"Impotency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... maturity, and remained there sterile like dry bushes on a plot of land exhausted by over-cultivation. And the frightful sadness that one felt arose from the fact that so creative and great a past had culminated in such present-day impotency—Rome, who had covered the world with indestructible monuments, now so reduced that she ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... destruction of every arbitrary power that can separately, secretly and of its single choice disturb the peace of the world, or, if it cannot be presently destroyed, at least its reduction to virtual impotency." He declared that the power which had hitherto controlled the German nation was of the sort thus described, and that its alteration actually constituted a condition ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... the sound of the firing, which was receding more and more to the eastward, as a deadly hurricane moves off after having accomplished its disastrous work. With a fierce gesture, expressive of his sense of impotency, General Douay outstretched his arms toward the wide horizon of hill and dale, of woods and fields, and the order went forth to proceed with the march ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... Wellington, the immense concourse of the seditious was placed at the side of the river where they could do least mischief, and the passages of which by the bridges could be easily defended by a small force. The government thus showed the impotency of the chartist party, and its ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... 3. Impotentia (agenesia). Impotency much seldomer happens to the male sex than sterility to the female sex. Sometimes a temporary impotence occurs from bashfulness, or the interference of some voluntary exertion in the production of an effect, which should be performed alone by ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... power, as regards the generative act, may be defined as—the aptitude or ability to beget; and Impotency, the negation or ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... was not found to exhibit any virtue. Vermuyden, however, was not to be laughed out of his superstitious notions, although his companions took every opportunity of turning his expectations into ridicule, but he found a very plausible excuse for the impotency of his divining rod in the discovery, that its qualities had all been dried up by the heat of the climate, and that, under every circumstance, it was not an instrument adapted to the country in which it was to be carried into use. On ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... proved the people right. The forts, when built, were but slight obstacles to the invasions of the Indians. The murders became more frequent than before. The impotency of the defenses of the colony seems to have inspired them to more terrible and vigorous attacks. The cry against the forts became more bitter. "It was a design," the people thought, "of the grandees to engross all their tobacco into their own hands".[500] As the cries of their women and children ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... Seventh, The impotency and limitations of the world order are most evident. Its leader, though mighty, is inferior to Christ: "Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world (Satanic system)" (I Jno. 4:4). ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... countless myriads of Suns, rolling along in their appointed orbits, and thus on and on throughout eternity. What an idea of the limitless extent of Creative Power—filling up infinite space with the evidences of His Almighty Presence! The human mind feels its utter impotency in endeavouring to grasp such ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... sense, is possible only as a fruit of experience. A life in which the aesthetic interest unduly dominates, in which action is transmuted into pulses of sensation, and the means of efficiency into the ends of contemplation, is an idle life, protected from the consequences of its own impotency only by the constructive labor of others. He who from prolonged gazing at the spoon forgets to carry it to his mouth, must die of hunger and cease from gazing altogether, or be fed by his friends. The instruments of achievement may be adorned, and made delightful in the using, ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... an union and communion with him in love; if it do not discover thyself unto thyself, that in that light of God's glorious majesty thou mayest distinctly behold thy own vileness and wretched misery, thy darkness and deadness and utter impotency. The angels that Isaiah saw attending God in the temple, had wings covering their faces, and wings covering their feet. Those excellent spirits who must cover their feet from us, because we cannot ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... are a man, and consequently a sinner; and this may be a punishment to you for your sins: indeed in this sense it may be esteemed as a good, yea, as the greatest good, which satisfies the anger of Heaven, and averts that wrath which cannot continue without our destruction. Thirdly, our impotency of relieving ourselves demonstrates the folly and absurdity of our complaints: for whom do we resist, or against whom do we complain, but a power from whose shafts no armour can guard us, no speed can fly?—a ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... from being an exceeding trial; and James could hardly yet have endured it, but for pleasure and interest in watching his sister's lively good-humour, saucy and determined when the old man was unreasonable, and caressing and affectionate, when he was violent in his impotence; never seeming to hear, see, or regard anything unkind or unpleasant; and absolutely pleased and gratified when her uncle, in his petulance, sometimes ungraciously rejected her services in favour of those of 'Roland,' who, he took it for granted, must, as a man, ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... And the utter impotence of their struggle against God is revealed in the quietness and brevity with which their defeat and capture are told. Satan's great earth leader and his chief who deceived the people with his miraculous power, both are taken and forever put away. And then Satan himself ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... particularly distressed by this form of discrimination, which, considering the armed forces' persistent declaration of impotence in the matter, seemed destined to remain a permanent condition of service life. "These problems involve factors which are not directly under the control of the Department of Defense," Assistant Secretary for Manpower Carlisle P. Runge noted in a typical response.[20-6] ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... he must act at once if he were to save her. But how? He writhed under the terrible feeling of impotence produced by his ignorance of the syndicate's real business. If he were to help Madeleine he must know what ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... every incentive to progress, with the least possible danger of unmerited destitution. And although large economic organizations will continue, as they are bound to do, there will be a diffusion of power which will take away the sense of individual impotence from which men and women suffer ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... chairs or huddled in cheerful groups behind sheltering projections, and stood watching the dip and rise of the steamer's bow as it drove onward into the mist. Whither was she going, and to what? With a desperate sense of her ignorance and impotence, she strained her eyes into the white, dimly translucent bank, from which stray drops repeatedly lashed her face, as though its vaporous wall alone stood between her and the ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... wishes, is her way; Nor asks of God, but of her stars, to give The mighty blessing, "while we live, to live." Then all for death, that opiate of the soul! Lucretia's dagger, Rosamonda's bowl. Say, what can cause such impotence of mind? A spark too fickle, or a spouse too kind. Wise wretch! with pleasures too refined to please; With too much spirit to be e'er at ease; With too much quickness ever to be taught; With too much thinking to ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... nothing to gain by putting himself at the service of others, while his own occupations claim his attention,—he refuses, I say, to aid others in getting a foothold, as he was aided in getting his own; and when, in the impotence of their isolation, these poor laborers are compelled to sell their birthright, he—this ungrateful proprietor, this knavish upstart—stands ready to put the finishing touch to their deprivation and their ruin. And you think ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... of the German Empire may instead offer German socialism the opportunity of emerging from its voluntary impotence and redeem itself by breaking down the feudal political regime of the empire, taking away from Russian absolutism the assistance it has hitherto enjoyed, and contributing to alter decisively the aims of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... maintains its place and keeps its nature; whatever falls away from this forsakes the existence which is essential to its nature. "But," thou wilt say, "the bad have an ability." Nor do I wish to deny it; only this ability of theirs comes not from strength, but from impotence. For their ability is to do evil, which would have had no efficacy at all if they could have continued in the performance of good. So this ability of theirs proves them still more plainly to have no power. For if, as we concluded just now, evil ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... pushed the wine cask aside, it rolled away from under him, and in the fulness of his contempt for Merlin and his impotence, he stood up before them all, strong in ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... undergraduates Come forth by twos and threes, From the broad tower of Trinity, From the green gate of Caius: The wily bargeman marks them, And swears to do his worst; To turn to impotence their strength, And their beauty to ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... observed, is eminently an old-age vice, and in natures that are in no degree avaricious it will be found that real money anxieties are more felt and have a greater haunting power in age than in youth. There is then the sense of impotence which makes men feel that their earning power has gone. On the other hand youth, and especially early married life spent under the pressure of narrow circumstances, will often be looked back upon as both the happiest and the most fruitful period of life. It is the best discipline of character. ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... to you. You never saw that red flood bearing the mangled breasts of women and the spattered brains of babes and sucklings. Oh! [He covers his eyes with his hands. The BARON turns away in gloomy impotence. At last DAVID begins to speak quietly, almost dreamily.] It was your Easter, and the air was full of holy bells and the streets of holy processions—priests in black and girls in white and waving palms and crucifixes, and everybody exchanging Easter eggs ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... to expect of poor human nature, that a man capable of producing some effect in one line of literature, should, for the greater good of society, voluntarily doom himself to impotence and obscurity in another. Still less is this to be expected from men addicted to the composition of the "false or malicious criticism" of which Wordsworth speaks. However, everybody would admit that a false or malicious criticism had better never have been written. ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... ladies of the poorer class and infirm old men—all classes making a direct appeal to public pity, and therefore suitable with our designs. As M'Guire drew near his heart was inflamed by the most noble sentiment of triumph. Never had he seen the garden so crowded; children, still stumbling in the impotence of youth, ran to and fro, shouting and playing, round the pedestal; an old, sick pensioner sat upon the nearest bench, a medal on his breast, a stick with which he walked (for he was disabled by wounds) ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... willing enough to go to his help, but I could do nothing, and the feeling of impotence began to rob me of such little power ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... right—all that is natural. But soon resistance, difficulty, unforeseen, coming we know not whence, arrest us, undeceive us, and the human yoke grows heavy on our necks. Thenceforward we become merely sharers in the common woe. Hemmed in on all sides, we feel our faculties only to realise their impotence: we have time and strength to do what we must, never what we will. Men go on repeating the words work, genius, success. Fools! Will all these resounding projects, though they enable us to cheat ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... perceive that neither the impotence of age nor the affliction of blindness, could turn aside the murdering fangs of these Babylonish monsters. The first of these unfortunates was of the parish of Barking, aged sixty-eight, a painter and a cripple. The other was blind,—dark indeed in his visual faculties, but intellectually illuminated ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... renown; ambitious of credit and importance, scourges of their country, torment of their relatives, traitors to their friends, their own executioners, flambeaux that burn without light, vain and mediocre spirits consumed by the most intense jealousy—presumptuous fools, irritated by their own impotence, intrepid in a pamphlet and pusillanimous in action, they, nevertheless, carried away by the flood which they have let loose, stake, in this terrible game of revolutions, not only their lives, but the honor ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... many to this man's service. The words he had said—simple though they were—had sent a thrill through Armand's veins. He felt himself disarmed. His resistance fell before the subtle strength of an unbendable will; nothing remained in his heart but an overwhelming sense of shame and of impotence. ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... then? What does this prove? Suppose one of us reduces the other to impotence: what will he have gained? You will not know what to do with me nor I with you. We shall stay here like ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... torment. There was other not so purgatorial—damned torment. That was when the sudden thought of her possession by another man, of his own robbery, his own impotence to regain, came upon him in a surging flood and made his neck swell with the rage of a beast. And no crouching to spring, no flash through the air, no snatching here. Here was no Gilles de Gurdun to deal with. Only the beast's resource was his, who had the beast's desire without his power. At such ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... way," cried Jack, and jerked at the reins with a childish impotence of anger. "I beat you for the first quarter of a mile and then this fool of a horse—I'm ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... consideration—that whatever impairs the brightness of such light as a man has, is not useful but hurtful. Our reply to those who contend for the usefulness of error on the ground of the comparative impotence of rationality over ordinary minds, is something of this kind. Superstition, blind obedience to custom, and the other substitutes for a right and independent use of the mind, may accidentally and in some few respects impress good ideas upon persons ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... doubt that Eubank and his men had seized Fayle in the act of entering the house; and enraged, yet bitterly aware of his impotence, he huddled on some clothes, and in a twinkling was out of his room. But in the kitchen, of which the outer door stood wide open to the night, was only Eubank; who, without his wig, and with a pistol poised in his ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... in such moments offered a terrible image of helpless impotence; the paleness of death would overspread his features, his back was as if it were broken, and he lost his control over every limb. His eyes only continued to move, and now and then a shudder shook his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... represented to the Pope that he himself was the character intended by Simplicio, the philosopher whose opinions get alternately refuted and ridiculed by the other two, till he is reduced to an abject state of impotence. ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... and gives a constant feast: More, we perceive by dint of thought alone; The rich must labor to possess their own, To feel their great abundance; and request Their humble friends to help them to be blest; To see their treasures, hear their glory told, And aid the wretched impotence of gold. But some, great souls! and touch'd with warmth divine, Give gold a price, and teach its beams to shine. All hoarded treasures they repute a load; Nor think their wealth their own, till well bestow'd. Grand reservoirs of public happiness, Through secret ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... mission for me, as a task for my hands in particular, is no longer possible; the thunder-bolts of retribution have been long since launched by other hands; and yet still it happens that at times I do—I must—I shall perhaps to the hour of death, rise in maniac fury, and seek, in the very impotence of vindictive madness, groping as it were in blindness of heart, for that tiger from hell-gates that tore away my darling from my heart. Let me pause, and interrupt this painful strain, to say a word or two upon what she ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the merest chance of my going back to England and getting back towards our old position on the rim of the mirror. The deviousness, the wayward passion, even the sempiternal abuses of the land were already beginning to take the aspect of something like quaint impotence. It was charm that, now I was on the road away, was becoming apparent. The inconveniences of life, the physical discomforts, the smells of streets, the heat, dropped into the background. I felt that I did not want to go away, irrevocably from a land sanctioned by her presence, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... the street and into his cabin just as Chatwourth and his gang came down? And why, if he was innocent of any share in the plot, did Diffenderfer refuse to testify to the facts? Denver ground his teeth at the thought of his own impotence, shut up there like a dog in the pound. He was helpless, and his ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... inartistic temperaments of the day busied themselves also in matters of literature and art, for the accusations of plagiarism were endless, and such accusations proceed either from the thin colourless lips of impotence, or from the grotesque mouths of those who, possessing nothing of their own, fancy that they can gain a reputation for wealth by crying out that they have been robbed. And I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks chattered ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... of those pathological cases in which deformities are sometimes, but very rarely, met with, it may be affirmed that woman is never impotent, for her organization opposes it. Radical impotence, in fact, results in the female from the complete absence, or the occlusion simply, of the vagina. Now, these cases are extremely rare, and may there fore be considered as exceptions ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... Charles de Quelleue Pontivy, likewise called Soubise, because he had married Catherine, only daughter and heiress of Jean de Partenay Baron de Soubise: this Lady had entered an action against him for impotence; His naked dead body being among others dragged before the Louvre, there were ladies curious enough to examine leisurely, if they could discover the cause or the marks of the defeat of which he had ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... the world. He accepted it as humbly, as gratefully, as gravely, as if it were a thing actually in her power to bestow. If he could have suspected her of any intention to patronize him, he could not have resented it, knowing as he did its pathetic impotence. ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... of the failure, the shame of the shortcoming, cannot be laid to the account of any momentary excess or default in emotion, of passing exhaustion or excitement, of intermittent impulse and reaction; it is an indication of lifelong and irremediable impotence. And it is further to be noted that by far the least unsuccessful parts of the play are also by far the most unimportant. The capacity of the author seems to shrink and swell alternately, to erect its plumes and deject them, to ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... might not pay THEM the same compliment which he had paid to Rosabella? As for the old women, they unanimously asserted that Abellino had sold himself to the Prince of Darkness, by whose assistance he was enabled to sport with the patience of all pious Venetians, and deride the impotence of their just indignation. The Cardinal and his associates were proud of their terrible confederate, and looking forward with confidence to the triumphant issue of their undertaking. The deserted family of Conari called down curses on his murderer's ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... into Normandy. Imagine therefore the hatred conceived for the tenants of the Chalet by the Norman Vilquin, a man worth three millions! What criminal leze-million on the part of a cashier, to hold up to the eyes of such a man the impotence of his wealth! Vilquin, whose desperation in the matter made him the talk of Havre, had just proposed to give Dumay a pretty house of his own, and had again been refused. Havre itself began to grow uneasy at the man's obstinacy, and a good many persons explained it by the phrase, ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... loose, and visage grim; Their feet unshod, their bodies wrapt in rags, And both as swift on foot as chased stags; And yet the one her other legge had lame, Which with a staff all full of little snags She did support, and Impotence her name: But th' other was Impatience, armed with ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... in his hands, he spoke collectedly, in an indifferent tone—the tone of a man who has confronted death often, who realises his impotence, who submits apathetically to impending fate, whether ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... suddenly, "I have so little time." His briskness dropped into a half complaint, like a faintly suggested avowal of impotence. "I have been at it four years now. It struck me—you seemed to coincide so singularly ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... Somehow, the pen stops there. Having written that, I feel that the book is done. I realize my impotence. My pen boggles at the task of adding another word or another hundred thousand words which shall light up those thunderous syllables. For to write about London Nights is to write a book about Everything. Philosophy, humanism, religion, love, and death, and ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... endeavoured without much success to resist the innovations forced upon them by King and by Parliament. They had every reason to fear both Henry and the Commons. They were conscious that the Church had lost its hold upon the nation. Its impotence was due in part to its own corruption, in part to the fact that thriving commercial and industrial classes, like those which elected Tudor Parliaments, are as a rule impatient of religious or at least sacerdotal dictation. God and Mammon, in spite of all efforts at compromise, do not ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... always less than that of a life. Power through money depends wholly upon the motive back of the money. Begrudged money, stained money, soils the treasury. That which comes nearest to omnipotence also comes nearest to impotence. But the power loosened out through prayer is as tremendous, at the least, to say no more just now, is as tremendous as the power of a true fragrant life and, mark you, and, may touch not one spot but wherever in the whole round world you may ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... direct), thence to the kidneys and on to the genital organs; he believes, too, that he knows the actual location of one such channel, for he observes, wrongly, that incision behind the ears, by interrupting the passage, leads to impotence. As an outcome of this theory he is prepared to accept inheritance of acquired characters. The embryo develops and breathes by material transmitted from the mother through the umbilical cord. We encounter here also a very detailed description of a specimen of ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... small eyes were burning with irritation. Yozhov was trying to uncork the bottle of water, and thus occupied, was silent; he pressed the bottle between his knees and made vain efforts to take out the cork. And his impotence ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... Saint-Menges, the Vth, moving steadily onward, had passed Fleigneux and with insolent temerity was constantly pushing its batteries more and more to the front, and so contemptuous were they of the ignorance and impotence of the French that they did not even wait for the infantry to come up to support their guns. It was midday; the entire horizon was aflame, concentrating its destructive fire on ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... hiccough now, but a pause from pure physical impotence, pending a doubtful struggle against ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... his impotence, the hunter suddenly ceases speech, again setting himself to listen. Hamersley, without heeding him, is already in ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... leveller, had brought their unapproachable neighbour nearer to them; they were not afraid of her now. It was strange to think that she was really less than one of themselves in the cold isolation and the pathetic impotence of the grave. They could hardly picture her yet as a powerless thing—the keen, narrowing eyes closed, the sharp-edged poniard of her speech for ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... in the old drawing-room, waiting for Gratian to come in, and thinking over the painter's words. Had his education and position really made it impossible for him to be brotherly? Was this the secret of the impotence which he sometimes felt; the reason why charity and love were not more alive in the hearts of his congregation? 'God knows I've no consciousness of having felt myself superior,' he thought; 'and yet I would be truly ashamed to tell people of my ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the boughs shoot out thicker; and the taking away of some kind of enemies increaseth the number. It is then most gracious in a prince to pardon when many about him would make him cruel; to think then how much he can save when others tell him how much he can destroy; not to consider what the impotence of others hath demolished, but what his own greatness can sustain. These are a prince's virtues: and they that give him other counsels are ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... perfection!" The rational among the most loftily endowed of mankind have grasped [219] the sublime significance of this query, acquiescing reverently in its scarcely veiled intimation of man's impotence in presence of the task ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... absorb the genial heat of the water. The captain at the Porte Saint Antoine had told him that the Grande Mademoiselle was still in exile at Blois, writing lampoons against the court and particularly against Mazarin; that De Retz was biting his nails, full of rage and impotence against those fetters which banishment casts around men of action; that Madame de Longueville was conducting a love-intrigue in Normandy; and that Louis had to borrow or beg his pocket-money. Strange as it seemed to ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... of affairs so flustered the inexperienced hunter that he altogether forgot to cock his gun. Twice he pulled desperately on the trigger, but with no result. Then, smitten with a sense of impotence, he hurled the gun at the ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... than speak in his proper idiom, he made, unaware to himself, perhaps, the choice of speaking through the voices of other men, of the great German composers; of imitating them instead of developing his own personality; of accepting sterility and banality and impotence rather than achieving a ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... golden thread must enter into the lives of all who today, in this busy work-a-day world of ours, would exchange impotence for power, weakness and suffering for abounding health and strength, pain and unrest for perfect peace, poverty of whatever nature for fullness ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... Stung by a sense of impotence, surging with despairing rebelliousness, Andrews hurried back towards the buildings where the company was quartered. He would be late for mess. The grey street was deserted. From a window here and there ruddy light streamed out to make a glowing oblong ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... question in mind continually: "Why do the lamps go out?" Now, like Hjalmar in "Princess Malenia," he feels every moment like exclaiming: Someone is weeping here near us! He had moments in which such nervous impotence attacked him that he did not feel capable of stirring a finger, or moving an eyelid. Accompanying this condition was a perfect understanding that all sentimental family-tenderness is a painted pot. It is known, of course, that in the world a multitude of maidens are always dying; that each life ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... symbol of the uncleanness of sin; paralysis of its impotence and pain. On the occasion of healing a paralytic, Jesus, however, did something more startling: he forgave sin. The poor sufferer had been borne by his four friends who were discouraged by no obstacles. When they were unable to enter ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... pouring its gracious light through the tenuous cross-hatchings of the pecans, nestling it in the dense tops of the cedars and magnolias and sprinkling it to the ground among the lower growths and between their green-black shadows. When in a certain impotence of rapture we cast about in our minds for an adequate comparison—where description in words seemed impossible—the only parallel we could find was the art of Corot and such masters from the lands where the wonderful pictorial value of trees trimmed high has been ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... by Descartes, he deliberately excluded the idea of force or motion from its attributes and from his definition. Extension only was taken into account. And, inasmuch as the impotence of matter to generate motion was assumed, its observed motions were referred to an external cause. God, resident outside of matter, gave the impulse. In this connection the argument in Young's 'Night Thoughts' will occur to ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... in him for the sniveling, selfish little thing and her impotence in the face of his trouble. "She's just the kind to play with," he thought, "just a doll, and like the doll, has as much heart as a thing stuffed with sawdust can have. I guess it took this jolt to wake me ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... not content to watch and wait till the plotters lost themselves in their own mysteries. The men whom Harley and Bolingbroke had driven from power had no mind to submit to impotence. They well knew what they wanted: the Hanoverian, the lawful, limited king upon the throne and themselves as his ministers. They were not delicate about the means they used. Since there were treason ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... whom he has planted there, and forcibly thrust him out of possession of a castle. Moreover, the whole Irish estates are likely to come to ruin; for nothing prevails but rascality among the English soldiers, impotence among the governors, and rebellion among the natives. Three thousand Burkes are up in arms; his 'prophecy of this rebellion' ten days ago was laughed at, and now has come true; and altogether, Walter Raleigh and all belonging to him is in ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... succeed. There is enough common sense among our people to mitigate against any such misfortune, and we have only to recall the general election of 1905-6, when every morning paper in London, except the Daily News, was against us, to realise the impotence of the press. ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... gift, the power that overcomes, which makes life on a large scale possible, which makes the soldier, the lover, the saint, possible. Most of us are only half alive. Our work is half dead. We deal in creep-mouse sentiment, and call it love. We write pathetically of our impotence to live, and call it resignation. We who have never been young, compare notes with each other on how to remain senile, and call it the art of ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... so, if 'I love you' were always outspoken when it might be, there would, I suppose, be no fear of its desecration at any after time. But lo! only last night, I had to write, on the part of Mr. Carlyle, to a certain ungainly, foolish gentleman who keeps back from him, with all the fussy impotence of stupidity (not bad feeling, alas! for that we could deal with) a certain MS. letter of Cromwell's which completes the collection now going to press; and this long-ears had to be 'dear Sir'd and obedient ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... of freedom to each and all—then, justice was not only blind but went on crutches, and women were made to suffer because they were women and because they could not defend, by force, their own. Still, there is comfort in the fact that from this dead level of mediocrity and impotence, one woman, the great Countess of Tuscany, was able to rise up and show herself possessed of a great heart, a great mind, and a great soul; and in her fullness of achievement, there was rich ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... your life be intolerable?" His whole work is shot through with the pangs and fevers of his physical life, which was one of extreme bad health; and in early middle age his brilliant brain broke down into impotence and darkness. All that was true in his teaching was this: that if a man looks fine on a horse it is so far irrelevant to tell him that he would be more economical on a donkey or more humane on a tricycle. In other words, the mere achievement of dignity, beauty, or triumph ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... rhythmetical compositions somewhat prosaically, providing an instance of that curious difference which exists between the poetical writer and the poet. It is easier to give the instance than the reason, but I suppose the cause of the rhythmetical impotence must lie somewhere in the want of the power of concentration. For is it not true that the most prolix poet is capable of briefer expression than the least prolix prose writer, or ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... heavy-hearted. The city's endless drama of squalor and pain was all about her; she could not understand, she could not help, she could not even lift her own little problem out of the great total of failures! All day long the sense of impotence assailed her. ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... same story. Great power reduced to impotence, great glory to misery, by the hand of Fate,—Necessity, as the Greeks called her; the goddess that will not be shunned! At the mill with slaves! People, when they read it, do not appreciate the horror of the picture. Go on my dear. It may ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... abandoned the oars; around it the legend "Fronti nulla, fides." There is no doubt that this signifies that he was induced, by the serene aspect of the waters, to venture on the treacherous sea, which having suddenly become troubled, the boy, in mortal fear, and in his impotence to still the tempest, has lost his head, his hope, and the power of his arm. But let us see ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... need tempering; the former that it may not encroach on the field of legislation, the latter that it may not invade the ground of feeling. But this tempering and moderating the sensuous impulsion ought not to be the effect of physical impotence or of a blunting of sensations, which is always a matter for contempt. It must be a free act, an activity of the person, which by its moral intensity moderates the sensuous intensity, and by the sway of impressions takes from them in depth what it gives them ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... personal struggles for truth or holiness. It was human and worldly, not lofty nor even reverential, except among the few who had deep religious wants. One of its characteristic features was the acknowledged impotence of the gods to secure future happiness. In fact, the future was generally ignored, and even immortality was but a dream of philosophers. Men lived not in view of future rewards and punishments, or future existence at all, but for the enjoyment of the present; and the gods themselves set ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... supremacy man is not always master of his fate. Circumstance, heredity, the despicable trifle, the inexpert finger, which a certain type of human is so zealous to thrust into an alien life, compass him about with a cloud of witnesses to his own impotence. ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... man has quite as much right to deny cause because it seems contrary to choice. The shortest ethical summary is that Determinism either affects conduct or it does not. If it does not, it is morally not worth preaching; if it does, it must affect conduct in the direction of impotence and submission. A writer in the "Clarion" says that the reformer cannot help trying to reform, nor the Conservative help his Conservatism. But suppose the reformer tries to reform the Conservative and turn him into another reformer? Either he can, in which ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth's horizon are the glances of ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... shared the unrest, for, even where the Church of England was strongest, the laity as a body preferred the greater freedom accorded them under commissaries as sub-officers of the Bishop of London. The indifference of the American laity as a whole to the project of the episcopate; the impotence of the English bishop to attain it, thwarted as he was by the threefold opposition of the ministry, the colonial agents, and the great body of English dissenters, did not lessen the prevailing suspicion and fear among the colonists, especially among those of New England. They felt no confidence in ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... herald of eternal night On his green mound with fatal wing did smite And cross his hands above his iron heart? Or shall we gibbet on some satire here The name thrice-bought of some pale pamphleteer, Who, hunger-goaded, from his haunts obscure, Dared, quivering with impotence and spite, Insult the hope on Genius' brow of light, And gnaw the wreath his breath had made impure? The lyre! the lyre! I can be still no more. Upon the breath of spring my pinions fly. The air supports me—from the earth I soar, Thou weepest—God has heard—the ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... thought, or fear, they shut The narrow gates of sense; Heedless and quiet, in slumber turn Their strength to impotence. ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... servile malignity of the Witches, who are equally instrumental in urging Macbeth to his fate for the mere love of mischief, and from a disinterested delight in deformity and cruelty. They are hags of mischief, obscene panders to iniquity, malicious from their impotence of enjoyment, enamoured of destruction, because they are themselves unreal, abortive, half- existences, and who become sublime from their exemption from all human sympathies and contempt for all human affairs, as Lady Macbeth does by the force of passion! Her ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... deepest anguish in a jest,— Feeling the infinite must be Best said by triviality, Speaks, where expression bates its wings, Just happy, alien, little things; What of all words is in excess Implies in a sweet nothingness, With dailiest babble shows her sense That full speech were full impotence; And while she feels the heavens lie bare, She only ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... it represented, in the bleak place, which had no life of its own, none but the life Kate had left—the sense of which, for that matter, by mystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor—the very impotence of their extinction. And Densher had nothing to oppose it withal, nothing but ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... she said, with a wild, guttural laugh, and reckless determination, impotence, and pain could be heard in ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... A sense of impotence seized Ronald, in nightmare grip. Indignant and furious, he yet felt absolutely unable to contradict ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... of honest minds; but there is a time, in which hope comes to all. From the present happiness of the publick, the patriots themselves may derive advantage. To be harmless, though by impotence, obtains some degree of kindness: no man hates a worm as he hates a viper; they were once dreaded enough to be detested, as serpents that could bite; they have now shown that they can only hiss, and may, therefore, quietly slink into holes, and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... were the flood-gates of vituperation let loose upon Parnell. Not all at once did the question of his continued leadership arise. He had led his people, with an incomparable skill and intrepidity, not unequally matched with the genius of Gladstone himself, from a position of impotence and contempt to the supreme point where success was within their reach. A General Election, big with the fate of Ireland, was not far off. Was the matchless leader who had led his people so far and so well to disappear and ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... of what the day held in store for the captain, and before it was half over he was reduced to a condition of raging impotence. The staff of Vyner and Son turned on their stools as one man as he entered the room, and regarded him open-eyed for the short time that he remained there. Mr. Vyner, senior, greeted him almost with cordiality, and, for the second time ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... is that we have made the Federal Government so strong it grows muscle-bound and the States and localities so weak they approach impotence. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... and your predecessors I owe that supineness and negligence of the English court, which, gave me opportunity and ability to form and prosecute my designs." Alluding to William III. he says: "To you I owed the impotence of his life and the comfort of his death. At that juncture how vast were my hopes?... But a princess ascended your throne, whom you seemed to court with some personal fondness ... She had a general whom her predecessor had wrought into the confidence and favour of the Allies.... It ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... can best perform that service, until he has tasted the sorrow at the heart of it. The tears that are the pledge of harvest are not called to the eyes by ridicule or opposition. They are not the tears of disappointment, vexation, or impotence. They are tears that dim the eyes of them that see visions, and gather in the heart of them that dream dreams. To see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ and the blindness of the world's heart to that glory; to see unveiled the beauty that should be, and, unveiled ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... so general a Folly, that it is wonderful one could so long overlook it. But this false Gallantry proceeds from an Impotence of Mind, which makes those who are guilty of it incapable of pursuing what they themselves approve. Many a Man wishes a Woman his Wife whom he dares not take for such. Tho no one has Power over his Inclinations or Fortunes, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... and desires. Upon our first, he sent out to suppress His nephew's levies; which to him appear'd To be a preparation 'gainst the Polack; But, better look'd into, he truly found It was against your highness; whereat griev'd,— That so his sickness, age, and impotence Was falsely borne in hand,—sends out arrests On Fortinbras; which he, in brief, obeys; Receives rebuke from Norway; and, in fine, Makes vow before his uncle never more To give th' assay of arms against your majesty. Whereon old Norway, ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... a fool!" he said savagely to himself, and found an outlet for his irritation in repeating these words aloud. Then, however, as an ETUDE was commenced, with an impotence that struck him as purely vicious, he could endure the torment no longer. He had seen in the BUREAU the particular master, and knew that the latter had not yet come upstairs. Going to the room from which the sounds issued, he stealthily opened ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... these men were murdered the General Government could not even bring the murderers to trial for their crime. Its treaty had been broken by a handfull of its own citizens and it was powerless to punish them. It had to confess its impotence to the world, and paid Italy a specified sum of money. The Negro finds himself an unprotected foreigner in his own home. Whatever outrages may be perpetrated upon him by the people of the state in which he lives, he cannot expect any character ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... Conventions and Church Congresses nowadays no topic excites greater interest than the question how better to adapt the services of the Church to the present needs and special conditions of all classes of the population. To be sure, the apparent impotence of the governing body to find or furnish any lawful way of relief is a little discouraging, but it is something to see an almost universal assent given in terms, to the proposition that relief ought to be had. What we have to fear is that ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... take the lead, and then strode composedly back to the erythrina; and leaving the place at my right vacant for her, I seated myself upon the bench. I did not stir, I sat there quietly, shuddering with rapture and expectation, and at the same time depressed by the impotence of my clumsy senses, to which I ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... to his troubles by my anxiety and anger. Still, he told me that, in another day or two, he would have felt that I ought no longer to be kept in the dark, and would have summoned me to Paris. I am thankful now that he did not do so, for I believe that my impotence to do anything would have driven ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... intertwined beneath like serpents petrified in an agony of contorted strife; green and glistening mosses carpeting the rough ground, mantling the rocks, turning pulpy stumps to mounds of verdure, and swathing fallen trunks as, bent in the impotence of rottenness, they lie outstretched over knoll and hollow, like moldering reptiles of the primeval world, while around, and on and through them, springs the young growth that fattens on their decay—the forest devouring its own dead. Or, to turn from ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... mind's tendency to follow the cinematographical method, a method so natural to our intellect, and so well adjusted also to the requirements of our science, that we must feel doubly sure of its speculative impotence to renounce it in metaphysics. But ancient philosophy also influenced the choice. Artists for ever admirable, the Greeks created a type of supra-sensible truth, as of sensible beauty, whose attraction is hard to resist. As soon as we ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... mean that we must absolve criminals, and that punishment is an injustice? No, we must protect ourselves. Since society rests upon honesty, we must punish criminals to reduce them to impotence, and above all to strike them with terror, and halt others on the threshold of evil deeds. But once the crime is established, we must not look for excuses for it. We run the danger then of always finding excuses. ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... Mouti on the box. There was the man whom she had just vowed never to see again, and the sight of him seemed to take all her strength out of her, so that she felt inclined to sink down upon the veldt. His sudden appearance was almost uncanny in the sharpness of its illustration of her impotence in the hands of Fate. She felt it then; all in an instant it seemed to be borne in upon her mind that she could not help herself, but was only the instrument in the hands of a superior power whose will she was fulfilling through the ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... it, what John says of the command to mutual Christian love; that it is an old history, and yet not an old but a new one. Old, in the sense, that, from what time by one man sin came into the world and death by sin, every one in earnest to fulfil the true end of his being, has found the dame impotence attached to good resolves; the same supremacy gained by the baser impulses, in the hour of trial; the same temptation to find an excuse in what seems so like a law unavoidable, as if it were no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me, as if it were not the responsible I ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... an intended contrast in these two clauses more pointed and emphatic in the original than in our Bible, between man's impotence and God's power in the face of the fact of sin. The words of the first clause might be translated, with perhaps a little increase of vividness, 'iniquities are too strong for me'; and the 'Thou' of the next clause ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... uneasiness. The capture of Duke Bernhard, the most brilliant of the German generals on the Protestant side, would be a heavy blow indeed to the cause, and leaving his supper untasted Malcolm walked up and down his cell in a fever of rage at his impotence to ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... tolerance, was at one stroke rendered null. Brought face to face with the grim destroyer, all the doubt and confusion of former years broke the bounds which had held them in abeyance and returned upon him with increased insistence. Never before had he felt so keenly the impotence of mortal man and the futility of worldly strivings. Never had he seen so clearly the fatal defects in the accepted interpretation of Christ's mission on earth. His earlier questionings returned in violent protests against the emptiness ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... so well acquainted, there is no sufficient ground for asserting that Caesar was concerned in it.[194] That he was greatly concerned in the treatment of the conspirators there is no doubt. He had probably learned to appreciate the rage, the madness, the impotence of Catiline at then propel worth. He too, I think, must have looked upon Cicero as a meddling, over-virtuous busybody; as did even Pompey when he returned from the East. What practical use could there be in such a man at such a time—in one who really believed in honesty, ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... lessened resources in wit and courage when surprised, for fatigue heightens the confusion and numbness of surprise and decreases the scope of intelligent conduct. Choice is made difficult, and the neurasthenic doubt is transformed to impotence by surprise. ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... had been educated to regard themselves as, naturally, the factors of power and the colored people as, naturally, the subject class, no factor at all. It was these two things which produced that exhibition of barbarity on the part of the South and impotence on the part of the government which make us go to Roumania and the Byzantine court ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... the island stories we have the same elaborate projection of the East, of its fantastic barbarism, of brooding Asia. And in the sea stories we have, perhaps for the first time in English fiction, a vast and adequate picture of the sea, the symbol at once of man's eternal striving and of his eternal impotence. Here, at last, the colossus has found its interpreter. There is in "Typhoon" and "The Nigger of the Narcissus," and, above all, in "The Mirror of the Sea," a poetic evocation of the sea's stupendous majesty that is unparalleled outside the ancient sagas. Conrad describes ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... Paris, on the 21st October, 1652, Louis the Fourteenth and Anne of Austria, and to share the joy of their victory over the Fronde, for he was the true achiever of it. It was he who, by retiring so opportunely, by leaving the Fronde to itself, had allowed it to exhibit at its entire ease its fury and impotence; it was he who, from the depth of his exile, disquieted by the success of Chateauneuf, had collected troops, rallied round him experienced generals, raised the banner of the monarchy, and from one vantage ground to another had ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... he had found in Dr. Schweninger a physician who was not only able to treat his complaints, but could also compel his patient to obey his orders. He still felt within himself full power to continue his public work, and now he was relegated to impotence and obscurity. Whether in Varzin or Friedrichsruh, his eyes were always fixed on Berlin. He saw the State which he had made, and which he loved as a father, subjected to the experiment of young and inexperienced control. He saw overthrown that carefully planned system by which ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... but his hand and wrist were stiff, his fingers were stiff. His pistol-barrel pointed at an angle downward; he had no power to straighten it or to pull the trigger. Standing thus, his face white with the rage of impotence and his raised hand shaking as if it had been palsied, he was struck full in the face with the shell from Marcy's wide-mouthed pistol. The brittle capsule burst, and in a second, insensible from the fumes of the powerful ammonia it contained, ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... of the royalists, and without any reason whatever for obtaining that fatal honor, found himself suddenly at the head of a powerful party of youth, energy and vengeance, standing between the passions of the day, which led to all, and the impotence of the law, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... else, Frank: change is the essence of passion: the reason you talk of is merely another name for impotence." ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... animals and plants lie below that level. We are therefore forced to conclude, from the aspect of living nature to-day, that for ages the early organisms had no hard and preservable parts. In thus declaring the impotence of geology, however, we are at the same time introducing another science, biology, which can throw appreciable light on the evolution of life. Let us first see what geology tells us about the ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... ability to communicate, observe, and to interact is a more reasonable and perhaps more achievable variant. This deprival of senses, including all electronics and substitution of false signals or data to create this feeling of impotence, is another variant. Above all, Shock and Awe are imposed instantly and the mechanism or target ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... conflict has begun: man finds himself face to face with rival claims. Greek tragedy shows how such a conflict may be treated with serenity, how the evolution of it may be a spectacle of the dignity, not of the impotence, of the human spirit. But it is not only in tragedy that the Greek spirit showed itself capable of thus bringing joy out of matter in itself full of discouragements. Theocritus too strikes often a note of romantic sadness. But what a blithe and steady poise, above ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... body and mind, they made ready to carry her remains to their island grave, while the wild sea-birds, which flew screaming in the face of the coming storm, seemed, to their saddened hearts, to wail of human impotence. ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... furious as they searched the unyielding features of his captor. His absolute impotence drove him to an insane desire for violence. But the violence was not forthcoming. He was powerless, and no one ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... aspect—wandering princes are we, sons of the Great King. In foreign lands outcast and forlorn, groveling with the very swine in the mire, and pining for the husks that the swine do eat; envying, defying, hating, forgetting—but never hated nor forgot; in the depths of our rage, and impotence, and sin—in the darkest moment of our moral death, when we would crucify the very image of that Parent who pities us—there is one voice deeper and sweeter than all music, the voice of our elder brother pleading with that ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... withering glance at him, and was about to reduce him to utter impotence by some scathing remark, when both were startled by a voice in front of them, issuing from "the chair." Silently the Senior Warden had entered, and had proceeded to open the meeting. His face was set and stern, and his voice ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... a man to do in a case of that kind? I could simply retire to my own apartments; but I did it in such a passion of wrath and impotence that I could have taken that stupid and credulous old woman by the shoulders and shaken her to reason. I was too angry and disheartened to speak a word; but while I was pacing up and down the room, and wondering what my next move should be, the manager of the hotel presented himself, ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... was something demonic, which appalled. The impotence of justice, of compassion, in the presence of certain shameless and insolent forces of the human spirit—the lesson goes ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... easily demonstrable, or generally admitted fact in modern life. The whole purpose of Socialism—in so far as it can be expressed in terms of income, is to reverse this tendency and to keep it reversed until private capital is reduced to impotence, as far as the control ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... appeared as if exhausted by so great an effort of will and power. He had only just signed his will, when he met, at Madame de Maintenon's, the Ex-Queen of England. "I have made my will, Madame," said he. "I have purchased repose; I know the impotence and uselessness of it; we can do all we please as long as we are here; after we are gone, we can do less than private persons; we have only to look at what became of my father's, and immediately ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... life, are the subtle ones of molecular chemistry and atomic energetics. We know that such mental qualities as irritability and stupidity, fatigability, and the power to recover quickly or slowly from fatigue, sexual potency and impotence, apathy and enthusiasm are endocrine qualities. We know also that the thyroid dominant tends to be irritable and excitable, the pituitary deficient to be placid and gentle, the adrenal dominant to be assertive ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D. |
