"Inept" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the city of Berlin. Had Schliemann given his priceless findings to Indianapolis, it would have made that city a Sacred Mecca for all the Western World—set it apart, and caused James Whitcomb Riley to be a mere side-show, inept, inconsequent, immaterial and insignificant. But alas! Indianapolis never knew Schliemann when he lived there—they thought he was a Dutch Grocer! And all the honors went to Benjamin Harrison, Governor Morton ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... in an uninteresting manner. After the first book, indeed, as far as Morris's epic manner is concerned, Virgil and Milton might never have lived. It attempts to be the grand manner by means of vagueness. In an altogether extraordinary way, the poem slurs over the crucial incidents (as in the inept lines describing the death of Fafnir, and those, equally hollow, describing the death of Guttorm—two noble opportunities simply not perceived) and tirelessly expatiates on the mere surroundings of the story. Yet there is no attempt to make anything there credible: Morris seems ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... originally mere images of the temple, donated by the piety of the devotees of those times. Upon evoking Roman grandeur, everybody sees in imagination the enormous Coliseum, circle of butcheries, or the arches erected to the glory of the inept Caesars. The representative works of nations have two significations—the interior or immediate one which their creators gave them, and the exterior or universal interest, the symbolic value which ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... nuisance to the foreigner within its borders but a danger to its neighbours. Mexico is in such a phase to-day. And most of the aggressions and annexations of the modern period have arisen out of the inconveniences and reasonable fears caused by such an inept phase. I am a persistent advocate for the restoration of Poland, but at the same time it is very plain to me that it is a mere travesty of the facts to say that Poland, was a white lamb of a country torn to pieces by three wicked neighbours, Poland in the eighteenth century was a dangerous ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... abandoned walls, each trotting on his little donkey and each followed by the inevitable Bedouin driver, who taps with his stick upon the rump of the beast. They are returning to Cairo, their visit ended, and exchange in a loud voice, from one ass to another, more or less inept impressions in various European languages. . . . And look! There is even amongst them the almost proverbial belated dame who, for private reasons of her own, follows at a respectable distance behind. ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... gentleman-rider who won the Grand Prix in a canter, but fell at the winning-post because his horse shied at the irrepressible Pan. The French half—and both her parents—urged a dissolute and anaemic aristocrat—blue blood and a gold lining. Her grandfather, a strong unsilent sheep-rancher, was against this inept decadent and converted to his view that saintly worldling, the gorgeous Cardinal Camperioni. A neo-futurist of the most bizarre type prances through the pages upon his head, causing enough "tumult" to satisfy any one. So why drag in Pan? Miss VALLINGS ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... endeavours are more happily applied, to extinguish the little remains of the virtue of the age by bold impieties, and befooling religion by impious and inept rhymes, to confound virtue and vice, good and evil, and leave ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... his generation, yes; but he could work no miracle. Spartan greatness, too, was ineffectual: there is that about pouring new wine into old bottles. Sparta was old and conservative; covered her patrician virtues with a rude uncultural exterior; was inept politically—as old aristocracies so commonly are; she shunned that love of the beautiful and the things of the mind which is the grace, as Bushido—to use the best name there is for it—is the virtue, of the patrician. You may say she was selfish and short-sighted; true; ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... sister-in-law Tillie, and colloquial English to her neighbors. Thea, who had a rather sensitive ear, until she went to school never spoke at all, except in monosyllables, and her mother was convinced that she was tongue-tied. She was still inept in speech for a child so intelligent. Her ideas were usually clear, but she seldom attempted to explain them, even at school, where she excelled in "written work" and never did more than mutter ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... was looking for the arrival, not of a British fleet, but of a French fleet, from the West Indies. For him these were very dark days. The recent defeat at Camden was a crushing blow. Congress was inept and had in it men, as the patient General Greene said, "without principles, honor or modesty." The coming of the British fleet was a new and overwhelming discouragement, and, on the 18th of September, Washington left West Point for a long ride to Hartford in Connecticut, ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... again, mildly. This latest attempt to seize them or harm them—if it was that—had been surprisingly inept. It was strange that creatures able to travel between the stars and put regiments and tanks out of action should fail so dismally to kill or kidnap Coburn, if they really wanted to. Could it be that they were not quite ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Alf and Emmy shrank now before her increasing skill in argument. How were they shattered! How inept were their feebleness! How splendid Jenny had been, in act, in motive, in speech, ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... This Lebyadkin, a stranger to the town, turned out afterwards to be a very dubious character, and not a retired captain as he represented himself to be. He could do nothing but twist his moustache, drink, and chatter the most inept nonsense that can possibly be imagined. This fellow, who was utterly lacking in delicacy, at once settled in his house, glad to live at another man's expense, ate and slept there and came, in the end, to treating the master of the house with condescension. ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... rendering all outlines indeterminate, though a great idea is felt to be present in the mind of the author, for which he works. The man who would say there is no feeling for symbol—no phantasy or Celtic glamour in these weird, puzzling, and yet on all sides suggestive tales would thereby be declared inept, inefficient—blind to certain qualities that lie near to grandeur in fanciful literature, or the literature of phantasy, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... The word "wit" has no meaning when thus used. Or again where he says: "All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes." Was there ever a more inept and untruthful comparison? To find any ground of comparison between the two things he compared, he must make his poet sustain his body by the scraps and lines of his poem which he rejects, or else the steam planing-mill ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... will find on the postcards illustrating this particular spot and calling it "Venice on the Vltava." In this the Pragers fall into the snobbish habit of going outside their own country for the sake of finding some inept comparison. I grant that they are not the only sinners in this respect; we may even have a "Venice in London," according to those who label the views on postcards, for all I know. I have, on postcards, met "Venice in Whatsisname" ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... And if from God I welcome you the more, Since great is God, and therefore great His gifts: God grant He send them daily, heaped and huge! Speak without fear, for him alone I hate Who brings ill news, or makes inept demand Unmeet for Kings. I know that Cross ye bear; And in my palace sits a Christian wife, Bertha, the sweetest lady in this land; Most gracious in her ways, in heart most leal. I knew her yet a child: she knelt whene'er The Queen, ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... not the picture of a man who was unqualified for his task, or indifferent, rebellious, or inept in its performance; it is the picture of a man of vital and electric temperament, with almost a genius—certainly with an extraordinary gift—for teaching. His ideals were lofty; he dreamed of a relationship between university instruction and ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... mind he read countless authors of different ages and countries, a total of around 50,000 epigrams, from most of which nothing at all was worth excerpting. There is no point in memorializing the names of the bad, except to note in passing that he found hardly anything so inept as the Delitiae, as they call them, of the German poets[5]—in this connection he gives special mention to the book of Lancinus Curtius[6], which contains ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... King shook hands with Archie, Teddy, Gratton, and the rest, made his formal bows to Gloria's girl friends, and felt relief when the inept banalities languished and he was free to draw apart. Gratton, with slender finger to his shadowy moustache, bore down upon him. King did not like this suave individual; he had the habit of judging a man by first impressions and sticking stubbornly to his snap judgment until circumstance ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... The one inept remark which Shelley seems ever to have made was that "there is nothing to see in France." My opinion, as we spun along the road which would lead us to Lucerne and my waiting mule, was that there ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... absurdity. It is granted that a hundred folios could not contain the hundredth part of all the limitations of human actions, and all the possible cases of a contentious casuistry; and it is also granted that human nature is not so inept as to be incapable of interpreting and limiting for itself such rules as 'Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... break the back; unhinge, unfit; put out of gear. unman, unnerve, enervate; emasculate, castrate, geld, alter, neuter, sterilize, fix. shatter, exhaust, weaken &c 160. Adj. powerless, impotent, unable, incapable, incompetent; inefficient, ineffective; inept; unfit, unfitted; unqualified, disqualified; unendowed; inapt, unapt; crippled, disabled &c v.; armless^. harmless, unarmed, weaponless, defenseless, sine ictu [Lat.], unfortified, indefensible, vincible, pregnable, untenable. paralytic, paralyzed; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... centuries of music are incarnated! His work is the immense ark, all the arts blended in one; the real humanity of the personages at last expressed, the orchestra itself living apart the life of the drama. And what a massacre of conventionality, of inept formulas! what a revolutionary emancipation amid the infinite! The overture of "Tannhauser," ah! that's the sublime hallelujah of the new era. First of all comes the chant of the pilgrims, the religious strain, calm, deep and slowly throbbing; then the voices of the sirens gradually drown it; ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... Nations; and if it is not feared, it deserves well to be loved. A King worthy to command it, who governs sagely, and acquires for himself the esteem of all Europe,—[there, won't that do!] may restore its ancient splendor, which the Broglios, and so many others even more inept, have a little eclipsed. That is assuredly a work worthy of a Prince endowed with such gifts! To reverse the sad posture of affairs, nobly repairing what others have spoiled; to defend his country against furious enemies, reducing them to beg Peace, instead of scornfully ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... would find his name, and smile. Most discreetly! He should have waited a few hours in order to drive home the utter inconsequence with which he regarded the incident. What an asinine blunder! She would think he considered himself particularly favored. She would think he was reacting with the most inept intimacy to ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Home.' Since the publication of his first book he had avoided as far as possible all knowledge of what the critics had to say about him; his nervous temperament could not bear the agitation of reading these remarks, which, however inept, define an author and his work to so many people incapable of judging for themselves. No man or woman could tell him anything in the way of praise or blame which he did not already know quite well; commendation ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... He had already informed his host that he knew her. She greeted him with a mere touch of her hand, a touch made cold by intent, and with "With a free evening off one would have expected you would spend it with Laetitia," said disdainfully. It was a rude and inept thing to say (in the tone she said it) for the feeble creature, as she stigmatised him, had not yet screwed his fatuous idolatry to the point of proposal of marriage. But she intended it to be rude and to discomfort him and ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... arguments no ways impertinent, and reasons not to be disputed, I will prove, in the teeth of a parcel of brokers and retailers of ancient rhapsodies and such mouldy trash, that our vulgar tongue is not so mean, silly, inept, poor, barren, and contemptible as they pretend. Nor ought I to be afraid of I know not what botchers of old threadbare stuff, a hundred and a hundred times clouted up and pieced together; wretched bunglers that can do nothing but new-vamp old rusty ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... will come out of it best? Not I, I promise you. I remember that I approached the beloved object with fear and trembling; my heart beat, my ideas grew confused, my voice failed me, I mangled all I said; I cried yes for no; I made a thousand blunders; I was illimitably inept; I was absurd from top to toe, and the more I saw it the more absurd I became. Meanwhile, under my very eyes, a gay rival, light hearted and agreeable, master of himself, pleased with himself, losing ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... imbecile pedants, like the Agamemnon of the book, a rhetoric of artificial words. These people are depicted with swift strokes, wallowing around tables, exchanging stupid, drunken speech, uttering senile maxims and inept proverbs. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... the Territory, which was printed in the Washington Standard in January, 1866. This article should be reprinted by the State Historical Society, as it represents a movement of considerable force at one time against the inept and confusing name adopted for the State. The Indian evidence for the native name of the Mountain was collected in Wickersham: Is it "Mt. Tacoma" or "Mt. Rainier?", pamphlet, Tacoma, 1893. The argument of an eminent traveler and author against "Mt. Rainier" may be found in Finck: Pacific coast ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... made in presence of the justices, and the sworn inquest. Of extrajudicial confession, all authorities held with the illustrious Farinaceus and Matthaeus, 'confessio extrajudicialis in se nulla est; et quod nullum est, non potest adminiculari.' It was totally inept, and void of all strength and effect from the beginning; incapable, therefore, of being bolstered up or supported, or, according to the law phrase, adminiculated, by other presumptive circumstances. In the ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... you remember that yourselves, but now I am convinced. He killed him, he must have done!' And for the present he falls back upon a gloomy and irritable denial. Impatience and anger prompted him, however, to the most inept and incredible explanation of how he looked into his father's window and how he respectfully withdrew. The worst of it was that he was unaware of the position of affairs, of the evidence ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... practicable. But Charlie babbled on serenely, interrupting the current of pure fancy with samples of horrible sentences that he purposed to use. I heard him out to the end. It would be folly to allow his idea to remain in his own inept hands, when I could do so much with it. Not all that could be done indeed; but, ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... state of defence, and even the bridge across the San had not been repaired to provide a direct line of supply to the front on the Dunajec. Offers of skilled labour from other countries to improve the inefficient service of Russian railways and the inept direction of industries and munition factories were ignored. The business organization of Russia had been managed mainly by Germans before the war; too much of it was left in their hands after war began, with the result that the Putilov munition works, for instance, were reduced ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... Of this Argument, both the Proposition and Assumption are false, and so the Conclusion cannot but be voyd of it selfe. For as to the Proposition, That because the braines are colde and moist, therefore things that are hote and drie are best for them, it is an inept consequence: For man beeing compounded of the foure Complexions (whose fathers are the foure Elements) although there be a mixture of them all in all the parts of his body, yet must the diuers parts of our Microcosme or little world within ourselves, be diuersly more inclined, some to ...
— A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco • King James I.
... fruit thereof grow audible, Holding as hapless his dream of good guardianship, Jestingly, earnestly, shouting it serviceless, Tardy, inept, and uncouthly designed. ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... his wife along the edge of the crowd till they came again to the pillared entrance. Here, where it was possible to stand back a little from the dancers, they were confronted by a thickset, heavy-faced man wearing the singularly inept-looking costume of a Pierrot. Face and carriage proclaimed that he had enjoyed his dinner very thoroughly before setting out for the ball; and Evelyn's small shudder fired the fighting blood in Desmond's veins. It needed an effort of will not ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... indeed have been qualmish prudes. Of all plays it is the most harmless. The scene in the fourth Act to which exception was taken seems to have been No. II, after the marriage of Gasper and Antonia, a most trifling and inept business. In Act V, IV, Alexis says to Viola: 'As for you Madam bread and water, and a dark chamber shall be your lot—' but Sebastian (Bannister, jun.), who has married Viola, breaks in crying: 'No, Sir,—I am the arbiter of her lot;—however, I confirm half your ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... terrestrial paradise below. He heard the Father pronounce His awful curse upon mankind. And he beheld the Son rise and with celestial magnanimity offer himself as the sacrificial lamb, whose blood should wash away the serpent-stain of sin. How inept ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... showing, came back looking like an adventurous tomcat that wished only to hide itself meekly in its accustomed haunts; and its unobtrusive bearing seemed to say, the less said about the matter the better. What a storm of obloquy would have burst upon such inept diplomacy in America, or in England, or even in France. Not so here. Everybody was sore and sorry, but the newspapers and the journalists could raise no protest that counted. It is all explained by the fact ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier |
