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More "Inability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as she had hoped and believed they would? Surely during these past two years they had been developing a real understanding of comradeship, the ability to stick together, to keep step. And girls and women had for so many centuries been accused of the inability ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... his facts, but those which he made use of he could array with such skill as to completely captivate the judgment of the unwary. In his History of the Civil War, all the enthusiasm of the writer, his easy flow of rhetoric, his vast fund of anecdote, and his characteristic inability to discriminate between truth and falsity, assert themselves. The chief importance of the work consists in its treatment of events, as army-correspondents saw them, and, hence, it comprises many minor features, usually omitted by more sober historians. As a political ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... the immediate principle is his will, or simple volition. He wills some act,—and the act follows of course, unless it be prevented by restraint from without, or by physical inability to perform it. These alone can interfere with a man following the determination of his will, or ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... destructive criticism of 'scientific' individualism was reinforced by the teaching of anthropology and of historical jurisprudence, which emphasized the part played in early forms of society by social solidarity and showed the inability of individualism to account for the development of society. Their destructive criticism was, however, the least part of their achievement. They exhibited convincingly the state as the product of will and purpose, ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... out his hands to quiet the murmur that ran through the auditorium. He said, "All of you are criminals. And all of you have one thing in common: an inability to obey the basic obligatory rules of human society. Those rules are necessary for civilization to function. By disobeying them, you have committed crimes against all mankind. Therefore mankind rejects you. You are grit in ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... student is unable to conceive of a wave of "thought" being projected into the air, and then traveling along until it reaches the mind of other persons. The difficulty, upon analysis, is seen to consist of the inability to conceive of "thought" as being a material substance capable of traveling in "waves." It is no wonder that the student finds this conception difficult, for there is no such thing as "thought" traveling in this ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... only added to the mystery of the whole affair, which she realized her inability to cope with. Grouping the facts with which she was familiar into regular order, her information was limited ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... practical bearing. "His chief merit is that he was one of the first to point the way to original research—as opposed to the acceptance of an authority—though he himself still lacked the means of pursuing this path consistently. His inability to satisfy this impulse led to a sort of longing, which is expressed in the numerous passages in his works where he anticipates man's ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... brother to interfere. Robert is a fair example of the worst type of men of the Norman-Angevin blood. Not bad in intention, and not without abilities, he was weak with that weakness most fatal of all in times when the will of the ruler gave its only force to law, the inability to say no, the lack of firm resisting power. The whole eleventh century had been nourishing the growth, in the favouring soil of feudalism, of the manners and morals of chivalry. The generation to which William ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... granular clusters of the others rested directly on the glass, at the bottom of the flask, as if, having decomposed the tartrate, the only carbonaceous food at their disposal, they had then died on the spot where we captured them, from inability to escape, precisely in consequence of that state of entanglement which they combined to form, during the period of their active development. Besides these we observed vibrios of the same diameter, but ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... soil and groundwater with agricultural chemicals, pesticides; salination, water-logging of soil due to poor irrigation methods; Caspian Sea pollution; diversion of a large share of the flow of the Amu Darya into irrigation contributes to that river's inability to replenish the Aral ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... Treatment restores the mental equilibrium, stabilizes the mental activities and places them under perfect control. The inability of the mind to control the organs of speech has led to a condition which might be described as a "flabbiness of the mental muscles" which necessitates that the mental condition be altered and improved so that the mind can once more possess ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... are strong, healthy men. The same task is assigned them. One of them being adapted to that line of work, and skilled, performs his task with ease; while the other, equally industrious, cannot get through with his. He is reported for shirking. He states his inability to do the amount of work assigned him. The contractor or his foreman makes a different report. The assertions of the convict amount to but little, as against the statements of the rich and influential contractor. He is punished and returned to his work. A second time he tries, again fails, ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... generosity and his absolute inability to press the payment of debts due him had brought the father to a state of financial embarrassment, and the burden of the family ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... the enemy's fleet, which had come out to meet him. He captured also the principal settlement, where the king of the island had his house and residence, but after a few days he abandoned it and returned to Manila, on account of sickness among the crews, and his inability to support and care for the Spaniards in that island. On the way back, and by his orders, Captain Estevan Rodriguez de Figueroa entered the island of Jolo; he came to blows with the natives and their chief, whom he conquered, and the latter rendered him acknowledgment and submission ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... lieutenant, with a shrug of the shoulders, that was intended to express his inability to form ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... necessity. Through the kindness of Mrs. Pollock, we found a young lady who was exactly fitted for the place. She was installed in the little room intended for her, and began the work of accepting with pleasure and regretting our inability, of acknowledging the receipt of books, flowers, and other objects, and being very sorry that we could not subscribe to this good object and attend that meeting in behalf of a deserving charity,—in short, writing almost everything for us ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... depression of the ocean's bed which we may visit. All these matters have been swept hither and thither over the ground by the action of the tidal and other currents, until they have happened to drift over this spot, and here they have finally settled owing to the inability of the currents to move them up the steep sides of the depression. Let us walk round the heap; we may see something of interest before we have completed ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... month that he was going South next day and delaying from week to week out of inability to make up his mind to the bother of packing and the tedium of a journey, had at last been driven off just before Christmas by the preparations for that festival. He could not support the thought of a Teutonic merry-making. It gave him goose-flesh to think ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... she yielded to her mother's persuasions. Harding did not return to Dublin, and her second season was more barren of incident than the first. The same absence of conviction, the same noisy gossiping and inability to see over the horizon of Merrion Square, the same servile adoration of officialism, the same meanness committed to secure an invitation to the Castle, the same sing-song waltz tunes, the same miserable, mocking, melancholy, muslin hours were ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... driven down by the smell of gas, which threatened to suffocate us all when we started. M. Wilfrid de Fonvielle, kneeling down by the side of the car, was perpetually "taking observations," and persistently asking for "the readings," which the gentleman from Cambridge occasionally protested his inability to supply, owing either to Burnaby having his foot upon the aneroid, or to the Captain so jamming him up against the side of the car that the accurate reading of a scientific instrument was ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... Warren had heard concerning the antecedents of Taylor's family, he could not be more sensitive upon the point than Warren was over his inability to fight without danger to his life. For a schoolboy to be told that he cannot stand up in a fair, square fight without bringing the danger to his antagonist of being charged with manslaughter, had brought such a shock to the boy that it was this, rather than the effects of the fall, that ...
— That Scholarship Boy • Emma Leslie
... clinging to the teachings which have inspired fear. We are fearless in proportion as we grow independent enough to know for ourselves. I cannot but stress this point to some extent, for the reason that I myself suffered so long from inability to let the traditional go. It seemed to me to have a sanctity just because it was traditional. The fact that other people had accepted certain ideas had weight in making me feel that I should accept them too. To go off on a line of my own seemed dangerous. I might make mistakes. I might ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... probable development of Moral Ideas with the development of the civilising process; and the last sentence was the opening of a prophecy: "In about two hundred years," I had written, "we may expect——" The sentence ended abruptly. I remembered my inability to fix my mind that morning, scarcely a month gone by, and how I had broken off to get my Daily Chronicle from the newsboy. I remembered how I went down to the garden gate as he came along, and how I had listened to his odd ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... work, as we have already pointed out, in decorative art; in which 'a redundancy of useless or ridiculous ornament is called richness, and the inability to appreciate simple and beautiful, or grand and noble forms, receives the name of genius.' The connection is curious, likewise, between this ingenuity of poetry and that of the machinery which gives a distinguishing character to our epoch. It looks as if the complication ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... powerful predisposing cause, such as gout, gravel, aneurism, paralysis, apoplexy, epilepsy, cystitis, premature incontinence of urine, erysipelas, spreading cellular inflammation, tendency of wounds and sores to gangrene, inability of the constitution to resist the attacks of epidemics. I have had a fearful amount of experience of continued fever in our infirmary during many epidemics, and in all my experience I have only once known an intemperate man of ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... information as to Longstreet's reinforcement was such that he telegraphed Halleck on the 20th that the siege of Knoxville was about to be renewed. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. p. 149.] The chronic inability of Halleck to understand East Tennessee affairs is shown in his insistence on still maintaining the Cumberland Gap line, which was necessarily uncovered whenever the enemy approached Strawberry Plains. ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... have sought to lull them to sleep. Their want of sincerity is proved by the circumstance of the piracies of their respective subjects not ceasing, the chiefs sometimes feigning they were carried on without their license or knowledge; and, at others, excusing themselves on the plea of their inability to restrain the insolence of the Tirones and other independent tribes. Nevertheless, it is notorious that the above-mentioned sultans indirectly encouraged the practice of privateering, by affording ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... munificence displayed by the middle classes in England, in their silver plate and other domestic utensils. But the people of Russia, and Mexico also, can make no mean display of silverware.(284) Here luxury is only a symptom of the disinclination or inability of the inhabitants of the country to use their capital in the production of wealth. How much richer would Spain be to-day, if it had employed the idle capital spent in the ornamentation of its churches in constructing roads and canals!(285) Most nations in a low state of civilization ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... His inability to reproduce faces in his mind's eye he mourned as an increasing calamity. Photographs were lifeless things, and when he tried to conjure up the faces of his dead they seemed to drift farther out of reach; but now and then kindly sleep brought to him something out of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... old my father came to pay up the arrears due to my protectress, and to take me to school. He had left me in Hampshire longer than he had intended, from his inability to pay this money; so there again I felt the bitterness of poverty, and ran the risk of growing up an ignorant creature among coarse rustic children, because my ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... summer cruise, and sprang up into a new existence in the life-giving breezes of the sea. After two happy months of lazy coasting round the shores of England, all that remained of Natalie's illness was represented by a delicious languor in her eyes, and an utter inability to devote herself to anything which took the shape of a serious occupation. As she sat at the cabin breakfast-table that morning, in her quaintly-made sailing dress of old-fashioned nankeen—her inbred childishness of manner contrasting delightfully ...
— Miss or Mrs.? • Wilkie Collins
... make standards at the height of parental expenditure and may find it thereby the more difficult to "begin at the bottom" when they marry. At any rate, the young couple starting out must keep within their means or suffer from the worst of fortunes, the dread of arriving bills and the shame of inability to pay them. That means some agreement before housekeeping begins as to what is involved ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... the genius which you have undoubtedly inherited from your grandfather. The inability to put your ideas into verbal form is due to amnesic aphasia. The portion of your brain through which your genius should find speech is either temporarily paralyzed or else deficient in composition. You had better go up and see Jackson. He can ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... for the first time takes cognizance of the contents of these formidable volumes, is overwhelmed by the amount of attestations they present him with, by his own inability to refute them, or by counter statements substitute a truer appreciation of what did really occur. The dry narrative of mere fact is thus, but the impression it should produce as of a fact lived ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... the Ministers intend to throw the blame either on their Commander-in-Chief, General H. Clinton, or on Earl Cornwallis, or (what some suppose), on Lord Greaves. The public at large have a right to know whether the real cause has not arose from the neglect, inability, or some other cause, ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... government is inability to repress internal forces tending to disintegration. It does not take long for a "self-governed" people to learn that it is not really governed—that an agreement enforcible by nobody but the parties to it is not binding. We are learning this very rapidly: ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... self-sacrifice, and that I believed we were much more competent to judge of its atrocity and horror than he who had been brought up in the midst of it. I told him that I could sympathize with men who admitted it to be a dreadful evil, but frankly confessed their inability to devise a means of getting rid of it; but that men who spoke of it as a blessing, as a matter of course, as a state of things to be desired, were out of the pale of reason; and that for them to speak of ignorance or prejudice was an absurdity ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... in 1991. By May 1994, when a cease-fire took hold, Armenian forces held not only Nagorno-Karabakh but also a significant portion of Azerbaijan proper. The economies of both sides have been hurt by their inability to make substantial progress ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... that, being neighbors—if I may be permitted the expression—it is intended that intercourse between the planets should take place. That we have been isolated up to the present time is only because of our ignorance—our inability to bridge the gap. I believe that migration, friendship, commerce, even war, between the inhabitants of different planets of our solar system was intended by Almighty God—and, in good time, will ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... probability, in time to have prevented a collapse, or warded off recognition and intervention, but for Miss Carroll. The failure to reduce Vicksburg from the water, after a tremendous sacrifice of life and treasure, and the time it took to take Richmond, furnish irrefragable proof of the inability of the Union to subdue the rebellion on the plan of our ablest generals.... England and France had resolved that duty to their suffering operatives required the raising of the blockade for the supply of cotton, and nothing ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... hope had been in the morning. But that instinct told her that her mother was becoming incapable of argument, she would have asked her why her views were so essentially changed in so few hours. This inability of reason in poor Bell ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... why Germany cannot settle down. A greater difficulty appears to be her inability ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... Shippen had been placed in charge of the hospitals in New Jersey and the medicines had been turned over to him by a vote of Congress.[68] Finally, on January 9, 1777, Congress dismissed Morgan as director general without giving any reasons except to indicate indirectly that it was due to his inability to provide adequate medical supplies.[69] To add insult to injury, on February 5 Congress asked "what is become of the medicines which Dr. Morgan took from Boston ..." and resolved to "take measures to have them secured, and applied to the ...
— Drug Supplies in the American Revolution • George B. Griffenhagen
... Ulstermen to confirm the Nationalist leader's profession of loyalty to the Empire; though they did him the justice of believing that he would have accepted office if he had felt free to follow his own inclination. His inability to do so, and the complaints of his followers, including Mr. Dillon, at the admission of Carson to the Cabinet, revealed the incapacity of the Nationalists to rise to a ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... being entirely relieved of all material considerations and her spirit left unfettered. Under the present make-shift circumstances she must be content with such humble beginning as the poor funds at her disposal would allow her. And Morgan felt quite guilty at his inability to provide the ideal debut she described, feeling she had quite a right to despise this mean and unworthy beginning, and that it was really generous of her to face the difficulties occasioned by their ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... prostrated nerves and it shows itself first of all by worry. Worry means the inability to relax the attention from a definite fear or fancied hard luck. Worry leads to many physical ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... the only ostensible cause was that put forward in his letter to Lord Salisbury, which was read in the House of Commons on 27th January. In this document he stated that his resignation was due to his inability, as chancellor of the exchequer, to concur in the demands made on the treasury by the ministers at the head of the naval and military establishments. It was commonly supposed that he expected his resignation to be followed by the unconditional surrender ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... to my mother. She told me once that he did not suspect that I had missed God's election until I was between five and six years old. I suppose that about that age I began to strengthen his cruel fear by my antipathy to the kirk services and my real and unfortunate inability to learn the Shorter Catechism. This was a natural short-coming. I could neither spell or pronounce the words I was told to learn and to memorise ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... diary she could confide her real feelings—her discouragement over her lack of improvement and her inability to understand her many "sins," such as not dotting an i, too much laughter, or smiling at her friends instead of reproving them for frivolous conduct. She wrote, "Thought so much of my resolutions ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... took too much wine, and misunderstood my granddaughter's reply She must have referred you to me for an explanation of her engagement, and consequent inability to entertain any other ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... purpose in coming to London; of his brilliant work and his lack of success in having it recognized; and of his great and loyal devotion to her, and of his lack of success, not in having that recognized, but in her own inability to return it. Helen was proud that she had been able to make Carroll care for her as he did, and that there was anything about her which could inspire a man whom she admired so much to believe in ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... not an honest poverty, but a sham and artificial poverty—the inability to dress as others did, and to lose money at "bridge" and "poker", and to pay the costs of their self-indulgences. As for Thyrsis and his parents, they always paid what they owed; but they were not always able to ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... now to the means by which the king may be cleansed of such sins. If the king fails to restore to a subject the wealth that has been stolen away by thieves, he should then compensate the injured from his own treasury, or, in case of inability, with wealth obtained from his dependents. All the orders should protect the wealth of a Brahmana even as they should the Brahmana's boy or life. The person that offends against Brahmanas should be exiled from the kingdom. Everything is protected ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... is most difficult for even the wisest and most experienced statesmen to solve the serious problems of the hour. Great discontent should, therefore, be expected from the failure of inexperienced agitators after coming into power, because of their inability to solve an almost endless number of serious difficulties. Foremost among these would probably be food difficulties, which, as in Russia, Germany, and Hungary, have resulted in widespread opposition to ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... into sane prose. Any work which I take upon myself as an engagement will act upon me to torment; e.g., when I have undertaken, as three or four times I have, a school-boy copy of verses for Merchant Taylors' boys, at a guinea a copy, I have fretted over them in perfect inability to do them, and have made my sister wretched with my wretchedness for a week together. The same, till by habit I have acquired a mechanical command, I have felt in making paragraphs. As to reviewing, in particular, my head is so ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... to appear among the men and stop the fermentation, as in our younger days a lordly owner still might do by small concessions and the physical influence—the nerve-charm—could suppose him to be holding aloof for his pleasure or his pride; perhaps because of illness or inability to conceive the actual situation at a distance. He mentioned the presence of the countess, and Mr. Wythan mentioned it, neither of them thinking a rational man would so play the lunatic as to let men starve, and wreck precious mines, for the sake of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a pig struggling in a swamp. Indeed, appeals to his compassion were so irresistible to him, and he felt it so difficult to refuse anything when his refusal could give pain, that he himself sometimes spoke of his inability to say "no" as a positive weakness. But that certainly does not prove that his compassionate feeling was confined to individual cases of suffering witnessed with his own eyes. As the boy was moved by the aspect of the tortured wood ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... the battle that ensued, but at last the savages were routed, more by terror, perhaps, at sight of a black man and a white fighting in company with a panther and the huge fierce apes of Akut, than because of their inability to overcome the relatively small force that ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... being ordered, went at once for the family physician. Ashamed to own that his return was owing to his inability to ride, Jerome resolved to feign sickness. The doctor came, felt his pulse, examined his tongue, and pronounced him a sick man. He immediately ordered a tepid bath, and sent for ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... that she should find nothing unusual in the incident. She felt that a living stream in her bosom had dried up, leaving nothing but sand and stones in its bed. This inability to feel, this being dead to all sensations, took the form of ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... ever been afraid to deviate in the least from the path of faith. And it would be wrong to imagine that the preservation from heresy so peculiar to them, and by which they are broadly distinguished from all other European nations, comes from dulness of intellect and inability to follow out an intricate argumentation. They show the acuteness of their understanding in a thousand ways; in poetry, in romantic tales, in narrative compositions, in legal acumen and extempore arguments, in the study of medicine, chiefly in that masterly eloquence by which so many of them are ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... Therefore there is no Idea, or conception of anything we call Infinite. No man can have in his mind an Image of infinite magnitude; nor conceive the ends, and bounds of the thing named; having no Conception of the thing, but of our own inability. And therefore the Name of GOD is used, not to make us conceive him; (for he is Incomprehensible; and his greatnesse, and power are unconceivable;) but that we may honour him. Also because whatsoever (as I said before,) we conceive, has been perceived first by sense, ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... the greatest discovery of man's misery and inability to save himself therefrom that ever was made in the world. Must the Son of God himself come down from heaven? or can there be no salvation? Cannot one sinner save another? Cannot man by any means redeem ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... invisible by the time I attained the bank. An open barge lay there, a mere black smudge, and I stumbled blindly across this, dropping silently over its side into the water. It was not thought, but breathless inability to attempt more, which kept me there, clinging to a slat on the side of the barge, so completely submerged in the river, as to be invisible from above. Swearing fiercely, my pursuers stormed over the barge, swinging ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... conditions under which the reconciliation could take place were less easy to settle. The popes, whose powers are unlimited where the exercise of them is convenient for the interests of the Holy See, have uniformly fallen back upon their inability where they have been called on to make sacrifices. The canons of the church forbade, under any pretext, the alienation of ecclesiastical property; and until Julius could relinquish ex animo all intention of disturbing the lay holders ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... desk, with chilled feet and burning cheeks, she was sent for by old Mr. Baxter, and found Miss Emily Saunders in his office. The visitor was chatting with Peter and the old man, and gaily carried Susan off to luncheon, after Peter had regretted his inability to come too. They went to the Palace Hotel, and Susan thought everything, Miss Emily especially, very wonderful and delightful, and, warmed and sustained by a delicious lunch, congratulated herself all during the afternoon that she herself had risen to the demand of the occasion, ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... shadow of this hospitable roof, Ali skilfully prepared the consummation of the crime which was for ever to draw him out of obscurity. He went every morning to pay his court to the pacha, whose confidence he doubted; then, one day, feigning illness, he sent excuses for inability to pay his respects to a man whom he was accustomed to regard as his father, and begged him to come for a moment into his apartment. The invitation being accepted, he concealed assassins in one of the cupboards without ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... came up with a message from some nice looking young ladies at the opposite end of the parlor, requesting 'The Star Spangled Banner,' in honor of the glorious news. Well, I didn't exactly fall under the piano; but briefly conveying regrets at my inability to comply, I retired as ...
— The Flag Replaced on Sumter - A Personal Narrative • William A. Spicer
... not wish to be thought frivolous in my notions regarding the noble science of philology; but when one considers the changes that language is constantly undergoing, the inability of the human voice to articulate more than twenty distinct sounds, and the wonderful amount of ingenious learning that has been wasted by philologists on trifling subjects, one is disposed to associate many of their deductions with the ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... operative than the first. Chatham attacked France in her distant dependencies when he had failed to make any impression on her own coasts. Still more clearly was Chatham's son, the most incapable of war ministers, driven to the capture of sugar islands by his inability to take part, otherwise than by subsidies, in the decisive struggle on the Continental fields. This may deserve the attention of those who do not think it criminal to examine the policy of Empire. Outlying pawns picked up by a feeble chessplayer merely because he ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... inability to prevent knowing more or less of the prisoner's troubles and the prison management. If the chaplain is alive to the prisoners' moral needs, their sorrows of heart and intent on affording the requisite advice, in searching for knowledge how to direct his words, he will often, of necessity, learn ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... anything to that young man, because, I, too, at times, had a rather bad impediment in my speech. It asserted itself especially when I heard any one else stutter, or when the weather was going to change; the men who knew me well said they could always foretell a storm by my inability to talk. From my own experience, however, I knew that when a stammerer heard another man stammer, he imagined that he was being made fun of, and all the fight in him came at once to the surface; and as this young man was about twice my size, I did my best to ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... enlighten her that it was his egregious pride had fetched him back when he was but a few hours upon his journey Pariswards, his inability to brook the ridicule that would be his when he announced at the Luxembourg that ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... the part Rosemary had played in this train of events and though he made several cutting remarks about the inability of girls to hold their tongues, he gradually, if grudgingly, admitted that ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... which makes us regret that Bacon did not do more historical work. Besides these are metrical versions of certain Psalms—which are valuable, in view of the controversy anent Shakespeare's plays, for showing Bacon's utter inability to write poetry—and a large number of letters and state papers showing the range and power of ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Gentleman of Verona, probably written a little later, shows improvement, but by no means perfect mastery. The first two acts still drag, although the play moves more rapidly when it is under way. The inability to lead up naturally to an inevitable end still persists. The young author, well as he has managed the middle of the play, does not wait for events to take their logical course. He winds up everything abruptly like a man who has just changed his mind or become tired ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... king is supposed to have no faculties. The inference drawn by counsel, that, not being capable of erring, the king must have the highest possible moral attributes, and consequently a memory, is unsound. The constitution says his majesty CAN do no wrong. This inability may proceed from a variety of causes. If he can do NOTHING, for instance, he can do no wrong. The constitution does not say that the sovereign WILL do no wrong—but, that he CAN do no wrong. Now, gentlemonikins, when a thing ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Children, when they are left to weep in solitude, often continue in wo for a considerable length of time, until they quite forget the original cause of complaint, and they continue their convulsive sobs, and whining note of distress, purely from inability to stop themselves. ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... Carhampton, as Commander-in-Chief. All moderate councils were denounced as nothing short of treason, and even the elder Beresford, the Privy Counsellor, was compelled to complain of the violence of his noble associates, and his inability to restrain the ferocity of his own nearest relatives— meaning probably his son John Claudius, and his ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... this subject. Our intellect, Bergson says, cannot grasp the true nature of life, nor the meaning of the evolutionary movement. With the emphasis of italics he repeats that "the intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life." He says this in a good many pages and in a good many different ways; the idea is one of the main conclusions of his book. Our intuitions, our spiritual nature, according to this ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... The fumes of the tutor's compound made her sleepy, and though she nodded to Miss Letitia's observations, it was less from appreciation of their force, than from inability to hold up her head. She was dreaming uneasy, horrible dreams, like nightmares; in which from time to time there mingled expressions of doubt and dissatisfaction which fell from Miss Letitia's lips. "Just half-a-yard ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... impressions of Concord by Roger Riordan, the poet and art critic. I cannot now put my hand, for purposes of quotation, upon the title of the periodical in which these appeared; but I remember that the writer was greatly amused, as well as somewhat provoked, by his inability to get any of the philosophers with whom he sought interviews to take an aesthetic view of any poem, or painting, or other art product. They would talk of its "message" or its "ethical content"; but as to questions of ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... Mr. Westmore. "What a comfort this is to me; to know that all have not deserted me. I did not expect it. But it will not change my mind. My eyes have been suddenly opened to my own inability to do the work. Another will do much better. I've explained everything to you, my Lord, that I can explain, and about that horse-race, too. It is better for me ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... is marked, and also in cloudy regions and often on young trees that have an over-supply of moisture. Yet such cores occur in old trees and sometimes with more or less regularity. What the physiological inability may be in such cases to dispose of excess moisture ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... during the absence of the employes they had let themselves out of the box which they at once filled with any articles they could lay their hands on, refastened the lid, and then decamped. But for the unfortunate inability of human nature to endure an inverted position for an indefinite period, the ingenious authors of the scheme might have flourished a long ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... life, and young Grahame West, who played the part opposite to hers in the Gilbert and Sullivan Opera that was then in the third month of its New York run, were among the honored patrons of the Hotel Salisbury. Miss Terrell, in her utter inability to adjust the American coinage to English standards, and also in the kindness of her heart, had given too generous tips to all of the hotel waiters, and some of this money had passed into the gallery window of the Broadway ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... last Hobert made a pillow of his saddle-bags and coiled himself together, he felt as if a circle of fire were narrowing around him, and yet utter inability to escape. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... system. One of the first steps by which the Continental Congress asserted its claim to independent national action was the throwing open of American ports to the commerce of all nations—that is, to free trade. It should, however, be added that the extreme breadth of this liberality was due to the inability of Congress to impose any duties on imports; it had a choice only between absolute prohibition and absolute free trade, and it chose the latter. The States were not so limited. Both under the revolutionary Congress and under the Confederation they retained the entire ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... that this evil proceeds? not from the inability of this great capital to provide for its Poor; for no city in the world, of equal extent and population, has so many hospitals for the sick and infirm, and other institutions of public charity. Neither is it owing to the hard-heartedness of the inhabitants; for a ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... often sacrificed to their inordinate vanity the lives and happiness of thousands. Private employers of labour were frequently cruel and exacting; their overseers used the stick, and it was not easy for those who suffered to obtain any redress. Moreover, taxation was heavy, and inability to satisfy the collector subjected the defaulter to the bastinado. Those who have studied the antiquities of Egypt with most care, tell us that there was not much to choose between the condition of the ancient labourers and ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... possession of strong passes, you will be able to stop their progress and give us time to come up." On the 10th of May, he again writes to Gen. Moultrie, "We are making, and shall continue to make, every exertion for the relief of Charleston. The baggage will be left. The inability of the men only, will put a period to our daily marches. Our men are full of spirits. Do not give up, or suffer the people to despair." But the governor and council did despair already, for a majority of them had finally offered to capitulate, and proposed ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... men would remain where they were and await his return. Kit Carson performed his mission with his usual promptness and soon returned with his charge, when the expedition was once more united under one leader. Owing to the great trials and privations recently met with, and the inability to procure at Sutter's Fort all that was wanted in the matter of an outfit, therefore it was determined upon that the party should proceed next to Monterey, where they knew they could purchase the articles ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... was quite a different personage. He only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion; of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis; happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... respect to age and the constitution of their bodies; and, therefore, those who design to enter into that condition ought to observe their ability and not run themselves into inconveniences; for those that marry too young may be said to marry unseasonably, not considering their inability, nor examining the forces of nature; for some, before they are ripe for the consummation of so weighty a matter, who either rashly, of their own accord, or by the instigation of procurers or marriage-brokers, or else forced thereto by their parents ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... carefully," said Judge Carter. "Is it not true that your difficulties in school, your inability to get along with your classmates, and your having to hide while you toiled for your livelihood in secret—these are due to this extensive education brought about ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... companionship of his pipe. He was not lonely for the society of men and women. In his own mind he put a stress of emphasis on women. Two of them had touched his life closely enough to alter its currents. One, he had lost through his own folly and her inability to free herself from the sectionalism of an inherited code. The other had been foolish in the extreme and had drawn him into the ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... teaching is reduced to the minimum, viz. five hundred francs a year; in the second, large numbers of scholarships are open to pupils who have successfully passed the examination of primary schools, and whose parents can prove their inability to pay the fees. No matter how poor he may be, the French peasant takes a long look ahead. He makes up his mind to forfeit his son's help or earnings for a year or two in view of the ulterior advantage. A youth having studied at Antibes, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... in either event. An expensive house requires a corresponding expense to maintain it, otherwise its effect is lost, and many a worthy owner of a costly mansion has been driven to sell and abandon his estate altogether, from his unwillingness or inability to support "the establishment" which it entailed; when, if the dwelling were only such as the estate required and could reasonably maintain, a contented and happy home would have remained to himself and family. It behooves, therefore, the American ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... Regent's Park, a wild sequestered spot, whither he invariably repaired when he did not wish to be noticed; for the inhabitants of this pretty suburb are a distinct race, and although their eyes are not unobserving, from their inability to speak the language of London they are unable to communicate ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... seen without either a fire actually made, or a piece of lighted wood, which they carry with them from place to place, and even in their canoes.* The perpetual fires, which in some countries formed a part of the national religion, had perhaps no other origin than a similar inability to produce it at pleasure; and if we suppose the original flame to have been kindled by lightning, the fiction of its coming down from heaven will be found to deviate very little ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... only a brief diversion. There is that magnificent Bob, eating his head off in the stable. You would buy me a beautiful mansion and leave me in it to yawn my head off, or cry my eyes out because of my helplessness and inability to save you. This disease of business would be corroding you and marring you all the time. You play it as you have played everything else, as in Alaska you played the life of the trail. Nobody could be permitted to travel as fast and as far as you, to work as hard or endure as much. You ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... have desired for Ireland is exactly such a system as is now possessed by one {308} of the provinces of Canada or Australia. When the alliance between France and independent America began to threaten Great Britain, and the English Government practically acknowledged its inability to provide for the defence of Ireland, Henry Grattan, with other Irish patriots of equal sincerity, and some of them of even higher social rank, started the Irish Volunteer movement, to be a bulwark of the ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of these vices? What do they come of? Who's to blame for them? Not the working class—never tell me! What drives a man to drink in his spare hours? What about the poisonous air of garrets and cellars? What about excessive toil and inability to procure healthy recreation? What about defects of education, due to poverty? What about diseased bodies inherited from over-slaved parents?' Messrs. Cowes and Cullen had accompanied these queries with a climax of vociferous ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... friends. "It became necessary to burn hundreds of wagons. At intervals the enemy's cavalry dashed in and struck the interminable train, here or there, capturing and burning dozens on dozens of wagons. Hundreds of men dropped from exhaustion, and thousands let fall their muskets from inability to carry them any farther. The scenes were of a nature which can be apprehended in its vivid reality only by men who are thoroughly familiar with the harrowing details of war. Behind, and on either flank, a ubiquitous and increasingly adventurous enemy; every mud-hole and every rise ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... de Cambray, believing that this excitement was entirely due to the solemnity of the occasion, had smiled indulgently—a trifle contemptuously too—at young de Marmont's very apparent eagerness. A vulgar display of feelings, an inability to control one's words and movements when under the stress of emotion was characteristic of the parvenus of to-day, and de Marmont's unfettered agitation when coming to sign his own marriage contract was only on a par with prefet Fourier's ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... misfortunes, has no imaginary ailings. Milliners and mantua-makers she ignores—"shopping" she never heard of—scandal she never invents or listens to. She never wishes for fine carriages, professes no inability to walk five hundred yards, and does not think it a "vulgar accomplishment," to know how to make butter. She has no groundless anxieties, she is not nervous about her children taking cold: a doctor is a visionary potentate to her—a drug-shop is a depot of abominations. She never forgets ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... continuous warfare. They came together for the purpose of giving Europe that "peace and stability" which they thought that the people needed and wanted. They were what we call reactionaries. They sincerely believed in the inability of the mass of the people to rule themselves. They re-arranged the map of Europe in such a way as seemed to promise the greatest possibility of a lasting success. They failed, but not through any premeditated wickedness on their ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... a brave front, to keep up appearances; but she felt helpless and weak, curiously confused by and unequal to dealing with this masterful stranger—who yet, somehow did not seem like a stranger. Precisely in this was the root of her confusion, of her inability ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... me one of her tender smiles and made a little gesture as if to say that she felt her inability to ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... himself only to equal or excel some other trifler, and is happy or miserable as he succeeds or miscarries: the man of sedentary desire and unactive ambition sits comparing his power with his wishes; and makes his inability to perform things impossible, an excuse to himself for performing nothing. Man can only form a just estimate of his own actions, by making his power the test of his performance, by comparing what he does with what he can do. Whoever steadily perseveres in the exertion ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... of intrigue in his own hands, his royal master by the dogged pursuit of one end overthrew the minister's entire scheme. Saturated though he was with Machiavellian theories, a man of one book, and that book The Prince, Cromwell lost all by his inability to read the bent of ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... arrive there, or take departure from her present anchorage, is a question that even her skipper cannot answer. If asked, he would most probably reply, "Quien sabe?" and, further pressed, might point to her deserted decks, offering that as an explanation of his inability to satisfy ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... quite pale with the painful wrist, and meditated, in a desperate fashion, on her inability to keep out of trouble and mischief; But Kittie was back in an incredibly short space of time, all flushed and panting, and with a little bundle of ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... self-distrust; and certainly the example of Dr. Kane will exert this wholesome influence, by the unmistakable directness with which it gives the lie to that lazy or cowardly skepticism of the powers of the will, which furnishes the excuse for thousands to slink away from duty on the plea of inability to perform it. To the young men of the country we especially commend this biography, in the full belief that it will stimulate and stir to effort many a sensitive youth who feels within himself the capacity to emulate the spirit which prompted Dr. Kane's actions, if he cannot hope to rival ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... tried and found wanting was tried again as though it were impossible for human minds to acknowledge defeat by an insensate plant. The axes, the scythes, weedburners and reapers were brought out again, only to prove their inability to cope with the relentless flow of the grass. Robot tanks loaded with explosives disappeared as had those containing the soldiers, and only the stifled sound of their explosion registered the fact that they had fulfilled their design if not ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... read the hymn through, and then deaconed out two lines at a time for the people to sing. He repeated the process with a second hymn, when Abel made a prayer; then Uncle Sam read from the Burial Service and began his exordium, apologizing for his inability to speak much on account of a sore throat, but holding forth for about half an hour upon the necessity for all to prepare for "dis bed," filling his discourse with Scripture illustrations and quotations aptly ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... Because he had taken Emmy, he had a grievance. Right! But against whom? Against Emmy? Certainly not. Against himself? By no means. Against Jenny? A horribly exulting and yet nervously penitent little giggle shook Jenny at her inability to answer this point as she had answered the others. For Alf had a grievance against Jenny, and she knew it. No amount of ingenious thought could hoodwink her sense of honesty for more than a debater's five minutes. No Alf had ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... resent the burden and the discomfort and the expense of an ailing wife, no matter how well-intentioned they may be. It is a failing of the male species to be cursed with the inability to understand any type of nervousness in a wife. Being inexplicable to him he attributes the symptoms to an evil imagination or to a bad disposition. He believes he is being imposed upon and proceeds to resent it. Many homes are rendered permanently ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... resented his behaviour towards me. Fearful of discovery, I had never paid any attention to music since my marriage; I had always pretended that I could not sing. Even my wife was not aware of my talent; and although latterly I had no fear of the kind, yet as I had always stated my inability, I did not choose to bring forth a talent, the reason for concealing which I could not explain even to my wife and mother, without acknowledging the deception of which I ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Inability to do the things you professed to do involved grave risk of making intimate acquaintance with the gang. If, for example, you were a skipper and navigated your vessel more like a 'prentice than a ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... Colonel and convey a letter to him detailing my situation, and was much taken with this idea, which I presently rejected because I did not clearly see what good could come of it. I was tortured with doubts, unable to decide for the best, and at last, from sheer inability to choose, resolved to adhere to my original plan ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... small social gathering, cards must be left within the following week. When unable to accept an invitation to dinner, a call should soon afterwards be made to express regret at the inability to be present. ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... short, all the general process of a trial was passing before my view. Curiosity would naturally have made me spring from my bed and approach this extraordinary spectacle; but I am not ashamed now to acknowledge, that I felt a nervelessness and inability to speak or move, which for the time wholly awed me. All that I could discover was, that the accused was charged with incivisme, and that, defying the court and disdaining the charge, he was pronounced guilty—the whole circle, standing up as the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... less derangement of its flight than on the former occasion. For all that, it was borne back, until its anchor "touched bottom." Then after making another upward effort, with the like result, it appeared to become convinced of its inability to rise vertically, and directed its flight in a horizontal line along the cliffs. The log was jerked over the ground, bounding from point to point, occasionally swinging in the air, but only for a few seconds ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... day, when books are so easily obtained, there is no need of the excuse of inability to procure them. Circulating libraries are easy of access,—though caution should be used in selecting from them,—and each Sabbath school has a library open for all. There has been much said, and much written about books of fiction, whether they may be read with safety by the young. Fiction as ...
— Our Gift • Teachers of the School Street Universalist Sunday School, Boston
... state of Paris was less satisfactory. That fickle populace cheered royalist allusions at the theatres, hissed off an "official" play that represented Cossack marauders,[438] and caused such alarm to Savary that he wrote to warn his master of the inability of the police to control the public if the war rolled on towards Paris. Whether Savary's advice was honestly stupid, or whether, as Lavalette hints, Talleyrand's intrigues were undermining his loyalty to Napoleon, it is difficult to say. But certainly the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... adieu he received before setting out we have space for only two. The first came from the venerable Professor Sedgwick, of Cambridge, in the form of an apology for inability to attend the farewell banquet. It is a beautiful unfolding of the head and heart of the Christian philosopher, and must have been singularly welcome to Livingstone, whose views on some of the greatest subjects of thought ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... the five-year test ... The E was the final word, or should be. The colonists knew it. The E knew it, or should know it. Obviously then it was weakness on the part of the Junior if he allowed the colonists to dictate that there could be no mechanical science. Proof of his inability to handle the job. ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... consciousness on his part of anything in her mind beyond what her words implied. But she felt in peril of fire, so close to him, with a resurrection of an image in it—a vivid one—of the lawn-tennis garden of twenty years ago, and the speech of his friend, the real Fenwick, about his inability to swim. ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... returned Cleek; "that the bird brought him a message of such importance it was necessary to leave this house at once, and that, not wishing to leave it unlocked while he was absent, and not—because of the captain's inability to get back upstairs afterward—having anybody to whom he could appeal to get up and lock it after him, he chose to get out of this window, and to go down by means of that wistaria. I think, too, we may decide that, as he left no note to explain his absence, he expected to return before morning, ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... the Government suffered inconvenience and embarrassment enough during the war in consequence of the inability of manufacturers to use this patent, and that its further extension will operate prejudicially to its interest by compelling it to pay to parties already well paid a large royalty for altering its ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... because of them, Sabre found with new certainty that he had no violent feelings. Increasingly he came to know that he had well expressed his constitutional habit, the outstanding trait in his character, when, on the day of that talk in the office with Nona, he had spoken of his disastrous inability—disastrous from the point of view of being satisfactory to single-minded persons, or of pulling out that big booming stuff called success—to see a thing, whatever it might be, from a single point of view and go all out for it from that point of view. "Convictions," ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... which to him was honorable; his hard work; his late hours; his devotion to a task which was often tedious; his many periods of heart-rending loss, which when they occurred would drive him nearly mad; his small customary gains; his inability to put by anything for old age; of the narrow edge by which he himself was occasionally divided from defalcation, he spoke to himself of himself as of an honest, hard-working professional man upon whom the world was ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... says (Div. Nom. iv) that evil is "weak and incapable." But weakness or inability either takes away or diminishes guilt. Therefore a human action does not incur ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... plaintive and disagreeable. He put it down to his lady wife's magnificence, in comparison with which all seemed common. Her money flew apace, in spite of the cheap living. She was even richer than he expected; and he remembered with shame how he had once regretted his inability to accept the thousand lire that Philip Herriton offered him in exchange for her. It would have been a ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... and injurious character of most of this legislation is best proved by the notable inability to effectively enforce its application. The chartered companies were continually complaining of the infringement of their monopolies by private adventurers, and more than one of them failed through inability ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... the three sat at the entrance of the cave and discussed the Prince's affairs, in which the hermit and his daughter seemed to take a lively interest. At a little distance on the small stone sat the Single Adherent, also smoking a pipe of water-cress, and his inability to enjoy this novel sensation was plainly evident in the radiant beams of the full moon. In the course of an hour the Prince and his Adherent retired to a guest-cave near by; but the hermit and his daughter sat up far into the ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... of the Dei Gratia, an able and intelligent seaman, is of opinion that the Marie Celeste may have been abandoned a considerable distance from the spot at which she was picked up, since a powerful current runs up in that latitude from the African coast. He confesses his inability, however, to advance any hypothesis which can reconcile all the facts of the case. In the utter absence of a clue or grain of evidence, it is to be feared that the fate of the crew of the Marie Celeste will be added to those numerous mysteries of the deep which will never be solved ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a rush of words came to Harry that he was silent by the sheer inability to decide which to utter first. But then ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... inform you where she is," I answered, petulantly. "I scarcely think it was worth while to disturb me for the sake of asking me a question you must have known my inability ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... (a)—There is an inability to release a word; in others, (b)—A tendency to repeat a syllable several times before the following syllable can be uttered; in others, (c)—The tendency to substitute an incorrect sound for the correct one; ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... jealousies have taken possession of the Indian mind. The difficulties are the inability of the Indians to select a high or principal chief from amongst themselves, and as to the matter and extent of the ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... faculty meeting he brought up the plight of an old woman who was about to be evicted from her little shack on the outskirts of the town because of her inability to pay the nominal rent which she was charged. He arranged to have her rent paid out of a sum of money which he always had included in the school budget for the relief of such cases. In such ways he was constantly ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... nearly converted to her side as the journey grew hotter and heavier, seeing her maintain her pace as well as himself, if not better, that he found himself stumbling every few yards sheerly through his inability to keep his eyes from her. He was bursting to talk; there was yet a problem unsolved in his mind; and when a stretch of level glade gave him back his breath, ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... and even when the service was over, and they entered the choir, these thoughts had not so passed away as to enable her to give full admiration to the exquisite leafy capitals and taper arcades of the Lady Chapel. Perhaps, too, there was a little perverseness in her inability to think that this Cathedral ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... different way. But sometimes the solution proposed for a given problem is almost the same in substance, even when the two thinkers we are contrasting belong to centuries which lie far apart. In this case, only our own inability to strip off the husk and reach the fruit itself prevents us from seeing that we have before ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... academies, rigidly prohibit the use of tobacco by their pupils. So also young men in athletic training are strictly forbidden to use it.[12] This loss of muscular vigor is shown by the unsteady condition of the muscles, the trembling hand, and the inability to do with precision and accuracy any fine work, as in ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... conviction. The correlations between his idiosyncrasies and his precepts are undeniable. This has special reference to his point of view in the matter of fasting and abstinence from meat. He too frequently vents his own aversion to fish, or talks of his inability to postpone meals, not to make this connection clear to everybody. In the same way his personal experience in the monastery passes into his disapproval, on principle, ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... man may be an active component in the economic and industrial life of society, yet his inability to hear and his frequently consequent inability to speak stand in the way of his prompt and continuous partaking in its social life. He may, and does, have many friends among his neighbors and acquaintances, but in the discourse between ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... still remain a skeptic as regards Spiritualism, but I repeat my inability to explain or account for what must have been an intelligent force which produced the writing on the slate, which, if my senses are to be relied on, was in no way the result ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... pent-up bitterness of a young life condemned to a slavery intolerable to any refined or sensitive nature. Is it strange that people here take to drink? To me it is far more surprising that so many are sober. I am convinced that, in the slums, far more drunkenness is caused by abject poverty and inability to obtain work, than want is produced by drink. Here the physical system, half starved and often chilled, calls for stimulants. Here the horrors of nightmare, which we sometimes suffer during our sleep, are present during every waking hour. An oppressive fear weighs forever on the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... great majority" has done for this country in the past, and is doing for it at the present time, and especially when we contrast its sense of justice and right with the weakness and inability of some of its public servants, does it not seem to be a little presumptuous for them to assume that "the danger is from the multitudes—the majority, with whom is the power," and that, were it not for their superior wisdom and patriotic ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... Thresk lived over again that evening in the tent upon the desert, but with a new understanding. His mind was illumined. He saw the world as a prison in which each living being is shut off from his neighbour by the impenetrable wall of an inability to understand. ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... and art critic. I cannot now put my hand, for purposes of quotation, upon the title of the periodical in which these appeared; but I remember that the writer was greatly amused, as well as somewhat provoked, by his inability to get any of the philosophers with whom he sought interviews to take an aesthetic view of any poem, or painting, or other art product. They would talk of its "message" or its "ethical content"; but as to questions of technique or beauty, they gently put them ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... ashore, where the ambulances stood upon the dock. Maurie had admitted his inability to drive, but asked to be allowed to go into the town. So he left the ship with the others and disappeared ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... history: Time lost from school by illness; school work as affected by physical condition when the girl is in school; probable ability or inability to bear the confinement of an indoor occupation; any early illness, accident, or surgical operation which may affect health and therefore ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... Ebony by treating him with the same deference which he accorded to his companions. In short each of our travellers congratulated himself not a little on this pleasant acquisition to the party—the only drawback to their satisfaction being their inability to reconcile the existence of such good qualities with ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... The inability of his contemporaries to understand his profound decorative genius, his tact in the handling of the great problem of lighting—the key is always higher because of the different or softer light of public buildings and the gloom of churches—and his feeling for the wall, purely as wall, a flat ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Man's inability to solve these sovereign problems is nowhere more poetically expressed than in Edward Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyam's ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... Holden sourly went away. There had been no particular consequences of Johnny Simms' inability to remember what was right and what was wrong. But Holden felt like a normal man about men whose wives look patient. Even psychiatrists feel that it is somehow disreputable to illtreat a woman who doesn't fight back. This attitude is instinctive. ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... to think he had better go. Lydia was surrounded by men who were speaking to her in German. He felt his own inability to talk learnedly even in English; and he had, besides, a conviction that she was angry with him for upsetting her cousin, who was gravely conversing with Miss Goff. Suddenly a horrible noise caused a general start and pause. Mr. Jack, the eminent composer, had opened ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... many teachers are apt to run, and that is, to condemn every thing which is vehement and forcible as theatrical. It is an old trick to depreciate what we can not attain, and calling a spirited pronunciation theatrical, is but an artful method of hiding an utter inability of speaking with force and energy. But though school-boys ought not to be taught those nice touches which form the greatest difficulties in the profession of an actor, they should not be too much restrained ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... were all four in such high spirits that they could no more help playing together than four colts could help playing in a grass field. Besides, Vincent had taunted Adelaide with her inability ever to make it up with Wayne. ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... sin. If we gather into one dismal pile the weakening of power for good, the strengthening of impulses to evil, the inward poverty, the unrest, the gnawings of conscience or its silence, the slavery under evil often loathed even while it is being obeyed, the dreary sense of inability to mend oneself, and often the wreck of outward life which dog our sins like sleuth-hounds, surely we shall not need to imagine a future tribunal in order to be sure that sin is a murderess, or to hear her laugh as she ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... something out of it, if I have to put in some more winters like the one I have just come through—which was Sheol, with ice and snow in the place of the traditional fire and brimstone. If I have one good quality—as I sometimes doubt—it's the inability to know when I am satisfactorily and ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... successfully in the silent drama. Lacking this knowledge, it is impossible to succeed. But the great majority of the ones who fail, and who, otherwise, would almost certainly have succeeded sooner or later, owe their failure to their inability to hit upon and develop original, ingenious and dramatic or truly humorous plots and plot-situations. Many a man of brains and of excellent education who in any other calling might easily make his mark, finds himself totally unable to win success in short-story writing and photoplay writing ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... standpoint of observation and inexperience, I would say that the supremest lack of men as lovers is the inability to say, "I am sorry, dear; forgive me." And to keep on saying it until the hurt is entirely gone. You gave her the deep wound. Be manly enough to stay by it until it has healed. Men will go to any trouble, any expense, any personal inconvenience, to heal it without ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... "dug-out;" but Mr. Low had before him the possibility of our having been assailed by bad characters, or of our having encountered a tiger in the jungle, and of my having been carried off from my inability ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... was on January 1, 1866, or at any time prior thereto, entitled to vote under any form of government, or who at that time resided in some foreign nation, and no lineal descendant of such person, shall be denied the right to register and vote because of his inability to read and write sections of such constitution. Precinct election inspectors having in charge the registration of electors shall enforce the provisions of this section at the time of registration, provided registration be required. Should registration be dispensed ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... facie case existed against him, or that sort of evidence that would induce a grand jury to indict. I offer this as an instance of the feeling that exists in all classes against the negro, and their inability to realize that he is a free man and entitled ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... there, "Rastas," as they are familiarly called by the Parisians, who make little if any distinction in their minds between a South American (blazing in diamonds and vulgar clothes) and our own select (?) colony. Apropos of this inability of the Europeans to appreciate our fine social distinctions, I have been told of a well-born New Yorker who took a French noblewoman rather to task for receiving an American she thought unworthy of notice, ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... steam engine was devised by James Watt, an English inventor of great ingenuity. He invented a cylinder containing a piston, which could be forced back and forth by the introduction of steam. His progress was much retarded by the inability of the mechanics of his time to make an accurate cylinder of sufficient size, but in the year 1777 the new machine was successfully used for pumping. A few years later (1785) he arranged his engine so that it would ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice-President, and the Congress may by law provide for the case of removal, death, resignation, or inability, both of the President and Vice-President, declaring what officer shall ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... unconsciousness of the other are happily contrasted. A sad monologue by Othello prepares the way for the coming outbreak. The handkerchief trio follows, in which the malignity of Iago, the indignation of Othello, and the inability of Cassio to understand the fell purpose of Iago are brought out with great force. At its close a fanfare of trumpets announces the Venetian embassy, and the finale begins with much brilliancy. Then follows the scene ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... she is sadly grieved at not having wished you good-bye. She says little Susan has kept watch down the lane for days past.—Nay, Margaret, what is the matter, dear?' The thought of the little child watching for her, and continually disappointed—from no forgetfulness on her part, but from sheer inability to leave home—was the last drop in poor Margaret's cup, and she was sobbing away as if her heart would break. Mr. Hale was distressingly perplexed. He rose, and walked nervously up and down the room. Margaret tried to check herself, but would ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... not answer that question,—a carefulness which touched even Petronius somewhat, for, with all his inability to feel the difference between good and evil, he had never been an informer; and it was possible to talk with him in perfect safety. He changed the conversation again, therefore, and began to praise Plautius's dwelling and the good taste which ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... we must discard, because of its inability to explain a great part of the facts, the most easy and simple hypothesis—that of some mechanical signal (e.g. by means of a supposed pressure of the hand under the cardboard, or by the hand itself which is held out to the animal, ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... mother's idol, but his utter lack of worldliness, his inability to drive a shrewd bargain sometimes annoyed his father, who was a just, but an undeniably hard man, who demanded a hundred cents for his dollar ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... plainly," answered the curate, "that what you say, I must do. But how, while on duty as a clergyman, I DO NOT KNOW. How am I, with the sense of the unreality of my position ever growing upon me, and my utter inability to supply the wants of the congregation, save from my uncle's store of dry provender, which it takes me a great part of my time so to modify as, in using it, to avoid direct lying—with all this pressing upon me, and making ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... up. His men were waiting and longing for a spurt and caught it up at once. But again the swing was marred by Franklin's inability to support the terrific pace. After the first stroke or two the boat began to roll heavily, the form and time became ragged, and ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... was this. The Persians were constantly victorious in the open field; Constantius was again and again defeated; but no permanent gain was effected by these successes. A weakness inherited by the Persians from the Parthians—an inability to conduct sieges to a prosperous issue—showed itself; and their failures against the fortified posts which Rome had taken care to establish in the disputed regions were continual. Up to the close of A.D. 340 Sapor had made no important gain, had struck no decisive blow, but stood nearly ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... followed by general fever, loss of consciousness, delirium, sopor while the child is lying in bed, interrupted more or less by sudden cries; boring of the head into the pillow, with copious sweat about the head, having the odor of musk; inability to hold the head erect; squinting of one or both eyes; dilatation of the pupils; gritting of the teeth; protrusion of the tongue; desire to vomit; nausea, retching and vomiting; collapse of the abdominal walls; scanty urine, which is sometimes milky; costiveness; trembling ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... general, had however been prudent enough to send them back severally in order to facilitate the liquidation of their pay, and the Council had believed that they would in the end consent to some reduction. But at present ill-will was caused by the inability to pay them. This debt was confused in the minds of the people with the 3200 Euboic talents exacted by Lutatius, and equally with Rome they were regarded as enemies to Carthage. The Mercenaries understood this, and their indignation found vent in threats and outbreaks. At last they demanded ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... two sail of ships of warr, crewsing up and down about Ostend: at which we are alarmed. My Lord Sandwich is come back into the Downes with only eight sail, which is or may be a prey to the Dutch, if they knew our weakness and inability to set ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... this rule when after water animals, and it is not always through a spirit of mercy toward the victim that actuates their motive, but the fact that they would otherwise lose many a catch, since the captive in despair over its inability to escape ...
— Darry the Life Saver - The Heroes of the Coast • Frank V. Webster
... wrote to Secretary of State Seward: "That Great Britain did, in the most terrible moment of our domestic trial in struggling with a monstrous social evil she had earnestly professed to abhor, coldly and at once assume our inability to master it, and then become the only foreign nation steadily contributing in every indirect way possible to verify its judgment, will probably be the verdict made against her by posterity, on calm comparison of the evidence[1]." Very different were the views ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... got to school, he made a violent struggle against his physical inability to study. He sat gripped, making himself pale and ghastly in his effort to concentrate on the book, to take in what he had to learn. But it was no good. If he beat down his first repulsion, and got like a suicide to the stuff, he went ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... without any concealment, fully exonerating Mildred. Although the judge maintained his stern, impassive aspect throughout the scene, he hugely enjoyed the floor-walker's dismay and confusion, and his tortured inability to warn ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... external tears but within; he mourned the bitterness of solitude, the inability to exchange a single thought with her. He had so many things to tell her which were burning his soul! How he would talk with her, if some mysterious power would bring her back for an instant. He would implore her forgiveness; he would ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... conclusions he had drawn. Though usually adroit enough where her own interests were concerned, she made the mistake, not uncommon to persons in whom the social habits are instinctive, of supposing that the inability to acquire them quickly implies a general dulness. Because a blue-bottle bangs irrationally against a window-pane, the drawing-room naturalist may forget that under less artificial conditions it is capable of measuring distances and drawing ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... moment came—no money—no relief. With sinking heart he went to the holder of the mortgage to announce his utter inability to meet his demand. While there, just at the last moment, when he was about to leave, the gentleman said, "By the way, here is an envelope I ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... previous resolutions, Clare found himself gravitating to her side as soon as his respects had been paid to Mrs. Brantley—a fact which may serve as a small proof of the weakness of man's resolve, and his general inability to fight against fate, especially when it is embodied in a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... his inability, looked around him for an active agent, and believed he had found one in a Mr. Gray, a man of captivating manners and good connexions, but almost as useless a person as the General himself. Fully ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... a talk with the village headman. He was elected for one year, he told me, by the people of the hamlet, comprising about forty families. He confessed his inability to read or write, but his face was intelligent and his bearing showed dignity and self-respect. Petty disputes and breaches of the peace were settled by him according to unwritten custom and his native shrewdness; and he was also responsible for the collection of the land tax due ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... existence; and are warned from recognising the domain of our knowledge as necessarily co-extensive with the horizon of our faith. And by a wonderful revelation, we are thus, in the very consciousness of our inability to conceive aught above the relative and finite, inspired with a belief in the existence of something unconditioned beyond the sphere of ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... escaped. Their misery could not be conveyed to the mind. The woman was like a demon come among them. They felt chiefly degraded, not by her vulgarity, but by their inability to cope with it, and by the consequent sickening sense of animal inefficiency—the block that was put to all imaginative delight in the golden hazy future they figured for themselves, and which was their wine of life. An intellectual adversary they could ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... dint of hard pulling they got within hail of the transport, and asked for help. "We cannot give it you," was the answer; "we have a boat-load of horses alongside." A second transport was neared, and then another and another, but all declared their inability to render assistance. Green was almost in despair; the artillerymen were shouting out more lustily than before, asserting that the raft was fast filling. At length the boats managed to tow her up alongside a transport, the master of which responded to their appeal, and assisted them ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... through the ceremony of squatting on the floor of the Durbar—our seven pair of unruly legs all converging to a common centre, from our inability to double them under us, as his Majesty did—we adjourned to the hall below to witness the "Hoolie" in safety. On each side of the court-yard was a sort of garden-engine, one filled with a purple and the other with a light-red fluid. ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... say, in passing, that the barrenness of incoherent ideas, and the sterility of widely distant species and genera of animals and plants, are one in principle—the sterility of hybrids being just as much due to inability to fuse widely unlike and unfamiliar ideas into a coherent whole, as barrenness of ideas is, and, indeed, resolving itself ultimately into neither more nor less than barrenness of ideas—that is to say, into inability to think at all, or ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... regret now—that was all over. Not only the time of her folly, but the time of her repentance was far. The only thing to regret was that Madame Merle had been so—well, so unimaginable. Just here her intelligence dropped, from literal inability to say what it was that Madame Merle had been. Whatever it was it was for Madame Merle herself to regret it; and doubtless she would do so in America, where she had announced she was going. It concerned Isabel no more; she only had an impression ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... qualms of conscience, which were deepened by his wife's sagacious words; and suddenly it struck him that the new-fangled vehicle which had brought him home so quietly from Scargate had shown a strange inability to stand still for more than two minutes at his side door. So much had he been hurried by the apparent straits of his charioteer that he ran out with box C without ever stopping to make an inventory of its contents—as he intended to do—or even looking whether the all-important deed ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... has not been dealt with in proportion to the significance of this fact. It accounts for his love of exaggerated surfaces, his formless extravagance, his indefiniteness in structural design; possibly, too, for his inability, or let us say lack of sympathy, for the monumental. He is essentially a sculptor of the intimate emotions; he delineates passion as a psychologist; and while we think of him as a cyclops wielding a huge hammer destructively, he ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... according to the desired pattern: in this case the fault probably lies in a lack of the power of co-ordinating the various activities. The necessary associations between the hearing centres and the motor centres for the control of voice have not been built up. But they can be so built, and then the inability to sing vanishes. A person who can speak has the necessary machinery for song, and to say that one has ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... his pockets full of papers, which instantly reminded me of the poet in Garrick's farce of Lethe. After we had finished our breakfast he drew from his pocket part of a tragedy, which he said he had brought for my correction. In vain I pleaded inability, when he began to read; and every part on which I expressed a doubt as to the propriety was immediately blotted out. I then most earnestly pressed him not to trust to my judgment, but to take the opinion of persons better qualified to decide on dramatic ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... No one had spoken to him outside of Burton. Judd imagined that they all were conscious of his showing the white feather. The first team men seemed especially hostile. They had received a tongue-lashing from the coach for their inability to run the score up. Of course he could not know that they were a bit resentful at him for having thwarted their scoring attempts by his ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... and there to my chamber till anon comes Mr. Turner and his wife and daughter, and Pelting, to sup with us and talk of my wife's journey to-morrow, her daughter going with my wife; and after supper to talk with her husband about the Office, and his place, which, by Sir J. Minnes's age and inability, is very uncomfortable to him, as well as without profit, or certainty what he shall do, when Sir J. Minnes dies, which is a sad condition for a man that hath lived so long in the Office as Mr. Turner hath done. But he aymes, and I advise him to it, to look for Mr. Ackworth's ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... all, was kindly and just, and never lifted a hand to him. Having survived sea-sickness at the first, and never setting foot upon the land so that he never again knew sea-sickness, Kwaque was certain he lived in an earthly paradise. He never had to regret his inability to climb trees, because danger never threatened him. He had food regularly, and all he wanted, and it was such food! No one in his village could have dreamed of any delicacy of the many delicacies which he consumed all the time. ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... reach Horne and his characteristics—of which I can tell you with confidence that they are grossly misrepresented where not altogether false—whether it proceed from inability to see what one may see, or disinclination, I cannot say. I know very little of Horne, but my one visit to him a few weeks ago would show the uncandidness of those charges: for instance, he talked a good deal about ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... should befal him; but Peter with an ungrounded Resolution, and in a Flush of Temper, made a sanguine Protestation, that tho all Men were offended in him, yet would not he be offended. It was a great Article of our Saviours Business in the World, to bring us to a Sense of our Inability, without Gods Assistance, to do any thing great or good; he therefore told Peter, who thought so well of his Courage and Fidelity, that they would both fail him, and even he should deny ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... but a fierce and warlike temper, was shown in the first youthful exploit of Rodrigo. His father Diego, when too old to bear arms, was grossly insulted by an enemy, the Count of Gormaz. Diego wept and raged at the insult put upon him and his inability to resent it. Moved deeply by his father's grief, Rodrigo determined to avenge the insult to the ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... exclaimed, "It is finished." It is even so with all faithful missionaries. They feel it to be an unspeakable privilege to be co-workers with Christ; recognizing the fact that it is not their work but God's, and while they acknowledge their utter inability to save a single soul, yet, doubtless, their joy and satisfaction in all their work springs from the sacred consciousness that there is not only rejoicings and gladness of heart experienced on earth, but "joy in the ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... diminishes naturally with the consciousness of growing strength. By strength, I mean strength of body, no less than strength of mind, so closely are our body and mind connected with, each other. The helplessness of childhood, which presses upon it every moment, the sense of inability to avoid or resist danger, which makes the child run continually to his nurse or to his mother for protection, cannot but diminish, by the mere growth of the bodily powers. The boy feels himself to be less helpless than the child, and in that very proportion he is apt to become ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... hope that New York City might again come into a mastery of the trade with the West, as at the time when the Erie Canal was first completed and because of the inability of the railroads to meet the demands of traffic, the legislature of New York, in 1903, appropriated $100,000,000 for the enlargement of that waterway and the two branch canals, the Oswego and Champlain. The proposed uniform depth is twelve feet and it is otherwise to be large enough for boats ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... strung, so delicately balanced. Often the lack of spiritual joy and peace and power in prayer is attributable to nothing else than our confinement in the narrow limits of a tiny room; to the foul, gaseous air we are compelled to breathe; to our inability to get beyond the great city, with its wilderness of brick, into the country, with its blossoms, fields, and woodland glades. In a large number of spiritual maladies the physician is more necessary ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... around him, far meaner souls many of them than he, have only known and remembered that and, remembering it, have made due allowances for his vagaries, all might have been well. His generous letter of the third of July failed utterly of its mission; but not so much, perhaps, because of Hindman's inability to appreciate it or unwillingness to meet its writer half-way, as because of the very seriousness of Hindman's own military situation, which made all compromises impossible. The things he felt it incumbent upon him to do must be done his way or not at all. The letter of July 3 could scarcely ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... [inverted Y]-ligament, the foot is advanced and the heel drawn up. It is not uncommon for the patient to be able to walk after the accident, and only to seek advice some time later on account of inability to adduct and extend the limb. There is apparent lengthening of the limb due to tilting of the pelvis downward on the affected side. The hip is flattened, the trochanter less prominent than usual, and the ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... both countries attained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. By May 1994, when a cease-fire took hold, Armenian forces held not only Nagorno-Karabakh but also a significant portion of Azerbaijan proper. The economies of both sides have been hurt by their inability to make substantial progress toward a peaceful resolution. Turkey imposed an economic blockade on Armenia and closed the common border because of the Armenian occupation of ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... information of the ostler was literally true with regard to the horse-shoe; at least the blacksmith of the village, to whom we conducted the animal, confessed his inability to shoe him, having none that would fit his hoof: he said it was very probable that we should be obliged to lead the animal to Lugo, which, being a cavalry station, we might perhaps find there what ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... feel towards him all the respect due to a parent arrived at a time of life when things are not as they were wont to be, nec mens, nec aetas. I may be among those he accuses of sometimes employing "unintelligible jargon," but shall not retort while I confess my inability to understand such expressions as "some obscure occurrence of unwholesome circumstances" which seem to have, according to him, both "brought" the disease to Jessore in 1817, and produced it there at the same time. Sir Gilbert marks out for the ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... nothing which more certainly proves the innate evil of the human heart than its refusal of that mystery of grace. Disbelief is the creature, not of the intellect, but of the will. It is not the result of inability to understand, but of stubborn obstinacy and stiffneckedness. Here is the supreme manifestation of moral beauty, but man has no eyes for it. Here is the highest revelation of God's desire for man to be reconciled ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... rescue of the two boys, much to the discomfort of the blushing Job, and they rose to take their departure, feeling no ill will toward the Governor for his inability to help them. As they started to go out of the room, a loud insistent knock was heard. "Come in," said Johnson, and immediately the door was opened to admit a short, well-built gentleman, very much flushed as ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... him as a sincere believer, comparing his past life (though neither licentious nor reckless) with the perfectness of the divine law, the retrospect might well depress him with a consciousness of his own unworthiness, and of his total inability to perform the work which he saw (p. 004) before him, without the strength and guidance of divine grace. For that strength and that guidance, we are assured, he prayed, and laboured, and watched with all the intenseness and perseverance of an humble faithful Christian. ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... contemptuous snort, turns his back on the phenomenon; mounts his horse and rides home. [Pollnitz, ii. 212, 214.] A divided man from this Grumkow henceforth. The Prince waited on her Majesty; signified his sorrow for past estrangements; his great wish now to help her, but his total inability, being ousted by Grumkow: We are for Halle, Madam, where our Regiment is; there let us serve his Majesty, since we cannot here! [Wilhelmina, i. 90, 93.]—And in fact the Old Dessauer lives mostly there in time coming; sunk inarticulate in tactics of a truly deep nature, not stranding ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... hyaenas. In the greater states men felt perfectly helpless without a king to rule the anarchical chaos into which society would have dissolved without him. When the Spanish Communes rebelled against Charles V they triumphed in the field, but their attempt simply collapsed in face of their utter inability to solve the problem of government without a royal governor. They were as helpless as bees without a queen. Indeed, so strong was their instinct to get a royal head that they tried to preserve themselves by kidnapping Charles's mother, poor, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... imagination most readily assented; and, mentioning it to the guide, I was rather surprised to hear him say that, although it was the view almost universally entertained of the subject by the Norwegians, it nevertheless was not his own. As to the former notion he confessed his inability to comprehend it; and here I agreed with him—for, however conclusive on paper, it becomes altogether unintelligible, and even absurd, amid ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... was sent to report the state of affairs to Mr Dallas, who lay on his rough couch, apparently quite calm and confident, but with a red patch burning in either cheek, as he bitterly felt his helplessness and inability to do more than give a word or two of advice. But this advice he did give, when the frigate was about ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... on a good and well-connected plan, and apparently with a sincere desire to tell the truth. He accepts the British official accounts as needing nothing whatever to supplement them, precisely as Cooper accepts the American officials'. A more serious fault is his inability to be accurate. That this inaccuracy is not intentional is proved by the fact that it tells as often against his own side as against his opponents. He says, for example, that the guns of Perry's and Barclay's squadrons "were about equal ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... wet through, with the exception of his coat, and but for John's apparent inability to go home alone, would at once have returned to his boarding-house to exchange his ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... state of servitude; look back, I entreat you, on the variety of dangers to which you were exposed; reflect on that period in which every human aid appeared unavailable, and in which even hope and fortitude wore the aspect of inability to the conflict, and you cannot but be led to a serious and grateful sense of your miraculous and providential preservation, you cannot but acknowledge, that the present freedom and tranquility which you enjoy, you have mercifully received, and that ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... others of my congregation, and I heartily thank you for your friendly advice and godly admonitions; believing them to have been given in that love which purifies the heart. I am very sensible that the charge committed to my care is very great; and am also fully convinced of my own inability for so great an undertaking. And I do assure you, that when I was called to the task, I trembled at the idea, and was ready to say, "Who am I." But when I consider that God can send by whom he will, and as you very justly have observed, he sometimes makes use of the feeblest instruments ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
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