"Imbecility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... States again and again, only that I might have the thought that one of them—though I knew not which—might be this lady's, and that in so infinitesimal a degree I had been near her again. Will it be estimated extreme imbecility in me when I ventured the additional confession that I felt a great warmth and tenderness toward the possessors of all these names, as being, if not herself, at ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... him. The eye that spared not woman in its lust, Glaring with maniac terror, sinks in death. The homicidal hand, whose fiendish skill Made man its victim, crushed and bleeding lies. The crafty tongue, a ready instrument Of that most subtle wickedness, his brain, Babbles in fatuous imbecility." —Holofernes, a Mystery. ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... prerogatives of a master, he is excused from cultivating the faculties of a man. Coercion begins by producing pain, by violently alienating the mind from the truth with which we wish it to be impressed. It includes a tacit confession of imbecility. ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... State. It banishes free white labor—it exterminates the mechanic—the artisan—the manufacturer. It deprives them of occupation. It deprives them of bread. It converts the energy of a community into indolence—its power into imbecility—its efficiency into weakness. Sir, being thus injurious, have we not a right to demand its extermination! Shall society suffer, that the slaveholder may continue to gather his vigintial crop ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... which he excited in his day is scarcely to be wondered at; for, though this judgment has not been ratified by posterity, Filicaja has at least the merit of having raised the poetry of Italy from the abject service of mere amorous imbecility to the noble office of embodying the more manly and virtuous sentiments; and though his style is infected with the bombastic spirit of the age, it is even in this respect singularly moderate, compared with ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... here. For what? To let the sense of luxury overcome the hidden repugnance of the idea of marrying Cutty, divorcing him, and living on his money. To put herself in the way of visible temptation. What fretted her so, what was wearing her down to the point of fatigue, was the patent imbecility of her reluctance. There would have been some sense of it if Cutty had proposed a real marriage. All she had to do was mumble a few words, sign her name to a document, live out West for a few months, and be in comfortable ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... arcading, out of scale with the columns, incongruous with the capitals, and quite unsuited for a work that should be simply grand in its usefulness; and at each corner of the bridge is a huge block of masonry, apropos of nothing, a well-known evidence of desperate imbecility." ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... enemy of his family, his life, and his honor, possibly the shame and scandal and blot of human society, to debauch from his care and protection the dearest pledge that he has on earth, the sole comfort of his declining years, almost in infantine imbecility,—and with it to carry into the hands of his enemy, and the disgrace of Nature, the dear-earned substance of a careful and laborious life? Think of the daughter of an honest, virtuous parent allied to vice ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... fields, the street and public chambers, are the places where Man executes his will; let him yield or divide the scepter at the door of the house. Woman, with her instinct of behavior, instantly detects in man a love of trifles, any coldness or imbecility, or, in short, any want of that large, flowing, and magnanimous deportment, which is indispensable as an exterior in the hall. Our American institutions have been friendly to her, and at this moment I esteem it a chief felicity of this country, that it excels in ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... will prey upon his innocent and industrious subjects.[5] In India there are no universities or public schools, in which young men might escape, as they do in Europe, from the enervating and stultifying influence of the zanana.[6] The state of mental imbecility to which a youth of naturally average powers of mind, born to territorial dominion, is in India often reduced by a haughty and ambitious mother, would be absolutely incredible to a man bred up in such schools. They ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... no movement, no dramatic action—the sanest doctrine set forth with almost insane ingenuity, for he was always the "wild dog outside the kennel" who wouldn't imitate and hence kept free, as Louis Stevenson told him; extraordinary things treated quite as a matter of course; brilliant flashes of imbecility passed for cool well-balanced argument; until often I would suddenly gasp, wondering into what impossible world I had strayed after him. And he would tell the most extravagant tales, he would confide the most paradoxical philosophy, the most ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... of eating all her meals walking, and it was her practice to move around the dinner—table in this her dotage, and to commit pranks, that, against my will, made me laugh, and even in despite of the feelings of pity and self—humiliation that arose in my bosom at the sight of such miserable imbecility in a fellow—creature. Thus keeping on the wing as I have described, it was her practice to cruise about behind the chairs, occasionally snatching pieces of food from before the guests, so slyly, that the first intimation of her intentions was the appearance of her yellow shrivelled ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... have," said Tito, readily, in a low tone. "He is the escaped prisoner who clutched me on the steps of the Duomo. I did not recognise him then; he looks now more as he used to do, except that he has a more unmistakable air of mad imbecility." ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... applicable to Persia, than what we find in the conduct of Nadir upon this memorable occasion. Though that chief had revived the military spirit of his country, and roused a nation sunk in sloth and luxury to great and successful exertion, yet neither this success, the imbecility of Shah Tamasp, nor a reliance upon his own fame and strength could induce him to take the last step of usurpation, until he had, by his arts, excited in the minds of his countrymen that complete ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... retailing the several manners of the three Carracci—Guido, Domenichino and Guercino. This system of retailing continued to descend from master to pupil, until the school of Bologna sunk into irrecoverable imbecility. ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... essential part of the intellectual wealth of the civilized world, when civilization could not prevent the world from falling into decay and ruin. And as it was the noblest triumph which the human mind, under Pagan influences, ever achieved, so it was followed by the most degrading imbecility into which man, in civilized countries, was ever allowed to fall. Philosophy, like art, like literature, like science, arose, shone, grew dim, and passed away, leaving the world in night. Why was so bright a glory followed ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... be roughly divided into two classes: Puzzles that are built up on some interesting or informing little principle; and puzzles that conceal no principle whatever—such as a picture cut at random into little bits to be put together again, or the juvenile imbecility known as the "rebus," or "picture puzzle." The former species may be said to be adapted to the amusement of the sane man or woman; the latter can be confidently recommended ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... reforming frame of mind that I desire earnest exhortations to improve society. In the same way I am only drawn to the Post-Impressionists when I want, not beautiful pictures, but an agreeable sense of the impudence and imbecility of professional craftsmen. But when I am in the mood for literature and art, I demand something that shall appeal to my sense of beauty; and I refuse to be shamed into believing that I ought to prefer scientific knowledge, or ethical suasion, or those ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... doctrine but the Scripture's claims, and therefore its inspiration in making those claims." [Footnote: Presbyterian Review, vol. ii. p. 245.] A proved error in Scripture stamps the book as fraudulent and worthless! Worthless it is then! Proved errors there are, scores of them. It is fatuity, it is imbecility, to deny it. And every man who can find an error in these old writings has the warrant of these teachers for throwing the book away. Tens of thousands of ingenuous and fair-minded men have taken the word of such teachers, and have ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... too severely, we become totally and permanently impaired, and suffer violent fits and fearful rages, insanity or imbecility. ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... first spark of the flame which in the course of time consumed the two Houses of York and Lancaster. Left an infant of three years, it was long before York became a party-leader, and probably he never would have disputed the succession but for the weakness of Henry VI, which amounted to imbecility, and the urging of stronger-minded men than himself. As it was, the open struggle began in 1455, and did not end until the defeat and capture of the person called Perkin Warbeck, in 1497. The greatest battles of English history took place in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Mrs. Whitlow; a small fragile woman, with a face sharp as a penknife, and lips that cut her words like scissors! and what a forlorn wretch was Whitlow with his head brought once a night to the pillow! poor creature! helpless, confused; a huge imbecility, a stranded whale! Mrs. Whitlow talked and talked; and there was not an apple-woman that in Whitlow's sufferings was not avenged: not a beggar that, thinking of the beadle at midnight, might not in his compassion have ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... men themselves to say whether they would be governed by a government of laws, or by the will of the most despicable 'one-only-man power,' armed with sword and lash, that ever a nation of Oriental slaves in their political imbecility cowered under? Who were better qualified than those men themselves, instructed in detail in all the peril of that crisis,—men who had comprehended and weighed with a judgment which has left no successor to its seat, all the conflicting considerations and claims which ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... high reputation—a literal myriad—is considerably below the number annually poured from all quarters of Germany, into the vast reservoir of Leipsic; spawn infinite, no doubt, of crazy dotage, of dreaming imbecility, of wickedness, of frenzy, through every phasis of Babylonian confusion; yet, also, teeming and heaving with life and the instincts of truth—of truth hunting and chasing in the broad daylight, or of truth groping in the chambers ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... that soul's nature. Nor is it difficult to perceive the tendency of this abandon-to elevate immeasurably all the energies of mind-but, again, so to mingle the greatest possible fire, force, delicacy, and all good things, with the lowest possible bathos, baldness, and imbecility, as to render it not a matter of doubt that the average results of mind in such a school will be found inferior to those results in one (ceteris paribus) ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... considered in Europe under a legitimate King, strong in the affection and willing obedience of his subjects, as she had been under an usurper whose utmost vigilance and energy were required to keep down a mutinous people. Yet she had, in consequence of the imbecility and meanness of her rulers, sunk so low that any German or Italian principality which brought five thousand men into the field was a more important member of the commonwealth ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... away, untune that string, And hark what discord follows! Each thing melts In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores, And make a sop of all this solid globe; Strength should be lord of imbecility, And the rude son should strike his father dead; Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong— Between whose endless jar justice resides— Should lose their names, and so should justice too. Then everything includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite, ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... a revival, in smoother numbers, of Dr. Donne's satires, which was recommended to him by the duke of Shrewsbury and the earl of Oxford. They made no great impression on the publick. Pope seems to have known their imbecility, and, therefore, suppressed them while he was yet contending to rise in reputation, but ventured them when he thought their deficiencies more likely to be imputed to Donne than ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... fastened to his wrist. And now the seconds, who had been standing in a close group with the heads of their horses together, separated at an easy canter, leaving a large, clear field between him and his adversary. Captain D'Hubert looked at the pale sun, at the dismal landscape, and the imbecility of the impending fight filled him with desolation. From a distant part of the field a stentorian voice shouted commands at proper intervals: Au pas—Au trot—Chargez! Presentiments of death don't ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... remodelling the government. "I have not made up my mind," says Grayson, "whether it would not be better to bear the ills we have than fly to those we know not of. I am, however, in no doubt about the weakness of the federal government. If it remains much longer in its present state of imbecility, we shall be one of the most contemptible nations on the face of the earth." "It is clear to me as A, B, C," said Washington, "that an extension of federal powers would make us one of the most happy, wealthy, respectable, and powerful nations that ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... as impudent as the other passages below are imbecile—of course in each case (as before) with a calculated impudence and imbecility. The miserable creature had himself obliged her to "come out of the water" by declining to join her there on the plea that he was never good for an assignation when he ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... of a place of distinction cannot save a fool from the reputation of folly, position in a sentence cannot redeem empty words from their truly insipid character. Indeed, as the imbecility of a shallow pate is made all the more apparent by a position of distinction, so is the utter unfitness of certain words for their position painfully manifest. This is the secret of anti-climax. By reason ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... such troops were utterly unable to meet the English. Until near the end, the generals were as bad as the armies they commanded, and the administration of the War Department continued to be a triumph of imbecility to the very last. [Footnote: Monroe's biographer (see "James Monroe," by Daniel C. Gilman, Boston, 1883, p. 123) thinks he made a good Secretary of War. I think he was as much a failure as his predecessors, and a harsher criticism could not be passed on him. ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... fellow-creatures, partly to snuff up the smell of coming pleasure, and scent it from afar; in those bag-cheeks, hanging like half-filled wine-skins, still able to contain more; in that coarsely protruded shelf mouth, that fat dewlapped chin; in all this, who sees not sensuality, pretension, boisterous imbecility enough; much that could not have been ornamental in the temper of a great man's overfed great man (what the Scotch name flunky), though it had been more natural there. The under part of Boswell's face is of a ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... that you have carried out the intention you hinted to me when I last had the pleasure of seeing you at Kingston. Your admirable letter must have had a good effect. I see that some little popguns were let off at you on the occasion, but they are too puny to excite anything but a smile at their imbecility. ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... century after Christ may be assimilated to the golden age of Mencius and Confucius; or, in other words, may consummate its religious freedom, and attain the highest pinnacle of human progress, by reverting to a state of childhood and of moral imbecility.' ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... too sovereign to leave them anything other than power written on paper and an empire of words. And, what is still more marvellous, people imagine they have other chiefs of state and other ministers than their miseries, their desires, and their imbecility. He was a wise man who said: 'Let us give to men irony and pity ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the 'painful imbecility of Lincoln,' of the 'venality and corruption' which ran riot in the government, and expressed the belief that no better condition of things was possible 'until Jeff Davis turns out ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... just as we speak of Byzantine or Gothic? Are we waiting for somebody to invent it? We think, maybe, that it is to spring forth, ready made, like Minerva from the brain of Zeus. If this is our idea, we might as well give up at once and confess to the world our imbecility. Never, from Adam's day to this, did anybody ever invent a new architecture. It is purely a matter of genealogy. For just as we trace back a family line, can we trace the generations of art. Spite of its complications, many an ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... right in this; namely, that Mr Slope was not insane enough to publish to the world any of his doings in Barchester. He did not trouble his friend Mr Towers with any written statement of the iniquity of Mrs Proudie, or the imbecility of her husband. He was aware that it would be wise in him to drop for the future all allusions to his doings in the cathedral city. Soon after the interview just recorded, he left Barchester, shaking the dust off his feet as he entered the railway carriage; and he gave no longing ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... society, which nothing can excuse or palliate,—an improvement upon beggarly villany—and shows an inbred wretchedness of heart made up between the venomous malignity of a serpent and the spiteful imbecility ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... ancient Mysteries, it is so only in this qualified sense: that it presents but an imperfect image of their brilliancy, the ruins only of their grandeur, and a system that has experienced progressive alterations, the fruits of social events, political circumstances, and the ambitious imbecility of its improvers. After leaving Egypt, the Mysteries were modified by the habits of the different nations among whom they were introduced, and especially by the religious systems of the countries into which they were transplanted. To maintain ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... permission. What, enter a carriage in a fog, steal a necklace, and carry it around with him for months? Never in this world. And private secretary to the very person he had robbed? Of all the fool situations, this was the cap! Imbecility was written all over the face of it. It was simply a coincidence in the matter of names. Yet, steward on the Celtic; there was no getting away from that. There could not have been two Thomas Webbs on board. I'm afraid Killigrew swore; distant thunder, off behind the hills there. He struck ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... better things, were mainly engaged in paltry intrigues, and in fishing for votes by flattering fools. The only question was whether the demagogues who were their own dupes were better or worse than the demagogues who knew themselves to be humbugs. Carlyle's denunciations of the imbecility of our system began to be more congenial to his temper, and encouraged him in his heresy. Carlyle's teachings were connected with erroneous theories indeed, and too little guided by practical experience. But the general temper which they showed, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... avoid danger, have no value unless countersigned by the Prince Royal; for he is allowed to be absolutely aim idiot, excepting that now and then an observation or trick escapes him, which looks more like madness than imbecility. ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... only to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America. I can add, with truth, that no one wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition, both of their body and mind, to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecility of their present existence, and other circumstances which cannot be neglected, will admit. I have taken the liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet, Secretary of the Academy of Sciences, at ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... upward—that being the earliest at which a man could fill this eminent seat. But the majority were of those, who having passed the prime of active life, might be considered to have reached the highest of mental power and capacity, removed alike from the greenness of inconsiderate youth, and the imbecility of ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... power over the outer world. The soul incarnate in such a body, enjoys a living medium of reciprocal communication between itself and all things without. Meanwhile the body itself does not arrive here mature in its powers; nor does it spring suddenly from the imbecility of the infant to the strength of the man. By slow development, by a gradual growth, in analogy with that of a tree whose life is protracted, it rises, after years of existence, to its appointed stature. Advancing thus slowly, it affords ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... road to the upper, not to the under, world. Ever since that day men have been constrained to follow Mate's path to Panoi and the dead. {188} Another myth is somewhat different, but, like this one, attributes death to the imbecility of Tangaro the Fool. ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... very exigencies of hypocrisy, which he would put on if he could. His infamy, his profligacy, can proceed even from no perverted energy of character, and must therefore be associated with contempt. There is a lively fatuity about him that is uniformly a symptom of imbecility. Among women, at least, it is so, and I have no doubt but it is the same with men. Alice, I know what my fate will be. It is true, you may see me married to him; but you will see me drop dead at the altar, or worse than that may happen. I shall marry him; but to live his wife!—oh! to live ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... world of readers,' Lamb wrote to Coleridge, 'I hate all that do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather myself up into the old things.' 'I am jealous for the actors who pleased my youth,' he says elsewhere. And again: 'For me, I do not know whether a constitutional imbecility does not incline me too obstinately to cling to the remembrances of childhood; in an inverted ratio to the usual sentiment of mankind, nothing that I have been engaged in since seems of any value or importance compared to the colours which imagination gave to everything then.' In Lamb ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... of October Maurice was more than usually a victim to this malady of distrust and barren speculation. He listened now approvingly to crude fancies that would formerly have brought a smile of contempt to his lips. Why should he not? Were not imbecility and crime abroad in the land? Was it unreasonable to look for the miraculous when his world was falling in ruins about him? Ever since the time he first heard the tidings of Froeschwiller, down there in front of Mulhausen, he had harbored a deep-seated feeling of rancor in his breast; he suffered ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... be found enticing? for, from the negative point of view, I flatter myself this volume has a certain stamp. Although it runs to considerably upwards of two hundred pages, it contains not a single reference to the imbecility of God's universe, nor so much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself.—I really do not know where my head can have been. I seem to have forgotten all that makes it glorious to be man.—'Tis ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to settle him in his religion, as the basis of all our other hopes, and the more to be considered in regard of the looseness of the place where you are. I doubt not but you have well considered of the resolve to travel to Italy, yet I have this to say for my fond fears (besides the imbecility of my sex) my affections are all contracted into one head: also I know the hotness of his temper, apt to feverishness. Yet I submit him to your total management, only praying the God of Heaven to direct you for the best, and to make him tractable to you, and laborious ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... "Chevy Chase" pleases, and ought to please, because it is natural, observes; "that there is a way of deviating from nature, by bombast or tumour, which soars above nature, and enlarges images beyond their real bulk; by affectation, which forsakes nature in quest of something unsuitable; and by imbecility, which degrades nature by faintness and diminution, by obscuring its appearances, and weakening its effects." In "Chevy Chase" there is not much of either bombast or affectation; but there is chill and lifeless imbecility. ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... man of a doctor, with his head on one side,' said my aunt, 'Jellips, or whatever his name was, what was he about? All he could do, was to say to me, like a robin redbreast—as he is—"It's a boy." A boy! Yah, the imbecility of the whole set ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... against Titherington's thoughtlessness and McMeekin's imbecility, I noticed that during the day the nurse became gradually less obnoxious. I began to see that she had some good points and that she meant well by me, though she still did things of which I could not possibly approve. She insisted, for instance, that ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... why all persons should abstain from the use of intoxicating liquors is that it is a mental curse, because it produces imbecility and transforms its unhappy victims into maniacs and fools. Intemperance or the use of alcoholic liquors brings a curse upon the morals of all nations, and thereby proves to be a moral curse. It weakens the will and so influences ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... had seen him that same morning, a nerveless, terror-stricken wretch, grovelling, like some craven cur, upon the floor, frightened, to the verge of imbecility, by a shadow, and less than a shadow, I was confronted by two hypotheses. Either I had exaggerated his condition then, or I exaggerated his condition now. So far as appearance went, it was incredible that this man could ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... deemed as good places as any for insane persons, and in fact were the only places available, so that, besides those whom long confinement had brought almost to the point of imbecility, there were several entirely insane and idiotic individuals among the prisoners. One of them went around in a high state of excitement declaring that it was the resurrection morning. Nor was the delusion altogether ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... parasite, whom he had set down as a worshiper of sham heroes, undoubtedly did not look like an associate of Bodine's, and had a certain seriousness that demanded respect. As he looked closer into his wide, round face, seamed with small-pox, he fancied he saw even in its fatuous imbecility something of that haunting devotion he had seen on the refined features of the wife. ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... beyond these facts save by ignoring or misrepresenting them? Healthy, scepticism is the basis of all accurate observation, but there comes a time when incredulity means either culpable ignorance or else imbecility, and this time has been long past in the ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... side of a stream and consider two things: the imbecility of your private nature and the genius of your ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... victim of physical deformity, increased by a fall which prevented the possibility of her ever being able to walk, nature had with unusual malignity stamped her with a feebleness of intellect that at times bordered almost on imbecility. ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... duty, so opposed to his tastes and habits, Gustave signalised himself as one of the loudest declaimers against the imbecility of the Government, and in the demand for immediate and energetic action, no matter at what loss of life, on the part of all—except the heroic force to which he himself was attached. Still, despite his military labours, Gustave found leisure to contribute to Red journals, and his contributions paid ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... all very well," Mark thought. "But holy imbecility is a great bore, especially when there is a ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... friend. There he was, casting the largesse of his soul at the feet of a blind woman, a woman blinded by the bedazzlement of a false fire, whose flare it was his religion to intensify. There he was doing this, and he did not see the imbecility of it! In after time we can correlate incidents and circumstances, viewing them in a perspective more or less correct. We see that we might have said and done a hundred helpful things. Well, we know that we did not, and there's an end on't. I felt, as ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... same principle of metaphor that governs the mechanism of language, and sheds a glory and a beauty around even our every-day fireside words; so that even those that seem hackneyed, worn out, and apparently tottering with the imbecility of old age—would we but get into the core of them—will shine forth with all the expressive meaning of their spring time—with the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... an "advance upon Richmond." The damnation of public clamor, and not the incompetency of the general, set the inchoate armies of Scott upon that fatal adventure. But that humiliating, incredible, and for years misunderstood Sunday, on the plateaus of Manassas, where, after all, blundering and imbecility brought disaster, but not shame, upon the devoted soldiery, aroused the sense of the North to the reality of war, as the overthrow at Jemmapes in 1793 convinced the Prussian oligarchy that the republic ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... will is a piece of folly," cried Sir Tom. He grew red at the very thought with irritation and opposition. "I believe the old man was mad. Nothing else could excuse such imbecility. Happily there is no question of ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... shines with more lustre as a poet than in any to which his name is affixed. Take the following miscellaneous ones, by way of specimens. They are sometimes a little faulty in rhyme and melody: but they are never lame from imbecility. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... This is conform to what is avouched by the most skilful physicians, when they affirm that shakings and tremblings fall upon the members of a human body, partly because of the heaviness and violent impetuosity of the burden and load that is carried, and, other part, by reason of the weakness and imbecility that is in the virtue of the bearing organ. A manifest example whereof appeareth in those who, fasting, are not able to carry to their head a great goblet full of wine without a trembling and a shaking in the hand that holds it. This of old was accounted a prefiguration and mystical pointing ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... have been fools over this thing! There's another point we've all missed, which alone proves it couldn't have been faked props. Here, Hilliard, this was your theory, though I don't mean to saddle you with more imbecility than myself. But anyway, according to your theory, what happened to the props after ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... thing; the press, an obstreperous thing; thought, an insolent thing, and liberty, the most crying abuse of all. But he came, and for the tribune he has substituted the Senate; for the press, the censorship; for thought, imbecility; and for liberty, the saber; and by the saber and the Senate, by imbecility and censorship, France is saved. Saved, bravo! And from whom, I repeat? From herself. For what was this France of ours, if you please? A horde of marauders and thieves, of anarchists, assassins, ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... from scholarly scepticism, is nothing but stupidity or weakness. Few people like to confess outright that they do not believe in a God, although the belief in a personal devil is considered to be a sign of imbecility. Nevertheless, men, as a rule, have no ground for believing in God a whit more respectable than for disbelief in a devil. The devil is not seen nor is God seen. The work of the devil is as obvious as that of God. Nay, as ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... streets in Venice,—just those who formed the gaping audience, when a mountebank offered a new quack medicine on the Riva dei Schiavoni. And, as fearful imagery is associated with the weakness of fever, so it seems to me that imbecility and love of terror are connected by a mysterious link throughout the whole life of man. There is a most touching instance of this in the last days of Sir Walter Scott, the publication of whose latter ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... disgrace of these noble lords; fatal to all pretences of earnest patriotism; but still in them accounted for, and perhaps a little palliated, by the known necessities of party. As respects the general mind, there is no such imbecility abroad; no such disposition to traffic or go halves, temporize or capitulate with treason. One only error is prevalent: it has been noticed by Sir R. Peel, who indeed overlooked nothing; but it may be well to put the refutation into another ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... book is that we'll end up a lot of intellectual roues: we'll be incapable of being astonished with anything. We knew, to start with, that science and imbecility are continuous; nevertheless so many expressions of the merging-point are at first startling. We did think that Prof. Hitchcock's performance in identifying the Amherst phenomenon as a fungus was rather notable as scientific ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... workman and, descending, shouted back the words: "You understand, Maitre Serlio; let it be as you suggest." After the porticos, Serlio decorated the Galerie d'Ulysse which has since disappeared owing to the indifference of Louis XV and the imbecility of his friends; and always it was with Francois: "You understand, Maitre Serlio; it is as you wish." The motif may have been Italian, but the impetus for the work was given by the ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... love; the right her husband gave when he committed her to your care; the right of your desire to prevent her from drifting into hopeless, lifelong imbecility, wherein she would be almost at the mercy of hired attendants, helpless to shield herself from any and every wrong; the right of a man to sacrifice himself absolutely for another if ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... possess, which is the point. The processes by which a Birmingham jeweller makes the wonderful things which we attribute to 'French taste' when we see them in the shops of the Rue de la Paix are, of course, mere imbecility—compared to my performances in Responsions. Lucky for me, at any rate, that the world has decided it so. I get a good time of it—and the Birmingham jeweller ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... science of phrenology of which you tell me, and which it must, in time, supersede. Now and then, though very rarely, the man of the earth regains the intellect he has lost; in which case his lunar counterpart returns to his former state of imbecility. Both parties are entirely unconscious of the change—one, of what he has lost, and the other of ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... all Sicily, it was hoped, would be secured. Carthage and Italy were next to be assailed. With large levies of Iberian mercenaries she then meant to overwhelm her Peloponnesian enemies. The Persian monarchy lay in hopeless imbecility, inviting Greek invasion; nor did the known world contain the power that seemed capable of checking the growing might of Athens, if Syracuse once ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... hundred pounds per annum; but it was necessary for him to return to his native country, in order to take possession of the property. This he positively refused to do; and when we remonstrated with him on the apparent imbecility of this resolution, he declared that he would not risk his life, in crossing the Atlantic twice for twenty times that sum. What strange inconsistency was this, in a being who had three times attempted to take away that which he dreaded so much to ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... exulted that the gambler was no worse. But could this make the gambler an honest man, because other men were rogues? How desperate the cause that could clutch at so frail a straw for support! Yet Mr. Freeman appeared perfectly unconscious of the imbecility of his reasoning. More perfect ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... him like a blow, and for a while he was overcome with shame. The fact was evident—alas! only too evident—his father was incapable of command. James was simply astounded; he tried not to hear the cruel words that buzzed in his ears, but he could not help it—imbecility, crass idiocy, madness. It was worse than madness, the folly of it was almost criminal; he thought now that his ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... was much fatter than any other of his kind that she had seen. His bared arms, however, gave evidence of great strength and his gait was not that of an old man. His facial expression denoted almost utter imbecility and he was quite the most repulsive creature that ever ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... counteracted by new ideas. I thought with indignation and shame on the imbecility of my proceeding. I called up the images of Susan Hadwin, and of Wallace. I reviewed the motives which had led me to the undertaking of this journey. Time had, by no means, diminished their force. I had, indeed, ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... the sparring-match, as one may say, on the very threshold, between Mrs. Pipchin the Ogress in bombazeen and the weak-eyed young man-servant who opens the door! The latter of whom, having "the first faint streaks or early dawn of a grin on his countenance—(it was mere imbecility)" as the Author himself explains parenthetically—Mrs. Pipchin at once takes it into her head, is inspired by impudence, and snaps at accordingly. Of this we saw nothing, however, in the Reading. We heard nothing of Mrs. Pipchin's explosive, "How dare you laugh behind the gentleman's back?" ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... Joash used to lean was away, and the poor, weak king went just where the wicked princes led him. It was probably out of sheer imbecility that he passed from the worship of God to the acknowledgment and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... than all,—more in one hour than the Legislature in thirty years,—to extend the Slave Power. Indeed, he had solemnly decided all and more than all that President Buchanan, closing his long political life of servility in imbecility, in December, 1860, asked to have adopted as an "explanatory amendment" of the Constitution, to fully satisfy the Slave Power. Well would it have been for that Power, for a while at least, had its members recollected that "no tyranny is so secure, none ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... The insignificant Lepidus patronizes Antony, and is sued to by Augustus! Still do I doubt whether Augustus will ever come forth again. Is this a peace patched up by Livia for the sake of her children, seeing the imbecility of her husband? or is Augustus to own he has been acting changeling, like the first Brutus, for near two years? I do not know, I remain ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... read every word of David Grieve. Owing to the unusual and unaccountable imbecility of the reviewing—(the Athenaeum man, for example, does not even comprehend that he is reading a biography!)—it may be three months or so before the public fully takes hold, but I have no doubt of the ultimate ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... reticence, he was a sensitive man; and for months now he could scarcely take up a newspaper, except his party's official organ, without finding himself accused of imbecility, of idle vanity, of corrupt bargaining, of every unworthy motive. Worse than all, he realized the inherent weakness of his position. He told his hearers at Waterford that the Irish party would not vary its attitude upon the war, but that we should now become ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... other people's thoughts together; I forget every paragraph as fast as I read it; and my head has received such a shock by an all-night journey on the top of the coach, that I shall have enough to do to nurse it into its natural pace before I go home. I must devote myself to imbecility. I must be gloriously useless while I stay here. How is Mrs. [M.]? will she pardon my inefficiency? The city of Salisbury is full of weeping and wailing. The Bank has stopt payment; and every body in the town kept money at it, or has ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... the Master calls this shrewd farmer a fool. He began by reckoning without God. He virtually said in his heart, "There is no God." He went wrong in the very center of his nature. This put the blight of moral imbecility on his whole life. He turned to his possessions and sought to satisfy his soul with them. He received them without gratitude and held them without any sense of obligation, for he thought ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... troubling your mind with the question, "Why are these things so?" What would be the condition of the world if all our minds lay dormant? If men did not think, reason, and act, our undisturbed, slumbering intellects would not excel the imbecility of the brute; we should live in chaos, hardly aware of our existence. And yet, with all our activity of mind, we daily pass by unobserved that which would be wonderful if philosophized and reasoned upon; and with the same inconsistency wonder at that which ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... will arise. But, by the way, an occasion arises at this moment; for the reader will be sure to ask, when we come to the story, "Was this other creature present?" He was not; or more correctly, perhaps, it was not. We dropped the creature—or the creature, by natural imbecility, dropped itself—within the first ten miles from Manchester. In the latter case, I wish to make a philosophic remark of a moral tendency. When I die, or when the reader dies, and by repute suppose of fever, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... said abruptly. "You can't do it—really. I can assure you this present world touches the nadir of imbecility. You and your friend, with his love for the lady who's so mysteriously tied—you're romancing! People could not possibly do such things. It's—if you'll excuse me—ridiculous. He began—he would begin. A most tiresome story—simply bore me down. We'd been talking very agreeably before that, or ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... Vast Imbecility, Mighty to build and blend, But impotent to tend, Framed us in jest, and left us now ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... to political affairs was energy thrown away. By his death not only had the State lost an ultimate controlling power, if dull, yet practised and tenacious, but this loss was palpable to all the world. The void stood bare and unrelieved before the public eye. The notorious imbecility of the Emperor Ferdinand, the barren and antiquated formalism of Metternich and of that entire system which seemed to be incorporated in him, made Government an object of general satire, and in some quarters of rankling contempt. In proportion as the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Brainerd finished his course. I am now at the age at which the Savior of men began his ministry, and at which John the Baptist called a nation to repentance. Hitherto I have made my youth and insignificance an excuse for sloth and imbecility, now let me have a character ...
— Life of Henry Martyn, Missionary to India and Persia, 1781 to 1812 • Sarah J. Rhea
... have similar defects, or have descended from tainted families, the children are usually more deeply impressed with their imperfections than when only one possesses the defect. This is the reason of the frequency of nervous disease and imbecility among the opulent, as intermarriages among near relations are more frequent with this class ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... the cultivation of the ballads had, as we have suggested, a certain aspect of silliness. It is well known that Addison's essays elicited the immediate objections of Dennis. The Spectator's "Design is to see how far he can lead his Reader by the Nose." He wants "to put Impotence and Imbecility upon us for Simplicity." Later Johnson in his Life of Addison quoted Dennis and added his own opinion of Chevy Chase: "The story cannot possibly be told in a manner that shall make ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... attack, but Mason admitted the next day, as stated by Governor Harris, of Tennessee, who was serving as a volunteer aide on Hood's staff, that he never sent the order. This strange neglect of the part of his own chief of staff affords a fitting climax to all the rest of the imbecility that contributed to Hood's failure after he had personally led the main body of his army to a position where by all ordinary chances success ...
— The Battle of Spring Hill, Tennessee - read after the stated meeting held February 2d, 1907 • John K. Shellenberger
... principle, and acting upon it in the training of the young, it must be productive of the happiest effects.—While acted upon, under the guidance of Nature, its efficiency and power are astonishing. It is by means of this principle, that the infant mind, with all its imbecility and want of developement, acquires and retains more real knowledge in the course of a few months, than is sometimes received at school afterwards during as many years.—Few things are more cheering in prospect than the knowledge of this fact; for what may we not expect ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... themselves out of sight, or, more properly speaking, never think about themselves at all, unlike our latter-day school of humourists, who seem to have revived the old horse-collar method, and try to raise a laugh by some grotesque assumption of ignorance, imbecility, or bad taste. ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... and power of the state were sustained by the superstitious terrors wielded by the Church. She could not be blind to the trickery by which money was wrested from tortured consciences, and from ignorance, imbecility, and dotage. She could not but admire her mother's placid piety, neither could she conceal from herself that her faith was feeling, her principles sentiments. Deeply as her own feelings had been impressed in the convent, and much as she loved ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... period. Perhaps there isn't in the History of the world a more complete instance of political imbecility than was exhibited in the late Peace at Paris, especially in the Allies not availing themselves of the very extraordinary opportunity of securing the tranquillity of Europe for a ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... that it was with captains as with gods: reserve, under all events, must still be their cue. But probably this appearance of slumbering dominion might have been but an attempted disguise to conscious imbecility—not deep policy, but shallow device. But be all this as it might, whether Don Benito's manner was designed or not, the more Captain Delano noted its pervading reserve, the less he felt uneasiness at any particular manifestation of that reserve ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... Naecke found that, while moderate masturbation could be more easily traced among men than among women, excessive masturbation was more common among women. And, while among the men masturbation was most frequent in the lowest grades of mental development (idiocy and imbecility), and least frequent in the highest grades (general paralysis), in the women it was the reverse. (P. Naecke, "Die Sexuellen Perversitaeten in der Irrenanstalt," Psychiatrische en ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of Iago is that deep motiveless malignity which rejoices in evil as its proper element—which loves evil as good men love virtue. In calculations on the character of the Moor, Iago despises Othello's unsuspicious trustingness as imbecility, while he hates him as a man because his nature is the perpetual opposite and perpetual reproach of his own. Now, Reineke would not have hurt a creature, not even Scharfenebbe, the crow's wife, when she came to peck his eyes out, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... stupidity, dulness, imbecility, inaptitude, inefficiency, unskilfulness, feebleness, impotence, incapacity, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... please than this mere child? He felt everything at once, except love. He saw her fortune slipping from him at the very moment of getting it, he felt a little contempt for the part he was playing and a sovereign scorn for his own imbecility, he even anticipated the Marchesa's languid but cutting comments on his failure. One second more, and all was lost—but not a word would come. Then, in sheer despair and with a violence that betrayed it, he seized one of Beatrice's hands in both of ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... so armed and manned, I fear it will be impossible.—He has already effected more than could have been expected, or perhaps than any commander besides himself could have done. He attributes much to the imprudence, or imbecility of the enemy, whose plan of saving an army he likens to Sterne's marble sheet. However, others are just enough to him, to feel that no faults of the enemy's commander lessen his merit, or obscure the courage necessary to ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... more than the physical effects of love; and having none of those moral ideas which only can soften the empire of force, he is led to consider it as his supreme law, subjecting to his despotism those whom reason had made his equals, but whose imbecility betrayed ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... was very little argument, and most of that among the Mardukans. Prince Bentrik insisted that Crown Princess Myrna would have to be taken along; King Mikhyl would be either dead or brainwashed into imbecility by now, and they would have to have somebody to take the throne. Lady Valerie Alvarath, Sir Thomas Kobbly, the tutor, and the nurse Margot refused to be separated from her. Prince Bentrik was equally firm, with less success, on leaving his ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... which, to Dick's great satisfaction, the good man had permitted and congratulated himself to sit at table with a free-born American—he was even more loquacious. For what then, he would ask, was this incompetence, this imbecility, of France? He would tell. It was the vile corruption of Paris, the grasping of capital and companies, the fatal influence of the still clinging noblesse, and the insidious Jesuitical power of the priests. As for example, Monsieur "the Booflo-bil" had doubtless noticed the great ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; .. then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the tragic ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville |
