thrust them into the earth with impotent indignation. Some of them drew scalps from their belts, stuck them on the points of their spears, and shook them at us over the brow of the abyss. They believed that Dacoma's band had been destroyed, as well as their women and children; ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... the more closely error simulates truth and 97:6 so-called matter resembles its essence, mortal mind, the more impotent error becomes as a belief. Ac- cording to human belief, the lightning is fierce 97:9 and the electric current swift, yet in Christian Science the flight of one and the blow of the other will become ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... the Powers, agreed to withdraw her troops from the occupied territories without consulting the Frankfurt Parliament, an act which involved Friedrich Wilhelm in conflict with the latter. The issues arising out of this dispute made it plain to every one that the Parliament of all Germany was impotent to enforce its decrees against one of the German Powers possessed of a preponderating military strength. By the end of 1848 the revolution in Vienna was completely crushed and a strongly reactionary Government appointed by the ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... never unaware that intercourse with him involved his companions in an effort, a distinct, a would-be Christlike effort to make the best of him. It was the same kind of effort they would soon be making when as Deacons they sought for the sick, poor, and impotent people of the Parish. Mark might have expected to find among them one or two of whom it might be prophesied that they would go far. But he was unlucky. All the brilliant young candidates for ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... had no joy to give; and he knew, too, what it was to lay his sins at a Saviour's feet, and to take the light yoke upon him. How anxious was he to lead his fellow-sinner there! Though his simple efforts seemed impotent at the time, years after, when his school-fellow had grown a steady and useful Christian, he dated his first serious impressions to this time of disgrace; and the remembrance of Louis' sweet ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... time fallen into the depth of want and distress, which, if aggravated, would prompt him to evil and even to crime. There are many examples of the extremes to which this kind of intelligence, at once ambitious, grasping, yet impotent, can transport its possessor. Vautrot, in awaiting better times, had relapsed into his old role of hypocrite, in which he had formerly succeeded so well. Only the evening before he had returned to the house of Madame de la ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... addition puzzled the man who, an hour before, could have gone through the whole of the arithmetic in his sleep. Oh, boasted intellect of man! How little is it thou canst do when the delicate and feeling heart is out of tune! How impotent thou art! How like a rudderless ship upon a stormy sea! Poor Burrage was helpless and adrift! And Michael sat for hours together alone, in his little room. He was literally afraid to creep out of it. He ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... northern France, are not matter of controversy; they have been proved by many extant military documents and by the testimony of many living witnesses. They were designed to reduce whole peoples to a state of impotent terror, beneath the level of humanity. The apology made for them, that by shortening resistance to the inevitable they were in effect merciful, is a blasphemous apology, which puts Germany in the place of the Almighty. The effect anticipated ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... moved by the Holy Spirit. He gave to Israel this assuring promise for their comfort, that the Seed of the woman, the Messiah, was coming not as a fallible, impotent ruler, but as a Prince and Savior. Israel failed to comprehend the glorious things predicted, and even yet they are not fully unfolded. But the Messiah did not fail to come, and, as predicted, he came at Bethlehem. Every phase of his life, and the mighty work of redemption, all that was predicted ...
— The Testimony of the Bible Concerning the Assumptions of Destructive Criticism • S. E. Wishard
... realized this comforting fact, and at the same time thought of his own great store of honey-pots—there were hundreds of them now—all ready and waiting to his hand. But his feeling of satisfaction passed quickly to one of impotent rage as he recognized his own powerlessness, for all his wealth of honey-pots, to make lebkuchen which would be eaten by anybody but the tough-palated children from St. Bridget's School. He was alone, smoking, in the little room back of the shop as this ...
— A Romance Of Tompkins Square - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... Home-made fabrics, because the profit on the former is usually much greater." This consideration is active and omnipresent in Trade generally. The sole interest subserved by Direct and Simple Exchanges is that of Labor; and this, though greatest of all, is unorganized, inert, and individually impotent. These Silk-Weavers of Lyons are no more capable of removing to Virginia or Missouri and establishing their business there than the Alps are of making an American tour. Our consumers of Silks, acting as individuals, cannot bring them over and establish them among ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... virulent treatment of Byron ranks with the meanest and most impotent actions of the militant oligarchists because of his shocking (?) sympathy with England's enemy. The fierce though exquisite weaver of rhymes, who had been the idol of the nation and the drawing-room, was sought after by the highest and most cultured in the land. Byron had fallen a victim ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... beside the platter. The visitors stood nonplussed, looked at each other, then eyed the landscape. Between barren sea and barren downs the beach stretched away, with not a human shape in sight. St. Petroc, choking with impotent wrath, appeared to study the hollow green breakers from between the long ears of his mule, but with quick sidelong glances right and left, ready to jump down the throat of the first ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... please come here), "Minheer, gaat tog daar" (Sir, please go there), and one grows so weary of scenes of suffering and sorrow; always red and tear-stained eyes; always Love, helpless, hopeless, impotent, despairing; always face to face with Decay, Change, Death; always the same ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... in sympathy with these obstructionist methods; and the authorities may feel that they must do what they can to combat this teaching. In Prussia, on every side, and in the industrial towns of Saxony, one sees the evidence of this impotent discontent expressing itself either openly or in surly malice of speech and manner. The streets of Berlin, and of the industrial towns, show this condition at every turn, and when the Reichstag closes with cheers for the Emperor, the Socialist members leave in a body before ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... origin of natural phenomena had been ascertained. God is always what Spinoza called it, "the asylum of ignorance." When causes are unknown, God is brought forward; when causes are known, God retires into the background. In an age of ignorance, God is active; in an age of science, he is impotent. History attests ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... to Dorothy that Ilbrahim's brief and troubled pilgrimage drew near its close. The two former would willingly have remained by him, to make use of the prayers and pious discourses which they deemed appropriate to the time, and which, if they be impotent as to the departing traveller's reception in the world whither it goes, may at least sustain him in bidding adieu to earth. But though Ilbrahim uttered no complaint, he was disturbed by the faces that looked upon him; so that Dorothy's entreaties, and their own conviction ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... in describing such natural phenomena, and in blending them with the turmoil of battle, that Quintus is in his element; yet for such a scene he substitutes what is, by comparison, a lame and impotent conclusion. Of that awful cry that rang over the sea heralding the coming of Thetis and the Nymphs to the death-rites of her son, and the panic with which it filled the host, Quintus is silent. Again, Homer ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... and all the world. Behind his voiceless misery was immeasurable hatred of those who had struck him this blow; at moments a revengeful fury all but maddened him. He held his mother's band; if he could but feel one pressure of the slight fingers before they were impotent for ever! And this much was granted him. Shortly before midday the open eyes trembled to consciousness, the lips moved in endeavour to speak. To Hubert it seemed that his intense gaze had worked a miracle, effecting that which his will demanded. She ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... before the cathedral affronting the sunlight with their gaunt black shapes lay across the length and breadth of Angers. Even in the corners where men whispered, even in the cloisters where men bit their nails in impotent anger, the stillness of fear ruled all. Whatever Count Hannibal had it in his mind to tell the city, it seemed unlikely—and hour by hour it seemed less ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... made way for Guy and his charge to pass, only grinding out between their teeth the strange guttural blasphemies that characterize impotent Gallic wrath. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
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