"Impotence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to hear with what scandal and reproach foreigners do speak of the impotence of our constitution in this point; that in a civilised Government, as ours is, the strangest contempt of authority is shown that can be instanced ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... build up grievances, and devastating thoughts, had given her a thousand bitter things to fling into the conflict; but they had not strengthened her character, and she could not stand the strain of prolonged argument. Sooner or later she would abandon everything, exhausted, and beaten into impotence. She could bear more, endure more, than Jenny; she could bear much, so that the story of her life might be read as one long scene of endurance of things which Jenny would have struggled madly to ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... plenty, but not when it is scarce. For ten years before 1757, we had in this country, regularly exported on an average, above 400,000 quarters of wheat, and in that year there was at once an excess of importation. With regard to the alleged impotence of governments in this respect, it appears to me that facts shew their power rather than their weakness. To be convinced of this, it is only necessary to look at the diminished importations from America during the war, and particularly ...
— The Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn: intended as an appendix to "Observations on the corn laws" • Thomas Malthus
... was an admirable contrivance for self-fertilisation. How utterly mysterious it is that there should be some difference in ovules and contents of pollen-grains (for the tubes penetrate own stigma) causing fertilisation when these are taken from any two distinct plants, and invariably leading to impotence when taken from the same plant! By Jove, even Pan. (221/4. Pangenesis.) won't explain this. It is a comfort to me to think that you will be surely haunted on your death-bed for not honouring the great god Pan. I am quite delighted at what ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Nothafft he was emptying into the music of another man. The envy of the man doomed to limit his display of talent to the appreciation of what another had created laid violent hands on the creator; the impotence of the taster was infuriated at the cook. It was as if a flunked and floored comedian had gone out into the woods to declaim his part with nothing but the echo of his own ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... knotted with wens and goitres; roots intertwined beneath like serpents petrified in an agony of contorted strife; green and glistening mosses carpeting the rough ground, mantling the rocks, turning pulpy stumps to mounds of verdure, and swathing fallen trunks as, bent in the impotence of rottenness, they lie outstretched over knoll and hollow, like moldering reptiles of the primeval world, while around, and on and through them, springs the young growth that fattens on their decay—the forest devouring its own dead. Or, to turn from its funereal shade to the light and life ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... her face the rose-bloom came, As thinking on that other, unaware Her eyes waxed tender. When he looked on her, Standing to answer him, with lovely shame, Submiss, and yet not his, a passionate, A quickened sense of his great impotence To drive away the doom got hold on him; He set his teeth to force the unbearable Misery back, his wide-awakened eyes Flashed as with flame. And she, all overawed And mastered by his manhood, waited yet, And trembled at the deep she could not sound; A passionate nature in a storm; a heart Wild with ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... with civilized people—for instance, our neighbor, Japan, which in the short space of twenty years has reached a point where she has no reason to envy any one, her strength and ascendency being shown in the last war with China. I see the impotence of the Spanish Government to contend with certain elements which oppose constant obstacles to the progress of the country itself and whose destructive influence has been one of the causes of the uprising of the masses, and as ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... the girl in her robe of pure gold trembled visibly. She knew, it was plain, the import of the words. She spoke rapidly, beseechingly, in her own tongue. The words were liquid music in the air. Then, realizing their impotence, she resorted to her poor vocabulary ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... the impenetrable and polished discretion of closed doors and curtained windows. Immobility and silence pressed on him, assailed him, like two accomplices of the immovable and mute woman before his eyes. He was suddenly vanquished. He was shown his impotence. He was soothed by the breath of a corrupt resignation coming to him through the subtle irony of ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... was grey dark. Stung by a sense of impotence, surging with despairing rebelliousness, Andrews hurried back towards the buildings where the company was quartered. He would be late for mess. The grey street was deserted. From a window here and there ruddy light ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... that if he had his choice in the matter, he would rather die than be condemned to a life of impotence, with perpetual cares and precautions, he bore his sufferings, or rather forebodings, with his accustomed courage and patience, and attempted to calm my apprehensions by affirming that, though his nights were disturbed, he could still get sleep out of bed, in an arm-chair, and now ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Miss Tabitha's dumb viciousness had, like an invisible sculptor's chisel, carved sudden deep lines in her face as fitting accompaniments to the deepening malice of her thoughts, they all rose from the luncheon table and went their several ways in their several moods of disconcerted confusion, impotence and vexation, in search of fresh means to gain new and unexpected ends. Roxmouth, reluctantly yielding to the earnest persuasions of Longford, walked with him into the village of St. Rest, and made enquiries at the post-office as to whether Miss Vancourt's sudden departure ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... and Mrs. Wilkinson, in the impotence of her prolonged and intense anxiety and fear, had thrown herself, with a groan, across her bed, when a sound in the street caught her ear. Instantly she started up, while a thrill ran through every nerve. Feet were on the door-steps; a key was in the lock—a moment ...
— The Two Wives - or, Lost and Won • T. S. Arthur
... Reason, judgment, renunciation, all the sane daylight forces, were beaten back in the sharp struggle for self-preservation. She wanted happiness—wanted it as fiercely and unscrupulously as Lily did, but without Lily's power of obtaining it. And in her conscious impotence she lay shivering, and hated ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... enter into the lives of all who today, in this busy work-a-day world of ours, would exchange impotence for power, weakness and suffering for abounding health and strength, pain and unrest for perfect peace, poverty of whatever ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... was beside himself; stricken with grief, enraged, I believe, as well, at the thought of his own impotence. Messengers were despatched, a consultation was called. The best skill of the city, at any cost, was at Margaret's bedside. Was there anything, then, that money could not ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... here—with his feeble hands working desperately at the hem of the sheet, and his aching head throbbing unavailingly through the cruel, open-eyed watches of the night. He raged over the world's injustice and his own impotence; the thought was never absent from him—he was coming under the disastrous domination of ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... was writhing with the feeling of impotence. Mechanically, unresisting now, he followed his enemy down the main staircase of the chateau and out through the wide open gates. He could not bring himself to believe that he had been so completely foiled, that this impudent adventurer had him once more ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... is broken. When we say that we are getting old, we should say rather that we are getting new or young, and are suffering from inexperience, which drives us into doing things which we do not understand, and lands us, eventually, in the utter impotence of death. The kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... and the impotence of these men were due to their having no organic ties with their own country, no roots in the Russian soil. They hardly knew the Russian people, who appeared to them as nothing more than an historic abstraction. They were really cosmopolitan, ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... flit ghost-like across the dim stretch of grass and vanish into the shadows. And he started to his feet as if he would follow or call her back. But he did neither. Be only stood swaying on his feet with a face of straining impotence—as of a prisoner wrestling vainly with his iron bars—until she had gone wholly from his sight. And then with a stifled groan he dropped down again into his chair and ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... scientists systematically shut themselves out of three-fourths of their minds, and the English have been insane on Induction these two hundred years. This unholy divorce has, as it always must do, brought poverty and impotence into the sciences, many of which stand apart, stand haggard and hostile, accumulations of incoherent facts, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... drew My Lady's life away. I watched, dumb for dismay, The shock of thrills that quivered through Her wasted frame, and shook The meaning in her look, As near, more near, the moment grew. O horrible suspense! O giddy impotence! I saw her features ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... placeman, mutually disgracing and disgraced. You sell your constituents to the vilest ministers, that ever came forward the champions of despotism. And those ministers show us what is their insignificance, their impotence, their want of discernment, in giving such a thing as you are, places of so great importance, ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... contrast in these two clauses more pointed and emphatic in the original than in our Bible, between man's impotence and God's power in the face of the fact of sin. The words of the first clause might be translated, with perhaps a little increase of vividness, 'iniquities are too strong for me'; and the 'Thou' of the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... he continued. "I felt that since I was prevented from arresting any of the evil to myself, I could at least mature my plans for an adequate discharge of just retributions on her. It reveals the impotence resulting from the trammels of modern civilization, that while the possibilities of wrong are infinite, the openings for vengeance are few and contemptible. Only when a man is thrown upon the necessities of this 'wild justice' does he discover how difficult vengeance really is. Had ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... one on the place, his niece included, to do just what pleased him. Never had an autocratic potentate been more completely nonplussed; but his sister's words, combined with events, brought him face to face with his impotence so inexorably that for a time ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... sometimes overtook him on shore deepened, a feeling of impotence, as if he had suddenly waked, lost and helpless, in an unfamiliar planet. There was the soft whisper of his wife's passage across the room. In the lamplight the paint on her cheeks made startling unnatural patches of—paint. ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... infinite must be Best said by triviality, Speaks, where expression bates its wings, Just happy, alien, little things; What of all words is in excess Implies in a sweet nothingness, With dailiest babble shows her sense That full speech were full impotence; And while she feels the heavens lie bare, She only talks ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... in the way of his election, but we know that at last he was not elected. Early in the year Clodius was killed, and then, at the suggestion of Bibulus—whom the reader will remember as the colleague of Caesar in the Consulship when Caesar reduced his colleague to ridiculous impotence by his violence—Pompey was elected as sole Consul, an honor which befell no other Roman.[55] The condition of Rome must have been very low when such a one as Bibulus thought that no order was possible except by putting absolute power into the hands ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... away on the clouds; the feeling of absolute insignificance growing on one as the ship drove on, the creaking of the ship and the hissing rush of the waters hardly audible for the shrieking of the gale through the rigging. In all my life I have never so understood the utter impotence and triviality of humanity ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... the more rapid woman. To be sure, they understood Greek plays a great deal better than she did; but she was penetrated with the liveliest impatience of their dulness all the same. Mrs Morgan, however, like most people who are in advance of their age, felt her utter impotence against that blank wall of dull resistance. She could not make them see into the heart of things as she did. She had to wait until they had attacked the question in the orthodox way of siege, and made gradual entrance by dint of hard labour. ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... with horror too great to be described. My blood was frozen in my veins. I would have called for aid, but the sound expired ere it could pass my lips. My nerves were bound up in impotence, and I remained in the same attitude ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... and around in the impotence of expression, saw the portraits of the dead Whaleys in unbroken lineal respectability, bending their eyes upon him—the one, the only ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... paltry, awkward, and amateurish is his manner of "developing," his attempt at combining incompatible parts. His manner in this respect reminds one of two people who even in other ways are not unlike him in style—the brothers Goncourt; one almost feels compassion for so much impotence. That Wagner disguised his inability to create organic forms, under the cloak of a principle, that he should have constructed a "dramatic style" out of what we should call the total inability to create any style whatsoever, is quite ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... seventy-ninth year, the energy of Lucretia Mott is undiminished, and her soul is as ardent in the cause to which her life has been devoted, as when in her youth she placed the will of a true woman against the impotence of prejudiced millions. With the abolition of Slavery, and the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, her greatest life-work ended. Since then, she has given much of her time to the Female Suffrage movement, and so late as November, 1871, she took an active part in the ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... laughter? When the heroic and exceptional young victim leaves the drawing-room, what a deluge of jokes bursts upon his innocent head? What a shower of insults! What is held to be more shameful in France than impotence, than coldness, than the absence ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... reply to the prosecuting attorney; but when I rose, I was completely confounded. Never shall I forget the pang of that impotence which seemed to overspread my frame, and to paralyze every faculty of thought and speech. I was the victim to my own ardor. A terrible reaction of mind had taken place, and I was prostrated. The desire to achieve greatness—the belief that ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... intelligent, and good woman is utterly thrown away and wasted. One of the early sociologists regarded every evil passion as a force which might by judicious management be turned to good, while among us even a fine, noble passion springs up and dies away in impotence, turned to no account, misunderstood ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... no denying the fact that with all his confidence his colors were sinking, while hers remained as gallantly fluttering as when the struggle began. He was becoming confused and nervous; a feeling of impotence began slyly, devilishly to assail him, and he frequently found himself far out at sea. The strange inactivity of the prince's cohorts, the significant friendliness of the duke, the everlasting fear that a sudden move might catch him unawares began to tell on ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... argue with any one save his mother. Always, when he was about to reduce her to impotence, she fell on him thus and rolled him in the ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... while being perfectly conscious of existing threatening evils, deliberately turn his back to appeals for help,—shut his ears to the cry of the "lost sheep of the House of Israel", and even endeavour, with an impotence of indignation which was as pitiable as useless, to shake a rod of Twelfth-century menace over the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the sun, She longed to look her last upon, beside The sea, which somehow tempts the life in us To come trip over its white waste of waves, And try escape from earth, and fleet as free. Behind the body I suppose there bends Old Pheres in his hoary impotence; And women-wailers, in a corner crouch —Four, beautiful as you four,—yes, indeed! Close, each to other, agonizing all, As fastened, in fear's rhythmic sympathy, To two contending opposite. There strains The might o' the hero 'gainst his more than match, —Death, dreadful not in thew and bone, ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... doctrines of this philosophy, and those of revealed truth.... For this philosophy is professedly a scientific demonstration of the impossibility of that 'wisdom in high matters' which the Apostle prohibits us even to attempt; and it proposes, from the limitation of the human powers, from our impotence to comprehend what, however, we must admit, to show articulately why the 'secret things of God,' cannot but be to man 'past finding out.'"[O] Faith in the inconceivable must thus become the ultimate refuge, even of the pantheist and the atheist, no less than of the ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... flood-gates of vituperation let loose upon Parnell. Not all at once did the question of his continued leadership arise. He had led his people, with an incomparable skill and intrepidity, not unequally matched with the genius of Gladstone himself, from a position of impotence and contempt to the supreme point where success was within their reach. A General Election, big with the fate of Ireland, was not far off. Was the matchless leader who had led his people so far and so well to disappear and to leave his country the prey of warring factions—he ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... to note that among several misconceptions that were held by some of the peoples of the Levant was one that coffee was a promoter of impotence, although a Persian version of the Angel Gabriel legend says that Gabriel invented it to restore the Prophet's failing metabolism. Often in Turkish and Arabian literature, however, we meet with the suggestion that ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... to hers, he looked closely into her eyes. And—perhaps it was something in his look that moved her—perhaps it was only the realisation of her own utter impotence—Dot suddenly hid her face upon his shoulder ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... blasts had strown the wreaths that erstwhile hung so gay, Above the brows of Queenston Heights where we impatient lay; Niagara fretted at our feet, as chafing at his post, And impotence to turn the fleets that bore ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... permit Kester and Chavis to think they could repeat the offense with impunity. That would be an indication of impotence, of servile yielding to the feminine edict that had already gone forth, and behind which Chavis and his men were even now hiding—the decree of the Flying W owner that there should be no taking of human life. His lips twisted crookedly as on the morning of the day ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... that what ain't cowards here are thieves,'" roared the Cap'n, beside himself, ashamed, enraged at his impotence before this boastful fool and his grim bulwark. His impulse was to cast caution to the winds and rush upon Luce. But reflection told him that, in this flush of his childish resentment and new prominence, Luce was capable of ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... of those who preach humanity while they practise unrestricted frightfulness have not deceived the Allies. They know, and have let the enemy know, that they must go on until they have made sure of an enduring peace by reducing the Central Empires to impotence for evil. ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... we had been telegraphing him since our arrest and my impotence made me speechless with rage. Douglas took advantage of my condition to beat ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... and to swear about the town that he has been belied and defamed in that he has been accused of bad grammar or a false metaphor, of a dull chapter, or even of a borrowed heroine, will leave on the minds of the public nothing but a sense of irritated impotence. ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... Priam Farll, opulent though he was and illustrious, had sunk to a tragic impotence. He could do nothing for himself; and he could do nothing for Leek, because Leek refused both brandy and sandwiches, and the larder consisted solely of brandy and sandwiches. The man lay upstairs there, comatose, ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... That if there be a God—as there is a God—these failures are not according to His will. The highest reason should teach us that; for it must tell us that in the work of the Divine Artist, as in the work of the human, imperfection, impotence, disorder of any kind, must be contrary to the mind and will of the Creator. The highest reason, I say, teaches us this. And Scripture teaches it like wise. For if we believe our Lord to have been as He was—the express image of the Almighty Father; if we believe ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... showed a splendid confidence in their own intuitions, a proud assertion of their own taste, which is the greatest evidence of aesthetic sincerity. On the contrary, our own gropings, eclecticism, and archaeology are the symptoms of impotence. If we were less learned and less just, we might be more efficient. If our appreciation were less general, it might be more real, and if we trained our imagination into exclusiveness, it might ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... my return, I was limited to a week, or must risk suspicion by staying. Dollmann was away (according to von Brning), 'would probably be back soon'; but how soon? Beyond Norderney lay Memmert. How to probe its secret? The ardour it had roused in me was giving way to a mortifying sense of impotence. The sight of the Kormoran, with her crew preparing for sea, was a pointed comment on my diplomacy, and most of all on my ridiculous survey of the dykes. When all was said and done we were protgs of von Brning, and dogged ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... and as she had walked unthinkingly into that room, so she had unsuspiciously fallen into the cruel iron jaws of the relentless machine. She sat in that chair by the fire, gazing at the hissing logs as they spat at the flames that licked them, and felt all the powerlessness, all the impotence, that the frightened rabbit knows when it is caught in ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... place of residence this section of the city I am just beginning to know has become very interesting to me. No one of importance lives near it, and the occupants of its houses, realizing their social submergence and pecuniary impotence, have too long existed in the protection of obscurity to venture into the publicity which civic attention necessitates, and on first acquaintance it is not attractive. I agree with my friends in that. I did not come here because I thought ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... His impotence exasperated him. He was jealous of this Carthage which contained Salammbo, as if of some one who had possessed her. His nervelessness left him to be replaced by a mad and continual eagerness for action. With flaming cheek, angry eyes, and ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... already come to pass, without design or mandatory guidance, in those lines of human interest where the national frontiers interpose no bar, or at least no decisive bar, whether by force of unconcern or through impotence. Fashions of dress, equipage and decorous usage, e.g., run with some uniformity throughout these modern nations, and indeed with some degree of prescriptive force. There is, of course, nothing mandatory, in the simpler sense, about all this; nor is the degree of conformity ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... Marrett's good-humoured face broke into mirth at the thought of the Ambassador's impotence and duplicity. ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... rights and wrongs, Of world's ideals vast and bright, And feels the impotence of songs To scourge the wrong or help the right; And only writhes to feel how vain Are songs as weapons for his fight; And so he turns to love again, And sings of ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... time to time, by the greatest ministers, from Walpole to Peel,—it has had, from its position, its power, and the talent at its command, every opportunity for doing the best things that a bank could do; and yet behold this record of periodical impotence! Its periodical mischiefs we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... Come forth by twos and threes, From the broad tower of Trinity, From the green gate of Caius: The wily bargeman marks them, And swears to do his worst; To turn to impotence their strength, And their ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... of July 3rd-5th had already disclosed with perfect clearness that a complete impotence reigned within the ruling Soviet parties at Petrograd. The garrison was far from being all on our side. There were still some wavering, undecided, passive elements. But if we should ignore the junkers, there ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... human kind desires and what they shun, Rage, passion, pleasure, impotence of will, Shall this satirical collection ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... revolutions of a garret 162. Old men in danger of falling into pupilage. The conduct of Thrasybulus 163. The mischiefs of following a patron 164. Praise universally desired. The failings of eminent men often imitated 165. The impotence of wealth. The visit of Scrotinus to the place of his nativity 166. Favour not easily gained by the poor 167. The marriage of Hymenaeus and Tranquilla 168. Poetry debased by mean expressions. An example from Shakespeare 169. Labour necessary to excellence ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... and yet all now a ruin and a blank; an intellect at war with good, and the good had conquered! But the conviction neither touched the conscience nor enlightened the reason; he felt, it is true, a moody sense of impotence, but it brought rage, not despondency. It was not that he submitted to Good as too powerful to oppose, but that he deemed he had not yet gained all the mastery over the arsenal of Evil. And evil he called it not. Good and evil to him were but subordinate genii at the ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... single effort may cost it its life; everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure; the desires, the regret, the sorrows, and the joys of the time, produce nothing that is visible or permanent, like the passions of old men which terminate in impotence. ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... conversation had not failed to delight the husbands, neither were his charms unsuccessful in affording satisfaction to their wives. To the one he railed against the impotence of the king's ministers, to the other he declaimed upon the wickedness of his majesty's mistresses; and to both his denunciations were equally sincere and acceptable. But his bitterest words were reserved for such courtiers as Rochester, Buckingham, and Killigrew, whose dissipated ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... equestrians we speak of were proceeding at a pace necessarily slow. One of them was a bluff, fresh-complexioned man, of about sixty summers; but although of a healthy look, and a frame that had evidently once been vigorous, yet he was a good deal stooped, had about him all the impotence of plethora, and his hair, which fell down his shoulders, was white as snow. The other, who rode pretty close to him, was much about his own age, or perhaps a few years older, if one could judge by a face that gave more undeniable evidences ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... accordingly. When we inquire into the origin of this facility in transforming fantasy into reality, for this omnipotence of the mere word or thought, we find it in the totally unreasonable overcompensation of these individuals for their feeling of impotence and weakness. This feeling of weakness and helplessness naturally becomes more acute under especially stressful situations of life, and hence it is that the criminal, especially the habitual criminal, who always uses deceit and simulation in his vain attempts ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... sudden and catastrophic, a violent change of emotional and volitional activity. When a man whose feeling has been repressed by sin and crusted over by deception, whose inner restlessness has been accumulating under the misery and impotence of a divided life, is brought into contact with Christian truth, he can only accept it through a volitional crisis, with its cleansing flood of penitence and confession and its blessed reward of the sense of pardon and peace and the relinquishment ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... fern-fringed stream, Nor knew that 'neath their shade most doughty Knights Daily rode forth to deeds of chivalry; And ruthless ruffians waged relentless war On those who strayed (without the Talisman Which turned their fury into impotence) Into those leafy depths nor dreamed there lurked Concealed amidst the bosky dells unseen, Grim dragons spouting instant death; nor feared The placid lake, along whose reed-fringed shore Bold Buccaneers swooped down ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... centers at the bases of which glowed his savage eyes. She thought of the rolling bitter voice with which she had once heard him stiffen the backs of his constituents, and she was sore afraid. She did not remember how much he loved her, or the impotence of his principles where she was concerned. And she did not recollect, for she had not been old enough to know, that the great bitter voice, with its heavy, telling sarcasm, had been lifted for ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... conditions, and the Duke of Guise entered Paris, where he was expected by the Leaguers, and whence he expelled Henry III. on the 12th of May, by the insurrection of the barricades. A fortnight after this insurrection, which reduced Henry III. to impotence, and, to use the language of the Prince of Parma, did not even 'permit him to assist the Queen of England with his tears, as he needed them all to weep over his own misfortunes,' the Spanish fleet left the Tagus and sailed towards ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... paint!—oh, God, if I could paint!' he groaned aloud, rubbing his hands together in a fever of impotence and misery. ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... morning of the fourth day from their leaving Epinal, Major Tempe told his men that he had learned, at Epinal, that the line was no longer so closely guarded as before—the Germans being confident, now, of the impotence of the French to harm them—and that they were now in the forest of Moudan, within three miles of the railway between Luneville and Rechicourt, on the line to Strasburg. His intention was to reconnoiter that day and—if success should be found possible—to attempt, at daybreak next ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... to it in the mouths of men. The publicity which beats on the pulpit makes veracity, down to the bottom of the soul, more necessary in the clerical than in any other calling. "A prime virtue in the pulpit is mental integrity. The absence of it is a subtle source of moral impotence. It concerns other things than the blunt antipodes represented by a truth and a lie. Argument which does not satisfy a preacher's logical instinct; illustration which does not commend itself to his aesthetic taste; a perspective of doctrine which is not true to the eye of his deepest ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... a heart-beat, appraising her. His hands lifted toward her and fell within the moment, as if it were in impotence. ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... the mind, repugnant to reason, and enemies in a high degree to the peace of the mind, and a tranquil life: for they introduce piercing and anxious cares, and afflict and debilitate the mind through fear; they violently inflame our hearts with exaggerated appetite; which is in reality an impotence of mind, utterly irreconcilable with temperance and moderation, which we sometimes call desire, and sometimes lust; and which, should it even attain the object of its wishes, immediately becomes so elated, that it loses all its resolution, and knows not what to pursue; so that he ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... a few tanks operating with them, but these met with little success, for everything was against them. One stopped a direct hit when immediately in front of a Turkish redoubt and was soon reduced to impotence by the concentrated fire poured into it. As a matter of fact the poor remains of the tank permanently occupied this position, and until it was taken months later Tank Redoubt was ever a thorn in the ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... angry gesture that was vaguely significant of future requital and present impotence, the vindictive creature swept aside the curtains and re-entered the room leading to the apartment occupied ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... crowds of these impenitently bold, In sounds and jingling syllables grown old, They run on poets, in a raging rein, E'en to the dregs and squeezings of the brain: Strain out the last dull droppings of their sense, And rhyme with all the rage of impotence. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... a sudden halt this sole activity permitted to him, this sole means of contact with his old profession. The doctor spent his summer between the horns of a dilemma: his disapproval of Reed's overworking, his greater disapproval of the need for thrusting Reed back into his former impotence. And, to all seeming, there was no middle ground. It would have taxed the strength even of a full-bodied man to have held together a reputation, under such handicaps as those beneath which Reed was working. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... strength of her sides and the long range of her heavy rifled guns, it was particularly desirable to anticipate her crossing the upper bar by the fleet itself crossing the lower. That done, the Tennessee was reduced to impotence. It was not done, for two reasons. First, the Navy Department did not send the ironclads which Farragut demanded; and second, the army in the Southwest, having wasted its strength in a divergent operation, was unable to supply the force necessary to reduce Fort ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... the verse 'Praestet fides,' and then it runs off the rails, taking no account of the shades, which are, however, quite perceptible, that the Gregorian melody introduces when the text declares the impotence of reason and the powerful aid of Faith; these adulterations are still more apparent, if you listen to the 'Salve Regina' after Compline. This is abridged more than half, is enervated, blanched, half its pauses are taken away, it is reduced to a mere stump of ignoble music, if you ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... believe untenable the position of a free State wedged in between the old despotism of Austria and the new one of France. The argument was ingenious and was likely to make converts. It was urgently necessary to form a new political combination which should reduce this party to impotence. ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... way," cried Jack, and jerked at the reins with a childish impotence of anger. "I beat you for the first quarter of a mile and then this fool of a horse—I'm going to give ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... white men of the South had been educated to regard themselves as, naturally, the factors of power and the colored people as, naturally, the subject class, no factor at all. It was these two things which produced that exhibition of barbarity on the part of the South and impotence on the part of the government which make us go to Roumania and the Byzantine court ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... between Austria and Prussia ended in 1866, when after Austria's defeat the clever diplomacy of Bismarck turned the rivalry between Austria and Prussia into friendship. Since the Germans in Austria began to feel their impotence in the face of the growing Slav power, a year later the centralising efforts of the Habsburgs were finally embodied in the system of dualism which gave over the Slavs and Italians in Austria to German hegemony and the Slavs and Rumanians in ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... effect on personal struggles for truth or holiness. It was human and worldly, not lofty nor even reverential, except among the few who had deep religious wants. One of its characteristic features was the acknowledged impotence of the gods to secure future happiness. In fact, the future was generally ignored, and even immortality was but a dream of philosophers. Men lived not in view of future rewards and punishments, or future existence ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... means of attack and obstruction which the enemy had it in their power to employ. Nothing is so unaccountable in this expedition as the manner in which such means were thrown away—the spectacle of Persian impotence. First, the whole line of upward march, including the passage of the Euphrates, left undefended; next, the long trench dug across the frontier of Babylonia, with only a passage of twenty feet wide left near the Euphrates, abandoned without ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... A hopeless feeling of impotence enveloped Gordon: the small, dry man before him with the pink, bald head shining in the lamplight, the set grin, was as remote from any appeal as an insensate figure cast in metal, a painted iron man in neat, grey alpaca, a stiff, white shirt with a small blue button ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... painfully making the voyage around Cape Horn,—then at Martinique, and, in short, at every conceivable point of menace. As a result of these conflicting reports, two American fleets were reduced to impotence. The "flying squadron" of fast cruisers under Commodore Schley was kept for weeks at moorings in Hampton Roads ready to be dispatched for protection of our northern coasts, while the squadron of battle-ships under Admiral Sampson was made to steam hither and yon in the Caribbean Sea looking for ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... Where art thou? How are thy wretched thoughts employed? Or art thou still allowed to think? Art thou among the living? If thou art, what is thy state! Thine is now the misery of impotence, thou who hast proved thyself so mighty in act! Thou wouldst not strike, thou wouldst not injure; and yet thy foe would sink before thee, had he not allied himself to perfidy, and had he but left thee free. His most secret machinations could not have withstood ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... must absolve criminals, and that punishment is an injustice? No, we must protect ourselves. Since society rests upon honesty, we must punish criminals to reduce them to impotence, and above all to strike them with terror, and halt others on the threshold of evil deeds. But once the crime is established, we must not look for excuses for it. We run the danger then of always finding excuses. We must condemn it in advance, by virtue of a cold principle. Justice ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... Europe will be filled with the broken furniture of palaces. No wonder that our ministers find the privileged orders willing to see the ominous republic split into two antagonistic forces, each paralyzing the other, and standing in their mighty impotence a spectacle to courts and kings; to be pointed at as helots who drank themselves blind and giddy out of that broken chalice which held ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... to receive a reward for their servitude, not for their piety and religion in this life. Nor is it even this hope alone that leads them; the fear of frightful punishments with which they are menaced after death also influences them to live—in so far as their impotence and poverty of spirit permits—in conformity with the prescription of the Divine law. And were not this hope and this fear infused into the minds of men—but, on the contrary, did they believe that the soul perished with the body, and that, beyond the grave, there was no other life prepared ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... overwhelming majority of the human race. Here and there in the mass you will see examples of a second type. These are individuals who are restive and resentful under the sense of helplessness and impotence. They struggle now gently, now furiously. They thrust backward or forward or to one side. They thresh about. But nothing comes of their efforts beyond a brief agitation, soon dying away in ripples. The inertia of the mass ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... bending in two and falling on his knees like a disjointed doll. Under the action of the chloroform, the fearsome brute sank into impotence, became harmless and grotesque. ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... a man to do in a case of that kind? I could simply retire to my own apartments; but I did it in such a passion of wrath and impotence that I could have taken that stupid and credulous old woman by the shoulders and shaken her to reason. I was too angry and disheartened to speak a word; but while I was pacing up and down the room, and wondering what my next move should be, the manager of the hotel presented himself, ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... the bristles, stops, hangs still, rolls his eyes, moon- large, and, in a fury of disappointment, goes out, leaving only the night, blacker and a little bewildered, and the unconscious throngs of ant-like human beings. Turning with terrified relief from this exhibition of diabolic impotence, the stranger finds a divine hand writing slowly across the opposite quarter of the heavens its igneous message of warning to the nations, "Wear—Underwear for Youths and Men- Boys." And close by this message come forth a youth and a man-boy, flaming and immortal, clad in celestial underwear, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... possible; the thunder-bolts of retribution have been long since launched by other hands; and yet still it happens that at times I do—I must—I shall perhaps to the hour of death, rise in maniac fury, and seek, in the very impotence of vindictive madness, groping as it were in blindness of heart, for that tiger from hell-gates that tore away my darling from my heart. Let me pause, and interrupt this painful strain, to say a word or two upon what she was—and how far worthy ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... no doubt that this signifies that he was induced, by the serene aspect of the waters, to venture on the treacherous sea, which having suddenly become troubled, the boy, in mortal fear, and in his impotence to still the tempest, has lost his head, his hope, and the power of his arm. But ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... go to his help, but I could do nothing, and the feeling of impotence began to rob me of such little power as ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... leapt and crept and jumped and ran, streaming with sweat; seeing the tall form rise before him, he stopped suddenly, dropped his hands in sullen impotence, and sank panting to the earth. A greyhound shot out of the woods behind him, howled, whined, and fawned before the stranger's feet. Hound after hound bayed, leapt, and lay there; then silently, one by one, and with bowed heads, they crept backward ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... unexpected moment, he might not pay THEM the same compliment which he had paid to Rosabella? As for the old women, they unanimously asserted that Abellino had sold himself to the Prince of Darkness, by whose assistance he was enabled to sport with the patience of all pious Venetians, and deride the impotence of their just indignation. The Cardinal and his associates were proud of their terrible confederate, and looking forward with confidence to the triumphant issue of their undertaking. The deserted family of Conari called down curses on his murderer's head, and wished that their tears ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... to do what the Commons asked; but in truth there was little to be done. The Irish, conscious of their impotence, submitted without a murmur. The Irish woollen manufacture languished and disappeared, as it would, in all probability, have languished and disappeared if it had been left to itself. Had Molyneux lived a few months longer he would probably have been impeached. But ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... domination by one race from a distant country, as a preventative against the aggression of another, a permanent and natural neighbour. Instead of developing strength to protect ourselves against those near whom we are permanently placed, a feeling of incurable impotence has been generated. Two strong and brave nations can live side by side, strengthening each other through enforcing constant vigilance, and maintain in full vigour each its own national strength, unity, patriotism and resources. If a nation wishes ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... queen were his bitter enemies. He feared them and fled away and lived in hiding.(2) He was afraid, lest he should be betrayed to them. He looked to his enemies; he saw their power; he looked at himself and saw his own impotence. And so he dwelt in fear. But the time came when God spoke to him, and as he looked to God he began to see His greatness and his soul was lifted up with courage. His own weakness and the might of his enemies faded away from his gaze. He came out boldly and challenged the idolatrous ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor |
