"Incapacity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sighs and tears. I took pity on him, and being so much used to sick people, perceived that he had need to have particular care taken of him. I would not permit him to be put into the hospital; for I am too well acquainted with their way of managing the sick, and am sensible of the incapacity of the physicians. I have caused him to be brought to my own house, by my slaves; and they are now in a private room where I placed him, putting on some of my own linen, and treating him as they would ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... inexperience, by suggesting that a mind like his ought to spurn the prejudices impressed upon it in childhood; and when assuming the latus clavus of reason, assuring him that such as he, laying aside the bulla of juvenile incapacity, as Bletson called it, should proceed to examine and decide for himself. It frequently happened, that the youth was induced to adopt the doctrines in whole, or in part, of the sage who had seen his ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... governments were so bad that an immense increase of wealth, intelligence, and happiness was bound to come merely from making a clean sweep of obsolete institutions. Shelley's Radicalism was not of this drab hue. He was incapable of soberly studying the connections between causes and effects an incapacity which comes out in the distaste he felt for history—and his conception of the ideal at which the reformer should aim was vague and fantastic. In both these respects his shortcomings were due to ignorance of human nature proceeding ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... reasons of it, and alters these. This wisdom, it must be owned, is Friedrich's; and much distinguishes him among generals and men. Veracity of mind, as I say, loyal eyesight superior to sophistries; noble incapacity of self-delusion, the root of all good qualities in man. His epilogue to this Campaign is remarkable;—too long for quoting here, except the first word ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... enough at this to suit even her. His face showed the most genuine amazed incapacity to understand her. "Shakes the . . . why, Marise dear, what are you talking about? You don't have to believe about yourself all the generalizing guesses that people are writing down in books, do you, if it contradicts your own experience? ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... his awkward length of body, his student's pallor that the Athabasca sun had played such havoc with, his blue eyes that looked so often with trepidation or amazement on the commonplaces of their world, his general incapacity and blind belief that an all-wise Providence would personally intervene to make things go right when they went wrong, had not struck these two hardy children of the solitudes as other than a ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... judgments of men further confirm this position, for they are said to be more impressed with a minimal success, than with a most magnificent effort. Now there is no injustice, no superficiality in this observation; its object is simply parallel to their incapacity for synthesis. Inasmuch as they are able to follow particular things they will understand a single success, but the growth of efficiency toward the future requires composition and wide horizon, hence they can ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... on board a man-of-war. Without it such a mass of people could not possibly be moved together, and all would be confusion and constant disaster. There must be a head to command, either worn by the captain or first lieutenant. If the latter is a good seaman, all may go well in spite of the incapacity of his superior; but a clever captain will never submit to have a stupid first, so that it is seldom that the office of first lieutenant is held by other than a good seaman. It would take up too much space were I to attempt ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... country, and to make a voyage to Europe. Rupert, however, confessed he had mistaken his vocation, and that he thought he could do no better than to enter a lawyer's office. I was thunderstruck at this quiet admission of my friend, of his incapacity to make a sailor, for it was the first intimation I heard of his intention. I had remarked a certain want of energy, in various situations that required action, in Rupert, but no want of courage; and I had ascribed some portion of his ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... fault with children for their incapacity to keep still. You may stop the supply of force, if you will, by refusing to give them food; but if you continue the supply, you must not complain of its manifesting itself in action. After giving your boy his breakfast, ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... already mentioned that the fault I most disliked in those children was their incapacity for being petted. Something of it still remains; but of late I have remarked a considerable improvement in this respect. They have not only grown in kindness, but in the gift of receiving kindness. I cannot but attribute this, ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... not of opinion that it is expedient to press this study to much extent, if at all, on those whom poverty or incapacity may have destined to situations in which they will never hear or think of it afterwards. The course of nature cannot be controlled; and fortune does not permit us to prescribe the same course of discipline for all. To speak the language which they have learned without study, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... of the so-called five hegemons or lords-protector of the federated Chinese Empire (after the collapse of the imperial power, and its consequent incapacity to protect the vassal states from the raids of the Tartars and other barbarians) was the Lord of Ts'i, whose capital was at the powerful and wealthy city of Lin-tsz (lat. 37o, long. 118o 30'; still so called on the modern maps), in Shan Tung province. Neither the Yellow River ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... It has been urged, as against this, that the Japanese possess the defect not uncommon among people of any race, viz., that the capacity for rapidly assimilating knowledge is to some extent counteracted or rendered abortive by an incapacity to practically apply that knowledge. I may say for myself that though I have often heard this objection urged I have not seen any indications of this lack of ability to practically apply knowledge on the part of the Japanese. I should have thought that the Russo-Japanese war would have ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... at this period at any rate, the decadence of Assyria was not due to any exhaustion of the race or impoverishment of the country, but was owing Mainly to the incapacity of its kings and the lack of energy displayed by their generals. The Assyrian troops had lost none of their former valour, but their leaders had shown less foresight and skill. As soon as Tiglath-pileser assumed leadership, the armies regained ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... here?" asked Kalman, whose sense of responsibility deepened as he became aware of Mackenzie's growing incapacity. ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... on him he felt the exquisite relief of talking about himself as he had not dared to talk to any one since his marriage. He would not for the world have confessed his discouragement, his consciousness of incapacity; to Undine and in Washington Square any hint of failure would have been taken as a criticism of what his wife demanded of him. Only to Clare Van Degen could he cry out his present despondency and his loathing of ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... beforehand. If you have on your side the testimony of your conscience, and against you that of the multitude, take comfort and be assured that time does justice." It is far from being a universal gift among men of letters and others to unite this fastidious estimation of the incapacity of the crowd in the higher provinces of the intellectual judgment, with a fervid desire that the life of the crowd should be made worthy of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... the overtures of Les Francs-Juges and La Muette. It was impossible to set up a rival society against him; and an exclusive monopoly in music was, therefore, held by him. According to M. Saint-Saens he was a mediocre musician, and had, in spite of his passion for music, "immense incapacity." In Harmonie et Melodie M. Saint-Saens says: "The few chamber-music societies that existed were also closed to all new-comers; their programmes only contained the names of undisputed celebrities, the writers of classic symphonies. In those times one had really to be devoid ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... of the lady during the journey—her long fits of profound silence, the irresolution and uncertainty which seemed to pervade all her movements, and the obvious incapacity of thinking and acting for herself under which she seemed to labour—Wayland had formed the not improbable opinion that the difficulties of her situation had in some degree affected ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... appointment; but if his conduct and capacity be not satisfactory to said officer he shall be so notified, and this notification shall be his discharge from the service: Provided, That any probationer may be discharged during probation for misconduct or evident unfitness or incapacity. ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... before the enemies of his country in battle. But how little she thought, at the moment of speaking, that the bullet was already billeted for the breast of Kearney, and that he was to fall, but a few weeks after, a sacrifice to his own rashness and the incapacity of others! Does war indeed have a mission beyond the national good or evil for which it is instituted? And are its missiles of death and the diseases to which its exposures give rise, especially commissioned to repay ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... acknowledged his superiority, and looked up to him with loyalty, reliance, and reverence; the others, who doubted his ability, or conspired against his sovereignty, illustrated, in their own conduct, their incapacity to be either his judges or his rivals. In the state, Adams, Jay, Rutledge, Pinckney, Morris—these are great names; but there is not one whose wisdom does not vail to his. His superiority was felt by all these persons, and was felt by Washington himself, as a simple matter ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... no social training, and in a less powerful position she might have shown her ignorance and incapacity, for she would then have had to take a personal supervision of the things which she now left utterly alone, and which, being essential to be done, were done—how and by whom she did not ask. Lord Hurdly had so long done the honors of ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... right expression, as his chagrined teacher had to admit when the boy was cross-examined. He had not been "up to some of his tricks;" he had stuck, and his explanations, as you will admit, merely emphasized his incapacity. ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... limited degree of positive knowledge compared with what there is to be learned. "Nothing," says he, "can be known; nothing is certain; sense is limited, intellect is weak, life is short,"—the complaint, not of a sceptic, but of a man overwhelmed with the sense of his incapacity to solve the problems which arose before his active mind. Anaxagoras thought that this spirit ([Greek: nous]) gave to all those material atoms which in the beginning of the world lay in disorder the impulse by which they took ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... not without ultimate good, the evil phantasms of a theology which would explain all God's doings by low conceptions, low I mean for humanity even, of right, and law, and justice, then only taking refuge in the fact of the incapacity of the human understanding when its own inventions are impugned as undivine. In such a system, hell is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell. Hence, as foundations must be laid in the deepest, the system ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... continental power only spurred him to the formation of a league which all but brought Philip to the ground; and the sudden revolt of England was parried by a shameless alliance with the Papacy. The closer study of John's history clears away the charges of sloth and incapacity with which men tried to explain the greatness of his fall. The awful lesson of his life rests on the fact that the king who lost Normandy, became the vassal of the Pope, and perished in a struggle of despair against English freedom, was no weak and indolent voluptuary but the ablest and ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... and they all came back to the original state of mind from which they started, and remembered that quiet and subdued tones and an incapacity for the consideration of secular subjects were the proper mental attitude for all that remained of ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... this day, open to be seen, was not so much sin as ignorance of how to live, squalor, filthy surroundings acquiesced in as the natural order, wonderful patience in suffering and deprivation, incapacity, ill-paid labor, the kindest spirit of sympathy and helpfulness of the poor for each other. Perhaps that which made the deepest impression on her was the fact that such conditions of living could seem natural to those in them, and that they could get so much enjoyment ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Leslie found to be a very kind but very firm master; while he made every allowance for a boy's incapacity or sheer inability to learn a particular task, he showed no mercy to those who could learn and would not, either from idleness or inattention. There were three other masters beside the doctor, who followed in the ...
— Leslie Ross: - or, Fond of a Lark • Charles Bruce
... The entire vascular system, arterial and veinous, would have to undergo successive unbuildings and rebuildings to make its channels everywhere adequate to the local requirements; since any want of adjustment in the blood-supply in this or that set of muscles, would entail incapacity, failure of speed, and loss of life. Moreover the nerves supplying the various sets of muscles would have to be proportionately changed; as well as the central nervous tracts from which they issued. Can we suppose that all ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... some escape, to return by-and-by and cut our throats?" the King retorted, with a strange spirt of fury; an incapacity to maintain the same attitude of mind for two minutes together was the most fatal weakness of his ill-balanced nature. "No. All! All!" he repeated with vehemence. "Didn't Noah people the earth with eight? But I'll not leave eight! My cousins, for ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... of conduct which at five-and-twenty prove the strength of the mind, that, ten or fifteen years after, would demonstrate its weakness, its incapacity to acquire a sane judgment. The youths who are satisfied with the ordinary pleasures of life, and do not sigh after ideal phantoms of love and friendship, will never arrive at great maturity of understanding; but if these reveries are cherished, ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... personal benevolence are still more common. There are tens of thousands of working people to-day rendering service whom their employers well know to be unprofitable servants, but who are retained because their youth or age or incapacity renders them proper objects of assistance in this way, a sort of charity far better than ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... licenses by many boards of education. In New York City about three per cent of those examined are excluded for defects of vision, of hearing, of probable endurance. Once a teacher, however, there is no further physical examination,—no way of discovering physical incapacity, nothing to prevent a teacher from exposing class after class to pulmonary tuberculosis contracted because of overwork and underventilation. The certainty of salary increase year by year and of a pension after the twentieth year will bribe many a teacher to overtax her own strength and ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... the beginning of the decline of medical science in ancient times, and this decline was contemporaneous with the overthrow of the Roman State. As everybody knows, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire resulted from the profligacy and incapacity of the emperors, luxurious living and vice among the people, tyranny of an overbearing soldiery at home, and the attacks of barbarian foes gradually increasing in strength. Rome fell quickly into the hands of the barbarians, and her power was broken. In A.D. 395, ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... destroy the character of a pack as a certain amount of laziness or incapacity upon the master's part in following them up. This is natural enough, as the best hounds, if repeatedly left unassisted for hours when at bay with their game until they are regularly beaten off, will lose their relish for the sport. ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... shall not take thy decrepitude. This is, indeed, my determination. White hair on the head, cheerlessness and relaxation of the nerves, wrinkles all over the body, deformities, weakness of the limbs, emaciation, incapacity to work, defeat at the hands of friends and companions—these are the consequences of decrepitude. Therefore, O king, I desire not to take it. O king, thou hast many sons some of whom are dearer to thee. Thou art acquainted ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... this irritating incapacity by saying that neither can women create ideal men at all resembling reality. But halte la! Was it not said at first that Rochester must be a man's man? Is not the little Professor Paul Emanuel an actual masculine creature? Heathcliff was a fiend,—but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... who must die knew, as did he himself and the heavenly witness to the compact, that his physical incapacity had been responsible for his deferred action—but now with returning strength he must ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... admit of the employment of a great multitude of women and children, and we find here {199} precisely the same features reappearing which the Factories' Report presented,—the work of women up to the hour of confinement, incapacity as housekeepers, neglect of home and children, indifference, actual dislike to family life, and demoralisation; further, the crowding out of men from employment, the constant improvement of machinery, early emancipation of children, husbands supported by their wives and children, etc. etc. The ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... parties had been formed in the army, some declaring for Achillas and some for Ganymede. Arsinoe advocated Ganymede's interests, and when, at length, the fleet was burned, she charged Achillas with having been, by his neglect or incapacity, the cause of the loss. Achillas was tried, condemned, and beheaded. From that time Ganymede assumed the administration of Arsinoe's government as her minister of state and the commander-in-chief of ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... by returning three or four Members to Parliament, and by the influence with Ministers which these seats gave him. The parliamentary interest of the house of Lyndon had been grossly neglected during my wife's minority, and the incapacity of the Earl her father; or, to speak more correctly, it had been smuggled away from the Lyndon family altogether by the adroit old hypocrite of Tiptoff Castle, who acted as most kinsmen and guardians do by their wards and relatives, and robbed ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... report upon the merits of rival fabrics were making the requisite investigations. Their verdict is thus substantially forestalled, and the millions who visit the Exhibition are invited to look at the American department merely to note the bad taste and incapacity therein displayed, and ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... we may place such a suggestion as that the existence of infective venereal disease should constitute legal incapacity for marriage, even when unknown, and be a sufficient cause for annulling the marriage at the discretion of the court. But by far the chief importance under this head is assigned by the Commission to education and instruction. ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... face with a keenness that somewhat belied his professed incapacity to be in earnest, and remarked ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... open their houses, modestly confessing, it may be presumed, their own incapacity, mainly trust to wax candles and upholstery. Gentlemen seem to rely on their white waistcoats. To these are added, for the delight of the more sensual, champagne and such good things of the table as fashion allows to be still considered as comestible. Even in this respect the world is deteriorating. ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... should have established a method of procedure, and should certainly in time discover the truth. (2) This example will once again show the reader the character of Phinuit, who hesitates at no invention, and risks being caught in the act of imposture sooner than own to his ignorance or incapacity. (3) The reader will find in it examples of the untrue assertions which are found in all ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... hearers and incapacity to understand the doctrine of Scripture are not the only obstacles those will have to contend against who undertake to preach "the [oe]onian gospel." There are the interests and attractions of the present world, which, since the love of them is ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... belonging to abbeys or sees, whose abbots or bishops are contumaciously disobedient to the Holy See, or to their lawful monarch, he being in the communion of the Church and at peace with the said Holy See. If, therefore,—to come to that point at which my incapacity, through the devious windings of my own simplicity, has been tending, but with halting steps, from the moment that your Majesty ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... perhaps to state that General Fremont has published an answer to the charges preferred against him. That answer refers chiefly to matters of military capacity or incapacity, as to which I have expressed no opinion. General Fremont does allude to the accusations made against him regarding the building of the forts; but in doing so he seem to me rather to admit than to deny the acts as ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... Socknersh's incapacity reached such a point that more than one warning was given Joanna for her father's sake, and one at least for her own, ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... that the spirit of resistance was awakening among his countrymen. But misfortune and trial had not soured his temper; his faith that sooner or later the cause would triumph had never wavered. His patience was inexhaustible, his temper beyond proof. The incapacity of many in whom he had trusted, the jealousies and religious differences which prevented anything like union between the various states, the narrowness and jealousy even of those most faithful to the cause, would have driven most men ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... intrigues and want of means caused some eighteen months to pass before Lord Cochrane proceeded to take up his command. Even his experience of Chili, Peru, and Brazil had hardly prepared the admiral for the corruption, the incapacity, the faction, and the rascality of the Greeks. His efforts were always crippled; and although he accomplished all that a man could do in their service, and obtained many minor successes, he never had an opportunity ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... proprietor of some little Old-World pueblo off the ordinary route. The mayoral of the diligence in the old times, the domestic servant of to-day, the senora who happens to sell you fish, or the senor who mends your boots, all strike the same note—an absolute incapacity for imagining that there can be any inequality between themselves and any other class, however far removed from them by the possession of wealth or education. Wealth, in fact, counts for nothing in the way of social rank; a poor hidalgo is exactly as much respected ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... to necessitate and to anticipate the elimination of the Negro as a voter." The decline of the political power of the Negro in Virginia is unfortunately considered by many as due to this cause. The author is wrong to leave the reader to infer that the Negro's incapacity to participate intelligently in the affairs of the government actually led to his elimination. The demands of race prejudice impelled all southern States to reduce the Negro to a lower status just as soon as the North loosed ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... did not allow him to consider how far a present act or opinion harmonized with what he had already done or written. His greatest admirers admit his lack of judgment, his inaptitude for the management of practical matters. His utter incapacity to comprehend rightly the public men and measures of his day is abundantly apparent; and the inconsistencies of his conduct and his writings are too marked to need comment. He suffered persecution for not conforming to some trifling matters of Church usage, while he advocated the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... heart and intellect of man; the devil of Jesuitry, with its sham learning, shameless lying, and casuistical economy of sins; the devil of vice-royal rule, with its life-draining monopolies and gross incapacity for government; the devil of an insolent soldiery, quartered on the people, clamorous for pay, outrageous in their lusts and violences; the devil of fantastical taxation, levying tolls upon the bare necessities ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... from abstract principles about justice, democracy, the rights of man and the like, often leads us into futilities, if not into dangerous political experiments. We have to see our typical citizen in clear light, realize his deficiencies, ignorance, and incapacity, and his possibilities of development, before we can wisely enlarge his boundaries. The centre of the citizen is the home. His circumference ought to be the nation. The vast majority of Irish citizens rarely depart from their centre, or establish those vital relations with their circumference which ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... difficulties,—increase it, indeed, to such a degree, that some minds appear to have lost the very power of perceiving truth; so that, even when they are extremely anxious to be correct in their statement, there is a total incapacity of transmitting a story to another in the way that they themselves received it. This is one of the most striking temporal punishments of sin,—one of those that are the inevitable consequences of the sin itself, ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... become of him? (Postmaster General Barry) Why, the President immediately expressed his high disapprobation of his almost unequaled incapacity and corruption by appointing him to a foreign mission, with a salary and outfit of $18,000 a year! The party now attempt to throw Barry off, and to avoid the responsibility of his sins. Did not the President indorse those ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... Others, like Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, are built on the grand scale; and desire, passion, or will attains in them a terrible force. In almost all we observe a marked one-sidedness, a predisposition in some particular direction; a total incapacity, in certain circumstances, of resisting the force which draws in this direction; a fatal tendency to identify the whole being with one interest, object, passion, or habit of mind. This, it would seem, is, for Shakespeare, the fundamental tragic trait. It is present ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... or white, fails to do, whether for good or evil, usually gives you a truer knowledge of the man than the things he succeeds in doing. When you fully realise this acuteness on one hand and this mechanical incapacity on the other which exist in the people you are studying, you can go ahead. Only, I beseech you, go ahead carefully. When you have found the easy key that opens the reason underlying a series of facts, as for example, these: a Benga spits on your hand as a greeting; you see ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... advantage of years but the older one has the advantage of experience and knowledge. Now if this older man could carry along with him that spirit of youth which actuated his earlier activities he would be prepared against incapacity. Our fate hangs on how we conduct ourselves in youth. The world has great need of the sober, thoughtful men above the fifty line. By right of experience and knowledge they should become our leaders in the shaping of our policies. It is all a matter of how a man comes through, mentally, physically ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... watched by the enemy. But the inaction of a force entrusted to the Earl of Moira for the support of the French royalists is certainly discreditable to him and to Ministers. Among them the Duke of Richmond, Master of Ordnance, distinguished himself by his incapacity and his ridiculous orders. Another obvious misfit was Lord Chatham at the Admiralty. But how can we explain the inactivity of four regiments in the Channel Islands all the summer? Surely they could have seized St. Malo or the Quiberon Peninsula.[228] Such a diversion would have been highly effective. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... safety, and by which he could assist the monarch. His staff was but a reed on which, if he leant, it pierced his hand. This Chatham felt; and though he clung tenaciously to office, from the fear of displaying his weakness and incapacity, he only acted, when he did act, behind the scenes. Ministerial exertions were also paralysed by another cause. A prevalent notion existed that there was a mysterious power about the court which worked to the detriment of the public good. This was a constant theme of invective among the opposition, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the means of avoiding fallacies, a general increase of sincerity and candour amongst mankind may be freely recommended. With more honesty there would be fewer bad arguments; but there is such a thing as well-meaning incapacity that gets unaffectedly fogged in converting A., and regards the refractoriness of O., as more than flesh and blood can endure. Mere indulgence in figurative language, again, is a besetting snare. "One of the fathers, in great severity called poesy vinum daemonum," says Bacon: himself ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... education, nor inherited from nature, any talent to reign, nor possessed any one quality that fitted him for a higher situation than the head of a regiment or a lady's drawing-room. He made himself justly suspected of a moral corruption, as well as of a natural incapacity, when he announced his approbation of the Revolution against his benefactor, the late King of France, who, besides a regiment, had also given him a yearly pension of one hundred thousand livres. Immediately after his ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... are among those who introduced and obtained the adoption of the Leavenworth resolution, and who are endeavoring to organize a force for the purpose of general retaliation upon Missouri. Those who so deplore my 'imbecility' and 'incapacity' are the very men who are endeavoring to bring about a collision between the people of Kansas and the troops under General ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... these laws apply to mothers who are widows, or in some cases to those who have lost their means of support through imprisonment or incapacity of the husband. The maximum age of the child on whose account allowance is made varies from 14 to 16, in a few cases to 17 or 18. The amount allowed for each child varies in each state, approximately between the limits of $100 and $200 a year. ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... the teapot. Owing to these encumbrances, perhaps, she lost the thread of her discourse, and concluded, rather wistfully, "It's all so SIMPLE." She referred to a matter that was a perpetual source of bewilderment to her—the extraordinary incapacity of the human race, in a world where the good is so unmistakably divided from the bad, of distinguishing one from the other, and embodying what ought to be done in a few large, simple Acts of Parliament, which would, in a very short time, completely ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... had sown. But an evil which is certain, may be retarded; and ravages which tend finally to confusion, may be limited for many generations. Now, in the case of the African provincials which we have noticed, we see an original incapacity of Islamism, even in its palmy condition, for amalgamating with any superior culture. And the specific action of Mahometanism in the African case, as contrasted with the Roman economy which it supplanted, is thus exhibited by Mr Finlay in a most instructive passage, where every negation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... idea of breeding it! Let us take all these dull, stagnant, respectable people, one might say, who do nothing but conform to whatever rule is established about them and obstruct whatever change is proposed to them, whose chief quality is a sheer incapacity to imagine anything beyond their petty experiences, and let us tell them plainly, "It is time a lunatic married into your family." Let no one run away from this with the statement that I propose such a thing should be done, but it is, at any rate in the present ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... where the theatre was, and she could not conceal from herself the fact that she was scarcely in a fit state to take a long walk through the London streets. The spirit drunk on an empty stomach had gone to her head; she reeled a little when she walked; and her own incapacity to act maddened her. Oh, good heavens! how her head was splitting! What would she not give to be all right just for a couple of hours, just long enough to go and tell that beast of a husband of hers what a pig he was, and let the whole theatre know how ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... seeing the immense expenses of so gigantic a war readily met without assistance from abroad, by large loans cheerfully made and heavy taxation patiently borne, are reduced to the necessity of exulting over what they term our "total want of military genius," and our "incapacity to conduct a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... superior. The Congress mistrusted him. Many an officer in his own camp hated him. Those who had been disappointed in ambition, those who had been detected in peculation, those whose selfishness or incapacity his honest eyes had spied out,—were all more, or less in league against him. Gates was the chief towards whom the malcontents turned. Mr. Gates was the only genius fit to conduct the war; and with a vaingloriousness, which he afterwards generously ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Tennyson's indifference to form. Upon the whole, Browning exhibits far fewer instances of this failure in his own style than any other of the great poets, with the exception of one or two like Spenser and Keats, who seem to have a mysterious incapacity for writing bad poetry. But almost all original poets, particularly poets who have invented an artistic style, are subject to one most disastrous habit—the habit of writing imitations of themselves. Every ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... illuminated the mind of Madame Evangelista during the semi-somnolence of her waking hour. The words that she herself had uttered at the moment when Mathias acceded to Solonet's conditions, "Questa coda non e di questo gatto," were cried aloud in her mind by that voice of memory. In spite of her incapacity for business, ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... penetrating realization of their own existence and of the meaning of their acts. We do not blame city dwellers for not having it; we ourselves lose it when we venture into their maelstrom. Like them, we become dwarfed by overwhelming numbers, and shriveled by the incapacity to "sense" the humanity of the countless human simulacra about us. But we do not stay where we cannot feel ourselves live. We hurry back to the shadow of Hemlock Mountain, feeling that to love life one does not need to be what Is usually called happy, one ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... as compared with other men. The women who have held such power have come to it as sovereigns by inheritance, or as regents by the accident of bearing a particular relation to the lawful sovereign when he was under some incapacity. Yet it is an undisputed fact that the number of able and successful female sovereigns bears a vastly greater proportion to the whole number of such sovereigns, than does the number of able and successful male sovereigns to the whole number of men who have reigned. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... facial development disfigured by the addition of a black eye, however, I watched my opportunity, and springing aside to avoid the blow with which he greeted me, succeeded in inserting my fingers within the folds of his neckcloth, after which I had little difficulty in choking him into a state of incapacity, when he submitted to the indignity of having his hands tied behind him, and was induced to resume his seat in the rumble as a prisoner, till such time as I should learn Mr. Framp-ton's opinion as to the fittest manner of disposing of him. I then ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... man addicted to the use of tobacco is often through its use retarded in his career by mental languor or weakening will power, and by mental incapacity. The keenness of mental perception is dulled, and the ability to seize and hold an abstract thought is impaired. True, these effects are not sharply obvious, as it would be impossible to contrast the present condition of any one person with what it might have been. ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... despotism of a corrupt and selfish oligarchy, or if such is not a necessary consequence, then at any rate the standard of citizenship in this country intellectually and morally is not high enough to make democracy practicable. That the ignorance, selfishness and incapacity of the people are the real source of the evils mentioned is diligently inculcated by all those who wish to discredit the theory of popular government. No one knows better than the machine politician ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... of the higher and lower classes, to admit of our finding the elements of good society in either of them. The lower orders are ignorant, from want of means of instruction; the higher, from indolence and perpetually increasing incapacity. It is besides not a little curious that, even in the bygone days of ceremonious manners, the higher classes, by whom they were practiced, were uniformly taught by those illiterate persons of the lower classes who almost alone ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... incapacitated to give evidence in our courts of law. I have frequently had to deplore, when applied to by the Aborigines for justice in cases of aggression committed on them by white men, or by those of their own race, my inability to do so in consequence of their legal incapacity to give evidence. It were unreasonable, therefore, under such circumstances, to expect the Aborigines would respect, or repose trust and confidence in the Protectors, or submit to the governance of a department unable efficiently to protect or afford them justice. ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... are a domestic race, living a sequestered, peaceable, family life, and the Englishman seeks in the circle of those connected with and pertaining to him that easy state of mind which is denied to him through his innate social incapacity. The Englishman is, therefore, contented with that liberty which secures his most personal rights and guards his body, his property, and his conjugal relations, his religion, and even his whims, in the most unconditional ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the Choshu forts, which result was attained with the greatest ease. This "Shimonoseki Expedition," as it was called, enormously strengthened the conviction which the bombardment of Kagoshima had established. The nation thoroughly appreciated its own belligerent incapacity when foreign powers entered the lists, and patriotic men began to say unhesitatingly that their country was fatally weakened by the dual system ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the end of the chapter is not yet written. The League of Nations is a fact, whatever the attitude of the United States may be toward it, and it will live unless the peoples of the earth prove their political incapacity to use it for the promotion of their own welfare. The principle of self-determination will remain as long as men believe in the right of self-government and are willing to die for it. It was Woodrow Wilson who wrote that principle ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... there is much charm and originality in the national color of his motive." When he heard Chopin play in after-years, however, he confessed the fascination of the performance, and bewailed his own incapacity to produce such effects in execution, though himself one of the greatest pianists in the world. So, too, Moscheles, though dazzled by Liszt's brilliant virtuosoism and power of transforming a single instrument into an ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... country pursuits of dowered daughters. At the time of her marriage she had no charms of person more remarkable than rosy comeliness and the symmetry of supple limb. As for the nurture of her mind, it had been intrusted to home-governesses of respectable incapacity. Martin Warricombe married her because she was one of a little circle of girls, much alike as to birth and fortune, with whom he had grown up in familiar communication. Timidity imposed restraints upon him which made his choice ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... indorsing an unsafe note, and then pleasing that neighbor by sharing his risk in a hopeless speculation,—and who, after all the capital they have earned by their industry and sagacity has been sunk in benevolent attempts to assist blundering or plundering incapacity, are doomed, in their bankruptcy, to be the mark of bitter taunts from growling creditors and insolent pity from a gossiping public. Much has been said about the pleasures of a good conscience; and among these I reckon the act of that man who, having wickedly lent certain moneys to a casual ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... we might declaim: for, setting aside the absence of punishment to a black, where confinement is accompanied with ease and regular dietary; to which he has not hitherto been accustomed (to say nothing of his incapacity to understand the nature of his crime, or the cause of his incarceration); the contamination he receives during his sojourn in those fearful sinks of infamy, complete his immoral training; and when he again breathes ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... altogether untenable, because such a thorn could never have been left when the prayer for its removal was earnestly presented; nor could it ever have been, when left, an occasion for glorifying. Manifestly it was no weakness removable by his own effort, no incapacity for service which in any manner approximated to being a fault, but purely and simply some infliction from God's hand (though likewise capable of being regarded as a 'messenger of Satan') which hindered him in his work, and took down any proud flesh and danger of spiritual exaltation in consequence ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... moods such as this? Who has not experience of those dark days when the ungrateful canvas refuses to come right, and the artist sits down before it and calls himself a fraud? We may even say that these fits of incapacity and blank despondency are part of the cost of all creative work. They may be intensified by terror for the family exchequer. The day passes in strenuous but futile effort, and the man asks himself, "What will happen to me and mine if this kind of ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... temptation to pull them all down. One cannot quite say that he has spoiled his own church in trying to save what he could of the old, but if he did not quite spoil it, he saved it only by the exercise of an amount of intelligence that we shall never learn enough to feel our incapacity to understand. True ignorance approaches the infinite more nearly than any amount of knowledge can do, and, in our case, ignorance is fortified by a certain element of nineteenth-century indifference which refuses to be interested in what it cannot understand; a violent reaction from ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... might be better done are forward to try their hand on it. Even the master workman must be encouraged by the reflection, that his awkwardness will be incompetent to do that thing harm, to which his skill may fail to do justice. Here is no apology for neglecting to do many things from a sense of our incapacity,—for what deed does not fall maimed and imperfect from our hands?—but only a warning ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... deduction of rent, and enjoyed some honourable distinctions, and, when the heir was in any manner incapacitated, a relation was appointed to act for him. The representations of the other Zemindars or farmers in the same gram, were usually considered as the most just criterion of this incapacity. Besides the judicial powers and the magistracy of his territory, the Pradhan kept an account of the other tenants, and of their payments and debts to government, and, receiving what was due, transmitted it to the collector. He was ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... company were pious, patriotic and zealous men, who laboured to extend the power and influence of France throughout the vast continent of America for the honour and glory of God. There were among the associates a certain number of gentlemen and ecclesiastics, who, realizing their incapacity to transact the business of such an important undertaking, preferred to hand over the administration to merchants of Dieppe, Rouen and Paris, together with the advantages to be derived therefrom. A special association was consequently formed, composed of merchants who undertook the financial ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... the neighboring Potomac. These furnished occupation and instruction to a small body of pioneers, recently organized, while the difficulties of the road drew heavily on the marching capacity—or rather incapacity—of the men. Straggling was then, and continued throughout to be, the vice of Southern armies. The climate of the South was not favorable to pedestrian exercise, and, centaur-like, its inhabitants, from infancy to old age, passed ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... Gibraltar,—the one of his deeds most esteemed, it is said, by himself,—protracted over a month in its performance, and essentially defensive in character, not only because of the much superior fleet of the enemies, but because the adverse forces of nature and the obstinate incapacity of the captains of supply ships had to be counteracted by unremitting watchfulness, foresight, and skill, dealing however with conditions determined for him, not imposed by his own initiative; or, finally, in the chase and partial actions of May 28 and 29, 1794, in which ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... and is still circulating among the juniors of the law-courts. "Let me see," said his lordship, "you have been convicted before, haven't you?"—"Yes, sir," answered the man; "but it was due to the incapacity of my counsel rather than to any fault on my part."—"It always is," said Lord Avory, with a grim smile, "and you have my sincere sympathy."—"And I deserve it," retorted the man, "seeing that you were ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... well. Why should'nt she now? It is a strange vagary of old people to consider themselves just as young as they used to be, notwithstanding their advanced years. To the majority of the old people, the idea of death is not so appalling as the inability to work and the incapacity to enjoy ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... anxious to ascertain who I am, know the world, that I am one of the oppressed, degraded and wretched sons of Africa, rendered so by the avaricious and unmerciful, among the whites.—If any wish to plunge me into the wretched incapacity of a slave, or murder me for the truth, know ye, that I am in the hand of God, and at your disposal. I count my life not dear unto me, but I am ready to be offered at any moment. For what is the use ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... itself to varying circumstances; and there is every danger that it will break up all that it can in order to remould the materials in its own way. Mr. Calhoun is as full as ever of his Nullification doctrines; and those who know the force that is in him, and his utter incapacity of modification by other minds, (after having gone through as remarkable a revolution of political opinion as perhaps any man ever experienced,) will no more expect repose and self-retention from him than from a volcano in full force. Relaxation is no longer in the power of ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... be drawn, as animals must be, by the high instinct of momentary perception, which rarely developed itself in any Dutch painter, and least of all in their painters of marine. And thus the awkward forms of shipping, the shallow impurity of the sea, and the cold incapacity of the painter, joining in disadvantageous influence over them, the Dutch marine paintings may be simply, but circumstantially, described as the misrepresentation of undeveloped shipping in a discolored sea by distempered painters. An exception ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... trouble. If she does, I shall feel more than half responsible. But otherwise she will be an interesting study for you. She is nearly all white; how much of racial lying, and slothfulness, barbarism, and general incapacity that black vein of hers contains will give you food for thought, for she certainly will reveal herself in the ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... years of more since I appeared before Judge Endicott of your city in a cause between a trustee and the cestui que trust. The counsel for the trustee in an argument of considerable length, proceeded to demonstrate the unwisdom, the incapacity, indeed, of my administration of the Treasury Department. I made no attempt to meet the new issue, and the Judge gave no opinion upon it. I made an effort to satisfy the Judge that the trustee was withholding money that ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... William II has declared that the wretched condition of the artillery in the Austrian army, the lack of cohesion in its infantry, and the inexperience, not to say incapacity, of its officers, render it unfit for war in the near future, and that no hope of its improvement is to be entertained, so long as it shall have as its head a man so completely worn out as Francis ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... furious conflict. A strange compression and constriction of the stomach, sharp pains like the stab of a knife beneath the shoulder-blades, perpetual restlessness, an apparent prolongation of time, so much so that it seemed the day would never come to a close, an incapacity of fixing the attention upon any subject whatever, wandering pains over the whole body, the jaw, whenever moved, making a loud noise, constant iritability of mind and increased sensibility to cold, with alternations of hot flushes, were some of the phenomena which manifested ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... the two pursuits his true vocation lies. His friends and onlookers are often able to judge more wisely than he himself can do as to which Of the two lines it would be better for him to pursue. This incapacity for perceiving the path in which greatness awaited him, existed in the case of Kepler. Personally, he inclined to enter the ministry, in which a promising career seemed open to him. He yielded, however, to friends, who evidently knew him better than he knew himself, and accepted ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... this materialism lies in its incapacity to represent the universe as a process, as one form of matter assumed in the course of evolutionary development. This limitation corresponded with the natural science of the time and the metaphysic coincident ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... exercise [25] of meditative power. A vein of subjective philosophy, with the individual for its standard of all things, there would be always in his intellectual scheme of the world and of conduct, with a certain incapacity wholly to accept other men's valuations. And the generation of this peculiar element in his temper he could trace up to the days when his life had been so like the reading of a romance to him. Had the Romans a word for unworldly? The beautiful word umbratilis perhaps comes nearest to ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... upon the prevailing philosophy of Swift, viz., that 'all his views were directed towards what was immediately beneficial, which is the characteristic of savages.' This is undeniable. The meanness of Swift's nature, and his rigid incapacity for dealing with the grandeurs of the human spirit, with religion, with poetry, or even with science, when it rose above the mercenary practical, is absolutely appalling. His own yahoo is not a more ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... examples. Perhaps if we should meet Shakspeare we should not be conscious of any steep inferiority; no, but of a great equality,—only that he possessed a strange skill of using, of classifying, his facts, which we lacked. For notwithstanding our utter incapacity to produce anything like Hamlet and Othello, see the perfect reception this wit and immense knowledge of life and liquid eloquence find in ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Dalrymple, at twenty-six, was beginning the series of Eastern journeys which had made him famous. He remembered the brillance of the youth; the power, physical and mental, which radiated from him, making all things easy; the scorn of mediocrity, the incapacity for subordination. ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... tremulous natures. His garments symbolise purity and repose. How sharply the difference between heaven and earth is given in the last words of verse 5! They were 'amazed,' swept out of themselves in an ecstasy of bewilderment in which hope had no place. Terror, surprise, curiosity, wonder, blank incapacity to know what all this meant, made chaos ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... from the one in which she had previously met him, with all the wide difference between a Baptist parson and an earth-soiled, uncouthly-dressed digger of gutters! Anna E. Surratt, Emma Offutt, Anna Ward, Elize Holohan, Honora Fitzpatrick, and a servant, attest to all the visual incapacity of Mrs. Surratt, and the annoyance she experienced therefrom in passing friends without recognition in the daytime, and from inability to sew or read even on a dark day, as well as at night. The priests of her ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... improvement. Her sister Mary, who continued to enjoy only the two hours on Sunday, advanced proportionally in mental strength;—and before she left the district in which the school was situated, her original incapacity could scarcely have been credited by a stranger. In proof of this, it may be added, that long after she had left the parish, the writer found her by accident in the school which she attended after removing, examined her with ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... functions of prose too narrowly; and this again is at least false economy, as being, in effect, the renunciation of a certain means or faculty, in a world where after all we must needs make the most of things. Critical efforts to limit art a priori, by anticipations regarding the natural incapacity of the material with which this or that artist works, as the sculptor with solid form, or the prose-writer with the ordinary [6] language of men, are always liable to be discredited by the facts of artistic production; and ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... conversation would probably be questioned in silence. If a man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the divine laws, he is answered by a silence which conveys well enough to an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to make his ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... military success during the first few months of the war, had caused a generally depressed feeling which begot discontent and distrust that in various ways found expression in Congress. Democrats complained more of the incapacity of the Executive than of the inefficiency of the generals, and the entire Administration was censured and denounced by them for acts which, if not strictly legal and constitutional in peace, were necessary and unavoidable in war. Republicans, ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... responding as well as I could, striving to meet his mood, acquit myself like a man, draw zest instead of humiliation from the irony of our position, but scarcely able to make headway against a numbing sense of defeat and incapacity. A queer thought was haunting me, too, that such skill and judgement as I possessed was slipping from me as we left the land and faced again the rigours of this exacting sea. Davies, I very well knew, was under exactly the opposite spell—a spell which even the reproach of the tow-rope could not ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... pass, the clear policy of the Pretender was to permit the fears of Englishmen to go to sleep for a while, to endeavor to reorganize his plans and his party; to wait until a certain reaction should set in, a reaction very likely to come about because of the apparent incapacity and the unattractive character of George the First, and then at some timely hour, with well-matured preparations, to strike an energetic blow. George the First was only a year on the throne when the adherents of James got up a ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... accidence. No explanation was attempted to be given why Latin was to be of use to me, or why it was necessary to commit to memory the cases of nouns and the tenses of verbs. I know not whether this was owing to the unwillingness of my instructor to give himself the trouble, or to my supposed incapacity to apprehend the explanation. The last of these I do not admit. My docility however came to my aid, and I did not for a moment harbour any repugnance to the doing what was required of me. At first, and unassisted in the enquiry, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... curtsey, which the little Girl copies with terrible fidelity.) That's ladylike—that's genteel. Now sing out! (The Child sings the first verse of a popular Music-hall song, in a squeaky little voice.) Talk about nightingales! Come 'ere, and receive the reward for extinguished incapacity. On your knees! (The little Girl kneels before him while a tin medal is fastened upon her frock.) Rise, Sir CONNIE COCKLE! Oh, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 6, 1892 • Various
... she never had been, having too much distrust of her own feelings to give way to them completely. And Thyme, that healthy product of them both, at once younger for her age, and older, than they had ever been, with her incapacity for nonsense, her love for open air and facts—that fresh, rising plant, so elastic and so sane—she had never given them a single ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... awakened a few sad echoes that were no doubt hand-clappings, but seemed like the napping of the wings of night-birds frightened by a light. But the Lit-and-Phils were not frightened; they were entirely bewildered and rather indignant, that was all. It was characteristic of their incapacity to grasp the humanity of any subject, even when it was dangerous, that the criticism which followed was directed almost entirely against Whitman's metrical vagaries. This was not poetry! Had not their revered founder, the learned ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... of anticipation) may be summed up in saying that fewer traces comparatively of the primitive state of things have been preserved in the case of the Italians, and of the Romans in particular, than in the case of any other Indo-Germanic race. The bow and arrow, the war-chariot, the incapacity of women to hold property, the acquiring of wives by purchase, the primitive form of burial, blood-revenge, the clan-constitution conflicting with the authority of the community, a vivid natural symbolism —all these, and numerous phenomena of a kindred character, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... to an incapacity to resist the temptation which clung to him, he again sent a messenger to ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... possible to find other ministers who to equal abilities would add equal subservience, it is not surprizing that the highest offices were constantly filled by men of notorious incapacity. Indeed, the King seemed to have an instinctive antipathy to everything great and noble. During the reign of George II the elder Pitt had won for himself a reputation which covered the world, and had carried to an unprecedented height the glories of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... Catholic priests, and some laymen known as much devoted to sacerdotal influence. The plaintiff was one Julie Metairie, next of kin to a deceased Roman Catholic gentleman, a native of France, whom it was alleged, when in a state of mental incapacity, was induced by a priest named Holdstock to make a testament of his property in favour of the Church of Rome, and of certain charities favoured by that church. It was given in evidence that the man had been a sceptic nearly all his life, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... This was transmitted to a friend to show to Lord Glenelg. My only object was the vindication of my character. I have never had the least expectation of obtaining justice or redress from the Colonial office. There seems in that department utter incapacity. The very persons they select for the Government of Upper Canada are enough to prove this. And yet I believe that Lord Glenelg is an able, as well as amiable, devout, ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... remember it until we were half-way down town. Ronald said, in his chaffing way, that I left my head somewhere when I was a boy, and that I have been going around without it ever since. I wish that he and Van Cortlandt hadn't such silly notions about my incapacity in the ordinary affairs of life—not that I really mind their nonsense, for you know how well I love them both. I am very glad that you consented to go directly to the mountains instead of coming to New York to see me off. There was ...
— A Temporary Dead-Lock - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... his father's incapacity for making money. In the twenty years that had passed since Thomas had been abroad he had built up a fortune, which he could not induce his father to share, but which that father was perfectly willing to see devoted to their mutual ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... to "see about it," by which word poor Fanny expressed all the business that her maintenance depended on. If an old general wished to put a major in temptation, could he have found a better means of doing so? Rachel even thought that Fanny's incapacity to understand business had made her mistake the terms of the bequest, and that Sir Stephen must have secured his property to his children; but Fanny was absolutely certain that this was not the case, for she said the Major had made her at once sign a will dividing the ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Melmotte and Mr Fisker, and two speeches were of course made by them. Mr Melmotte may have been held to have clearly proved the genuineness of that English birth which he claimed by the awkwardness and incapacity which he showed on the occasion. He stood with his hands on the table and with his face turned to his plate blurted out his assurance that the floating of this railway company would be one of the greatest and most ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... hard taskmaster; desire (das Wollen) man imposes upon himself; man's own will is his heaven. A persistent "should" is irksome; inability to perform is terrible; a persistent "would" is gratifying; and the possession of a firm will may yield solace even in case of incapacity to perform. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... altogether so attainable as he imagined. In no place does favouritism flourish with much more rank luxuriance than in that city—in no place do personal prepossessions more frequently operate to the overthrow of judgment, to the exclusion of merit, and to the fostering of incapacity. The multitude had their favourites whose merit touched the highest standard of their conceptions—any thing beyond that was hid in an intellectual mist. The taste of the many was formed upon the kind of merit which they so much admired in their favourites, and little did it relish that of Mr. Cooper. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... compulsory education is settled so far as Nature is concerned. Her bill on that question was framed and passed long ago. But, like all compulsory legislation, that of Nature is harsh and wasteful in its operation. Ignorance is visited as sharply as wilful disobedience—incapacity meets with the same punishment as crime. Nature's discipline is not even a word and a blow, and the blow first; but the blow without the word. It is left to you to find out ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and exalted elaboration of the human mind, and when protracted is a painful exertion; indeed, the greater portion of our species reluctantly submit to the toil and lassitude of reflection; but from laziness, or incapacity, and perhaps in some instances from diffidence, they suffer themselves to be directed by the opinions of others. Hence has arisen the swarm of critics and reviewers, those clouds that obscure the fair light that would beam on the mind of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various
... monopoly which has driven out of existence the smaller establishments, where alone the artist-cook can flourish. But it seems that the neglect of decent cooking is also due in this country to a racial incapacity and indifference which leads both men and women to despise "taking pains" about small things, and brings them into the world devoid of the desire to carry out with skill those small enterprises on which much of the sweetness ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... the adoption of a negative prefix to reverse the meaning: as, order, disorder; pleasure, displeasure; consistency, inconsistency; capacity, incapacity; observance, nonobservance; resistance, nonresistance; truth, untruth; ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown |
