"Impotent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... local distress, and that of a distinction between the pauper and the vagabond, were more clearly defined in a statute of 1572. By this Act the justices in the country districts, and mayors and other officers in towns, were directed to register the impotent poor, to settle them in fitting habitations and to assess all inhabitants for their support. Overseers were appointed to enforce and superintend their labour, for which wool, hemp, flax, or other stuff was to be provided at the expense of the inhabitants; ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... gigantic size cowered in the dark green; the erythrina stood quietly there upright like a mountain of fire; everything rested voluptuously, or overwhelmed, in the glow of the higher-mounting sun—only the snowy importunity of the fountain wore itself out in impotent resistance to his sway. I too stood motionless in an unshaded opening; I no longer felt the glow as a burden; with rapture, with awe, with rapture I felt its untamable creative energy—just as years before, one cold winter night, I had felt its lust of destruction at a conflagration ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... of members or by the exclusion from representation of a requisite number of States, reduce the minority to less than one-third. Congress by these means might be enabled to pass a law, the objections of the President to the contrary notwithstanding, which would render impotent the other two departments of the Government and make inoperative the wholesome and restraining power which it was intended by the framers of the Constitution should be exerted by them. This would be a practical concentration of all power in the Congress of the United States; this, in the language ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... of Byron ranks with the meanest and most impotent actions of the militant oligarchists because of his shocking (?) sympathy with England's enemy. The fierce though exquisite weaver of rhymes, who had been the idol of the nation and the drawing-room, was sought after by the highest and most cultured in the ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... fallen back upon his pillow of folded flag, and the Red Ensign over him bubbled and heaved with his impotent paroxysms. ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... worthy Hartman Schedel, God rest his soul, one wonders whether he has yet learned that Columbus discovered America. He had not yet heard of it when he finished his book, though Columbus had returned to Spain three months before. O most lame and impotent conclusion! But the fifteenth century, though it had an infinite childlike curiosity, had no nose for news. Nuremberg nodded peacefully on while a new world loomed up beyond the seas, and studied Michael Wolgemut's picture of Noah building the ark while Columbus was fitting out the Santa Maria ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... little more faded, a little more hesitant, but altogether, by no means unhappy. He was invited into her father's office for a long discussion. The result was that the two lovers fell into each others' arms while her father, trembling with impotent rage, hurled at them the ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... in a whisper. My voice sounded husky to me, and my throat felt parched. The child's impotent rage and hatred struck ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... impotent resentment, Paul Beaufoy looked up into the not unkindly eyes turned down to his. A physiognomist would have said it was a reckless face rather than an evil one. The blade had been lowered, but Jan's muscular hands still held his elbows behind his back in an iron grip; beyond him was Michault. ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... a hideous leer—oh, words are impotent to express the ugliness of that face! "Really, Monsieur, supposing I had stolen Miladi, you would be the last person I should inform of her whereabouts. You are simple, Monsieur. I had always heard that England was a country of arcadian innocence, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... imprisoned mind heard him in the depths of its dark, degrading purgatory. But the lips moved and a long groan made answer; a far-off wail, a despairing appeal caused the glance Francoise and her son exchanged to overflow with impotent tears, and drew from them both a simultaneous cry in which their sorrows met: Pecaire! the local word expressive ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... this would, I believe, solve the problem of sterility from hybridism. If you should ever hear of individual fowls or pigeons which are sterile together, I should be very grateful to hear of the case. It is a parallel case to those recorded of a man not impotent long living with a woman who remained childless; the husband died, and the woman married again and had plenty of children. Apparently (by no means certainly) this first man and woman were dissimilar in their sexual organisation. I conceive it possible that their offspring (if both had married again ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... impotent, for it rather made Gordon persist in carrying out his resolve than deterred him from doing so. His reply was thus worded: "Arrange retirement, commutation, or resignation of service; ask Campbell reasons. My counsel, if asked, would be for peace, not war. I return by America." Gordon's mind ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... "it can be. This chap"—I listened as might a prisoner in the dock to the argument of counsel, interested but impotent—"don't know enough to come in out of the rain, as the saying is. 'E's just the sort of chap this sort ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German prince that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign prince; your efforts are forever vain and impotent—doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies, to overrun them with the mercenary sons of rapine and plunder, devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... looks, As yet in their astonied hearing rung The strange sweet angel-tongue: The magi of the East, in sandals worn, Knelt reverent, sweeping round, With long pale beards, their gifts upon the ground, The incense, myrrh, and gold These baby hands were impotent to hold: So let all earthlies and celestials wait Upon thy royal state. Sleep, sleep, my ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... and in spite of himself, and as if bound to obey orders, the lad took a step forward again, when, to his utter amazement, the bison bulls, now not twenty yards away, stopped short, shook their heads at him, made some impotent tosses in the air, pawed up a little grass, and then turned altogether, and trotted back to take up their old position ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... "Mana" better than "god" or "spirit" may express that with which the partaker in the communal feast originally sought contact. "When you sacrifice," to quote some words of Miss Jane Harrison, "you build as it were a bridge between your mana, your will, your desire, which is weak and impotent, and |177| that unseen outside mana which you believe to be strong and efficacious. In the fruits of the earth which grow by some unseen power there is much mana; you want that mana. In the loud-roaring bull and ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... unbridled, ungoverned, uncurbed, riotous, impotent, saturnalian, rampant; licentious, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... in which we might follow him. We came upon his horse, quietly cropping the plants that grew at the foot of the cliff. The moon shining seawards, we were in shadow, so that had Vetch been looking from the brig, he would not have seen me as I raged up and down in impotent fury, nor my companions as they sat themselves down, troubled, like myself, but not ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... agony they endure and how very dark their odd convulsive species of existence is made, only that one man may buy forgetfulness by the glass. If I let my imagination loose, I can hear the immense army of the young crying to the dumb and impotent sky, and they all cry for bread. Mercy! how the little children suffer! And I have seen them by the hundred—by the thousand—and only helped from caprice; I could do no other. The iron winter is nearing us, and soon ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... alter it." But not on such terms, can I, for one, live. To know, to have some assurance—that is the one and only thing that matters at all. For if I once believed that God were careless, or indifferent, or impotent, I would fly from life as an accursed thing; whereas I would give all the peace, and joy, and contentment, that may yet await me upon earth, and take up cheerfully the heaviest burden that could be devised of darkness and pain, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... after them. When they had gone, he again knelt down close to the two coffins, his white locks falling about his face, raised his clasped hands to his tremulous but impotent lips, and kept gazing, gazing fixedly first at one of his dear departed and ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... brothers start from rest, And all their Furies wake within their breast: Their tortured minds repining Envy tears, And Hate, engender'd by suspicious fears: And sacred thirst of sway, and all the ties Of nature broke; and royal perjuries; And impotent desire to reign alone, 180 That scorns the dull reversion of a throne: Each would the sweets of sovereign rule devour, While ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... shelving shore, small, puny wavelets dashed in impotent fury, and the shingle sang unceasingly its dreary, syncopated monotone. High and dry, a few dingy boats lay canted wearily upon their broad, swelling sides,—a couple of dories, apparently in daily use; a small sloop ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... lest an infuriated hippopotamus should follow them. One harpoon had missed; the other had fixed the bull of the herd, at which it had been surely aimed. This was grand sport! The bull was in the greatest fury, and rose to the surface, snorting and blowing in his impotent rage; but as the ambatch float was exceedingly large, and this naturally accompanied his movements, he tried to escape from his imaginary persecutor, and dived constantly, only to find his pertinacious attendant close to him upon regaining the surface. This was not to last long; the howartis ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... through the loop formed by the lashing of his wrists behind him, he had recognized a Chinese training, and had resigned himself to the inevitable. The wooden gag was a sore trial, and if it had not broken his spirit it had nearly caused him to break an artery in his impotent fury. ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... their powers of attainment. Many envy and desire wealth, who can never procure it by honest industry or useful knowledge. They therefore turn their eyes about to examine what other methods can be found of gaining that which none, however impotent or worthless, will ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... the serious tales, such as those of the creation, he is spoken of respectfully, and there is no hint of the impish qualities which characterize him in other stories, in which he is powerful, but also at times impotent; full of all wisdom, yet at times so helpless that he has to ask aid from the animals. Sometimes he sympathizes with the people, and at others, out of pure spitefulness, he plays them malicious tricks that are worthy of a demon. He is a combination ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... Dorothy that Ilbrahim's brief and troubled pilgrimage drew near its close. The two former would willingly have remained by him to make use of the prayers and pious discourses which they deemed appropriate to the time, and which, if they be impotent as to the departing traveller's reception in the world whither he goes, may at least sustain him in bidding adieu to earth. But, though Ilbrahim uttered no complaint, he was disturbed by the faces that looked upon him; ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of Christianity was impotent to arrest the annual scenes of disorder; and, in some form or another—sometimes tolerated, sometimes the object of the Church's anathema—the tradition held its own down through the Dark Ages, and we meet with the substance of the Saturnalia, ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... the trout. For all these years the fishes have been trying to mount the waterfalls in order to ascend to the plateau above. Year after year, as the spawning-time came on, they leaped against the falls of the Gardiner, the Gibbon, and the Firehole Rivers, but only to fall back impotent in the pools at their bases. But the mightiest cataract of all, the great falls of the Yellowstone, they finally conquered, and in this way it was done: not by the trout of the Yellowstone River, ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... by tears Andre-Louis stumbled after them when they bore the body into the inn. Upstairs in the little room to which they conveyed it, he knelt by the bed, and holding the dead man's hand in both his own, he swore to him out of his impotent rage that M. de La Tour d'Azyr should pay a bitter price ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... of the song Anstice was back in the hideous past, back in the fatal Temple which had proved the antechamber to the halls of Death ... he heard again the chatter of native voices, smelt the odd, indescribable perfume of the East, felt the dread, the impotent horror of that bygone adventure in the ruined ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... of ourselves altogether insufficient for these things, we are weak and impotent; and our Saviour hath told us, "Without me ye can do nothing:" We are justified freely by God's grace, through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ; not justified by our own works. How great a contradiction is it to charge them with the contrary, that say, They ...
— A Sermon Preached at the Quaker's Meeting House, in Gracechurch-Street, London, Eighth Month 12th, 1694. • William Penn
... in their course; neither can we check any of those moral movements that gravitate with irresistible force towards their center of attraction: Justice. The moral world is governed by the same laws as the physical world, and all the power of man being impotent to suppress a single molecule of the spaces required for the gravitation of the universe, it is still less able to prevent the generation of the ideas that take shape in the mind and strive to attain to fruition in the field of ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... things on it were visible. When they passed the Scorpion and only just missed destruction from its menacing fangs, fear entered into the boy's heart. His mother had spoken truth. He was only partly a god, and he was very, very young. In impotent horror he tugged at the reins to try to check the horses' descent, then, forgetful of Apollo's warning, he smote them angrily. But anger met anger, and the fury of the immortal steeds had scorn for the wrath of a mortal boy. With a great toss of their ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... for a minute or two, then, with a smothered oath upon his lips, he turned slowly to the door and opened it. Before leaving the room, however, he said, in a voice half-stifled by impotent passion— ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... to this curse, Or ere some god appear to bear thy pangs On his own head vicarious, and descend With unreluctant step the darks of hell, And the deep glooms enringing Tartarus! Then ponder this: the threat is not growth Of vain invention—it is spoken and meant! For Zeus's mouth is impotent to lie, And doth complete the utterance in the act. So, look to it, thou! take heed! and nevermore Forget good counsel to ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... listened with a world of comprehension in her eyes more eloquent than speech, not attempting to arrest the fury of imprecation or the prophecies of vengeance which poured from his lips. Hers was that undoubting, undivided, implicit faith which is so dear to the wounded pride and impotent strength of a man in trouble who is conscious that what he longs to do would not be approved by law or sanctioned by religion. That faith spoke in her eyes, in her absorbed attention, in the few breathless sentences which escaped ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... and God's Church. He can shake it at times by the storms he raises; but vain are his attempts to overthrow it. The mark of Satan's fury is stamped on the roof of Franceses's lowly cell; but the relics of the canonised Saint now fill the chamber which, in his impotent rage, the tempter once sought to destroy. But this life of wonders, of trials, and of miracles, was drawing to a close. She who had been the holiest of maidens, of wives, and of widows, had all but finished ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... anarch, is passing. It is safer to be a soldier than a working-man. The chance for life is greater in an active campaign than in a factory or a coal-mine. In the matter of killing, war is growing impotent, and this in face of the fact that the machinery of war was never so expensive in the past nor so dreadful. War-equipment to- day, in time of peace, is more expensive than of old in time of war. A standing army costs more to maintain than it used to cost to conquer ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... alliance that insured great wealth, that promised a secure stepping-stone to political preferment, was apparently a substantial bulwark against the swelling billows of an unaccountable whim; yet he was impotent to resist the yearning tenderness which impelled him to forget all else, in one determined effort to rescue and shelter the life he had been the chief agent in imperilling. Clear eyed, keen witted, he did not for an instant deceive himself; and he knew that neither compassion for misfortune, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... published by the Secretary of the American Iron-Association, and by authority of the same. This Association—now four years old—is not a common trades-union, nor any impotent combination to resist the law of supply and demand. Its general objects, as stated in the constitution, are "to procure regularly the statistics of the trade, both at home and abroad; to provide for the mutual interchange of information and experience, both scientific and practical; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Jacques Cartier could not have been more cordial. The chief or Agouhanna, who was crippled in all his limbs, begged the captain to touch them, as if he had asked him for a cure. Then the blind, and those who were blind in one eye, the lame, and the impotent came and sat down near Jacques Cartier, that he might touch them, so thoroughly were they persuaded that he was a god descended to heal them. "The said captain, seeing the faith and piety of this people, recited the Gospel of St. John, namely: In principio, making the sign ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... finger negligently into the mane on the Horse Vivian's neck, and pulled himself slowly into the saddle. The policeman stood mysteriously impotent. Water dripped loudly from his clothes and ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... chair now is empty, And the impotent girl is away, While the night and the darkness covered Such a deed from the light ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... man is in some way violating the laws of his physical nature. He is secretly destroying himself. Yet, say his unconscious and admiring friends, 'He is falling a victim to his own diligence!' Most lame and impotent conclusion! He is sapping the very source of life, and erelong will be a mind in ruins or a heap of dust. Young man, beware of his example! 'Keep thyself pure;' observe the laws of your physical nature, and the most unrelaxing industry will ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... a-sneakin' up and settin' your dogs on me." Mother Borton again drew on an apparently inexhaustible vocabulary of oaths. "Oh, you're as bad as him," she shouted, "and I reckon you'd be worse if you knowed how." And she spat out more curses, and shook her fist in impotent but verbose rage. ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... prospect of a general convention of the States to consider the reorganization of a government which had reduced the Confederation to a condition fearfully close to anarchy, the country to ruin, and brought upon the thirteen sovereign independent impotent and warring States the contempt of Europe and ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... I love most is the stealing in of night, when the sky takes on that strange elusive purple; when eyes turn to the evening star and marvel at its brightness; when the Eiffel Tower becomes a strange, shadowy stairway yearning in impotent effort to the ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... proportions, towered over Christine's huddled body, his eyes terrible, his fists clenched and raised to strike. Then in that moment, at the very height of his awful fear and helpless hatred, the wonderful truth burst upon Robert, and he danced gleefully, full of cruel triumph, about the black, suddenly impotent figure, shouting: ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... filled itself with something that had not been there before, his impotent love. Hilda knelt down beside the bed and pressed her forehead against the hand upon the covering, the hand that had so little more ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... prayers for punishment have been impotent expressions of exasperation at our coolness, deliberation, and inflexible determination—qualities they had deluded themselves before the war into believing would prove all a sham before the first blast of frightfulness. They told themselves that, ...
— Fragments From France • Captain Bruce Bairnsfather
... twentieth century soldier and then we were turned by him into a waiting room. It was floored with marquetry, ceiled with brown and gold decoration—but modern enough—and walled in old tapestry. The room expressed the ornate impotent gorgeousness of a useless leisure class. Four or five tables, cases and stands, backed standoffishly against the tapestry on the walls, and the legs and bases of this furniture were great—unbelievably great, rococo gilded legs—legs that writhed ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... particular, a class of young men who nibble away an income of fifteen hundred francs with the same air with which their prototypes devour two hundred thousand francs a year in Paris. These are beings of the great neuter species: impotent men, parasites, cyphers, who have a little land, a little folly, a little wit; who would be rustics in a drawing-room, and who think themselves gentlemen in the dram-shop; who say, "My fields, my peasants, my woods"; who hiss actresses at the theatre to prove that they are persons ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... yours. But is it even mine? It is mine indeed to offer you, as I might take the coin from my neck, as I might break a live branch from a tree, and give it you. And yet not mine! I dwell, or I think I dwell (if I exist at all), somewhere apart, an impotent prisoner, and carried about and deafened by a mob that I disown. This capsule, such as throbs against the sides of animals, knows you at a touch for its master; ay, it loves you! But my soul, does my soul? I think not; I know not, fearing to ask. Yet when you spoke to ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of my Men Readers, and the bashful Grace in the Faces of my Women; but in all Cases which come into Debate, there are certain things previously to be done before we can have a true Light into the Subject Matter; therefore it will, in the first Place, be necessary to consider the impotent Wenchers and industrious Haggs, who are supplied with, and are constantly supplying new Sacrifices to the Devil of Lust. You are to know then, if you are so happy as not to know it already, that the great Havock which is made in the Habitations of Beauty ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... as I struggled to repress a sob, and hastily wiped away some tears, the impotent evidences of ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... of things. On the seacoast, vast losses uncompensated; on the frontier, Indian war and actual encroachment on our territory; everywhere discontent; resentments tenfold more fierce because they will be more impotent and humbled; national discord and abasement. The disputes of the old treaty of 1783, being left to rankle, will revive the almost extinguished animosities of that period. Wars in all countries, and most of all in such ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... span separated the foremost from the boy. And now the iron hook fell at his feet, and the fireman stood upon the step with the rescued lad in his arms, just as the pent-up flame burst lurid from the attic window, reaching with impotent fury for its prey. The next moment they were safe upon the great ladder waiting ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... still rubbing his cheek disconsolately and muttering impotent threats against his now unconscious assailant; but, he didn't do this until he was certain Larkyns could not hear good wishes ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... pages of Plautus we have all passed through a similar experience. In the beginning we have been vastly diverted by the quips and cranks and merry wiles of the knavish slave, the plaints of love-lorn youth, the impotent rage of the baffled pander, the fruitless growlings of the hungry parasite's belly. We have been amused, perhaps astonished, on further reading, at meeting our new-found friends in other plays, clothed in different names to be sure and supplied in part with a fresh stock of jests, but ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... progress of this astonishing revolution with impotent surprise. Stefano Colonna, who was absent on the eventful day, expressed his scorn of the mob and their leader. But a popular attack on his palace convinced him of his error and forced him to fly from the city. Within fifteen days the triumph of Rienzi seemed to be complete, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... those understandings I have been able to provoke: for anger and fury, though they add strength to the sinews of the body, yet are found to relax those of the mind, and to render all its efforts feeble and impotent. ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... is impotent; what worth to trim The bending sails! Look, I shall quaff a cup To Fate, while the wild ocean swallows up The shipwrecked youth, the man who ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... rich relations might have paid his debts or compounded for 'em. Besides, he had taken US in. He owed us immense sums all round. I would sooner have strangled him than had no return. If I sit here thinking of him," snarls the old man, holding up his impotent ten fingers, "I want to strangle him now." And in a sudden access of fury, he throws the cushion at the unoffending Mrs. Smallweed, but it passes harmlessly on one side of ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... continually with fierce eyes, and we felt that she was tortured by a wild longing for revenge. That seemed to us to be the most suitable punishment for the terrible torments that she had made Piedelot suffer, for impotent vengeance is ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... give license to impotent persons to beg within certain limits, and, if found begging out of their limits, they shall be set in the stocks. Beggars without license to be whipped or set in the stocks. All persons able to labor, who shall beg or be vagrant, shall be whipped and sent to the place of their birth. Parishes to ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... that poured from the North, and the Church of God alone stood safe and firm, with the rainbow of heaven around her, the stern warriors of Germany asserted their rights, or redressed their wrongs with the sword, and scorned to bow before the impotent decrees of a civil tribunal. A regular system of private warfare gradually sprang up, which falsely led every man of honor to revenge any real or fancied offence offered to any of his kindred. The most deadly enmity frequently existed between neighboring chiefs, and the ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... come, Dickie, flying to his chair, was greeted by a cold, unsmiling word, and a businesslike quotation from the menu. He felt as though he had been struck. His face burned. In the West, a fellow couldn't do that and get away with it! He tightened an impotent, thin fist. He filled the order and kept his distance, and, absurdly enough, gave Lorrimer's tip to another waiter and went without his own dinner. For the first time in his life a sense of social ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... the base of the Loewenburg. In the excitement of the chase he outstripped his followers, his quarry disappeared, and, overtaken by night, his surroundings, in the dim light, took on such an unfamiliar aspect that he completely lost all sense of direction. Up and down he paced in unrestrained yet impotent anger, feeling that he was under some evil spell. Maddened by this idea, he endeavoured to hack his way through the thick undergrowth, but the matted boughs and dense foliage were as effectual as prison bars. He was trapped, he told himself, in some ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... having expended her breath and exhausted her epithets, was fain to pause a moment, though both her fists were shaken in the prisoner's face, and the whole of her wrinkled countenance was filled with fierce resentment. Deerslayer looked upon these impotent attempts to arouse him as indifferently as a gentleman in our own state of society regards the vituperative terms of a blackguard: the one party feeling that the tongue of an old woman could never injure a warrior, and the other knowing that mendacity and vulgarity can only permanently affect ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... with much talk about Progress of the Species, Dark Ages, Prejudice, and the like; so that all were quickly enough blown out into a state of windy argumentativeness; whereby the better sort had soon to end in sick, impotent Scepticism; the worser sort explode (crepiren) in finished Self-conceit, and to all spiritual intents become dead.—But this too is portion of mankind's lot. If our era is the Era of Unbelief, why murmur under it; is there ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... however strange, is not incredible, will appear from this anecdote. Some obscure Greek, who was a litigant, had an altercation with him, in which he called out, "You are an old fool." [493] It is certain that a Roman knight, who was prosecuted by an impotent device of his enemies on a false charge of abominable obscenity with women, observing that common strumpets were summoned against him and allowed to give evidence, upbraided Claudius in very harsh and severe terms with his folly and cruelty, and threw his style, and ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... decaying corpses, the ghastly mutilations they had seen in the dead. There were tales, too, of "vengeance" wreaked on "the treacherous English." One story, in particular, of the fate of a Scottish Sergeant ... "der Hochlaender" they called him in this oft-told tale ... still makes me quiver with impotent rage when I ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... under the rapid progress of civilization, the population increased and the fields were cultivated. The nobility, reduced to moderation by the enfeebling consequences of extensive foreign wars, became comparatively impotent in their attempted efforts against domestic freedom. Those of Flanders and Brabant, also, were almost decimated in the terrible battle of Bouvines, fought between the Emperor Othon and Philip Augustus, king of France. On no occasion, however, had this reduced but ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... "Matter?" A sharp, impotent oath broke from him. Then he checked his impulse to rave. "Yes. See here, Nita," he went on, with a restraint which added deep impressiveness, "we've got to quit. We've got to get out—quick. Steve's hard on our trail. I've seen ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... feature of him here; you would never dream that this Book treated of him at all. A pale sickly shadow in torn surplice is presented to us here; weltering bewildered amid heaps of what you call 'Hebrew Old-clothes;' wrestling, with impotent impetuosity, to free itself from the baleful imbroglio, as if that had been its one function in life: who in this miserable figure would recognize the brilliant, beautiful and cheerful John Sterling, with his ever-flowing wealth of ideas, fancies, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... we cannot take it for granted that it is intended for Alexander, and still less that it is the work of Lysippus. It is difficult to imagine that the favored and devoted artist of the mighty conqueror would choose to portray his great master in a painful and impotent struggle with disease and death. This consideration makes it extremely improbable that it was executed during the lifetime of Alexander, and the whole character of the work, in which free pathos is the prevailing element, and its close resemblance in style ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... cool and capable, was now sharpened like a hunted beast's. His imagination was preying on him and I could picture its torture. He, who had been always at the top directing the machine, was now only a cog in it. He had never in his life been anything but powerful; now he was impotent. He was in a hard, unfamiliar world, in the grip of something which he feared and didn't understand, in the charge of men who were in no way amenable to his persuasiveness. It was like a proud and bullying manager suddenly forced to labour in a squad of navvies, and worse, for there ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... in Domremy. My family had fled to those distant regions from the neighborhood of Paris in the first years of the century. In politics they were Armagnacs—patriots; they were for our own French King, crazy and impotent as he was. The Burgundian party, who were for the English, had stripped them, and done it well. They took everything but my father's small nobility, and when he reached Neufchateau he reached it in poverty and with ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... passionate flame of impotent anger. He had insulted her, trampled down the pride of her untamed youth, brushed away the bloom of her maiden modesty. And there was nothing she could do to make him pay. He was too insensitive to be reached by words, no matter how she pelted ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... Maulevrier. He might ostensibly leave Fellside before Lesbia's return, yet lurk in the neighbourhood, and contrive to meet her every day. If Maulevrier encouraged this folly, they might be married and over the border, before her ladyship—fettered, impotent as she ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... funeral oration on Louis XIII. summed up briefly but significantly the result of Richelieu's gigantic efforts to consolidate the regal power. "Sixty-three kings," it said, "had preceded him in rule of the realm, but he alone had rendered it absolute, and what all collectively had been impotent to achieve in the course of twelve centuries for the grandeur of France, he had accomplished in the short space of thirty-three years." It was against that absolute power incarnate in Richelieu, which from the steps of the throne hurled men to the earth with its bolts rather than governed ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... was, hearing nothing but the echo of her laugh, unable to think save of the truth that was driven so cruelly into my mind. The first realising of things that cannot be undone brings to a young man a fierce impotent resentment; that was in my heart, and with it a sudden revulsion from what I had desired, as intemperate as the desire, as cruel, it may be, as the thing which gave it birth. Nell's laughter died away, and she was silent. Presently ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... an adequate, socially acceptable manner, and therefore has to resort to constant deceit and lying, and in which those inhibitions determined by social, ethical, and aesthetic considerations are equally impotent. The marked egotistic trend which constantly comes to the surface in the habitual liar when he attempts to play the part of the hero and central figure in the most fantastic, bizarre, and impossible ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... decidedly opposed to any rash movement, and against the idea of secession at this time. I did so because I think that Lincoln's administration will fail, and be regarded as impotent for good or evil within four months after his inauguration. We are to meet ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... her savagely, and would have liked to strike her, to beat out his passion on her white breast and shoulders. But she had spoken only the truth when she said he dare not touch her. With impotent oaths he sought to let off the anger that boiled in him. He feared to think, and every word she had uttered made him think in spite of himself. The events of sixty hours had destroyed what little of good there was in the man. Save only the idolatrous ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... impotent at the conclusion of the narrative. As long as he had conceived himself to be attacking a force of pirates and thieves, he was ready to board this great vessel, hunt for an engineer, or attempt any desperate scheme. But now when ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... that Mrs. Kerr the departed could have given her young daughter-in-law a few wrinkles had she met her—wrinkles of the most unprofitable kind upon her fair face; but as it was, Mrs. Kerr senior lay quietly afar off from No. 30 Welham Mansions, impotent to reform, and Osborn lay thinking his thoughts in silence while Marie, having dressed to petticoat and camisole, wreathed up her ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... at the beginning of each quarter of the year, so traversing till doomsday, being impotent of staying in one place, and finding some ease by so purning [journeying] and changing habitations. Their chameleon-like bodies swim in the air near the earth with bag and baggage; and at such revolution of time, ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... me rend impotent, Cul-de-jatte, goutteux, manchot, pourvu qu'en somme Je vive, c'est assez; je suis ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... vowing the most intense vengeance upon the college boys. The occurrence naturally caused him to cast back his thoughts to that other trick-the locking him into the cloisters, in which Jenkins had been a fellow-victim—and he doubled his fists in impotent anger. "This comes of their not having been flogged ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... to furnish positive proof of a future life for us. But this negation fully admitted is no evidence of our total mortality. Science is impotent to give any proof reaching to such a conclusion. However badly the archery of the sharp eyed and strong armed critics of disbelief has riddled the outer works of ordinary argument, it has not slain the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... and intellectual advantages that had been transplanted from Europe. On the contrary, we had been taught to regard them as most unfortunate in the circumstances under which [11] they so gloriously conquered their merited freedom. We saw them free, but perfectly illiterate barbarians, impotent to use the intellectual resources of which their valour had made them possessors, in the shape of books on the spirit and technical details of a highly developed national existence. We had learnt also, until this new interpreter of history had contradicted ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... Roman and Grecian races had become impotent and decrepit. The high destiny of man lay not with them, but with the younger race, for whom all earlier civilizations had but prepared ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... conjunction.' Thereupon I instantly clasped the Succubus with passion by the light of a thousand million of stars, and I wished in clasping her to feel the nature of those thousand million creatures. Then by this great effort of love I fell impotent in every way, and heard a great infernal laugh. Then I found myself in my bed, surrounded by my servitors, who had had the courage to struggle with the demon, throwing into the bed where I was stretched a basin full of holy water, and saying fervent ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... the Channel carrying Sir John French's little army to the Continent, while the boasted German fleet, impotent to menace the safety of our transports, lay helpless—bottled up, to quote Mr. Asquith's phrase, "in the inglorious seclusion of ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... people who offer vague commonplaces, or what they call "hopes;" she was spared also that savage disappointment to which many are doomed who in their trouble find that all philosophy fails them, and the books on their shelves look so impotent, so beside the mark, that they narrowly escape being ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... the door shut on him and paced up and down in an impotent fury of passion. "The dirty little blackleg! He'd like to bracket me in the same class as himself. He'd like to imply that I—By Heaven, if he opens his lying mouth to a hint of such a thing I'll horsewhip the ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... the baronet, with a sneer of contempt, "only you have mistaken your man. I am no subject for your craft—not to be deceived by your hypocrisy—and laugh to scorn your ominous but impotent croaking. Only before you go, remember the conditions I have offered the scoundrel who robbed me; and if the theological intricacies of your crooked creed will permit you, try and get him to accept them. It will be better for him, and better for you too. Do this, and ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... been brought to nought by the craft of an idle and vicious young man, and the wickedness of a faithless duena, working upon the weakness of an artless and inexperienced girl. Heaven save us all from such enemies as these, against whom the shield of prudence and the sword of vigilance are alike impotent to defend us! ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... a tiny set of almshouses, whose lowly gables line the road under the castle hill. They were built by Andrew Windsor, of the parish of Bentley in Hampshire, in 1619, and were intended, as an inscription on the wall informs you, "For the Habitation and Relief of eight poor Honest Impotent Old Persons." Even with four epithets, the almoners seem ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... boldest beauties round, The varied valley, and the mountain ground Wildly majestic: what is all the pride Of flats with loads of ornament supplied? Unpleasing, tasteless, impotent expense, Compared with Nature's rude magnificence. Oft on some evening, sunny, soft, and still, The Muse shall hand thee to the beech-grown hill, To spend in tea the cool, refreshful hour, Where nods in air the pensile, nest-like bower; Or where the Hermit hangs his straw-clad ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... Rovere, Duke of Urbino, commanded a considerable army as general of the Church, and was now acting for Venice. Why he effected no diversion while the Imperial troops were marching upon Rome, and why he delayed to relieve the city, was never properly explained. Folk attributed his impotent conduct partly to a natural sluggishness in warfare, and partly to his hatred for the house of Medici. Leo X had deprived him of his dukedom, and given it to a Medicean prince. It is to this that Cellini probably refers in the cautious ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... 'that the trouble came at once. Of course we can never put down the reason in black and white, but all India will understand. And it is better to have a sharp short outbreak than five years of impotent administration inside the Border. It costs less. Grish Chunder De has reported himself sick, and has been transferred to his own province without any sort of reprimand. He was strong on not having taken over ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... of contempt that scarecrow gave him out of his unquenchable eyes. He seemed to live only by the force of infuriated and impotent despair. Suddenly he gave a gasp and fell forward writhing in the agony of cramp in all his limbs; a not unusual effect of the heat of a camp-fire. It resembled the application of some horrible torture. But he tried to fight against the pain at ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... terrace, impotent, watching him as he crossed the lawn and made for the fields. It was a terrible day for her. She felt that she couldn't go to church in her usual way, but stayed at home tortured by the most hopeless and tragic anticipations of evil. At lunch time he had ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... the royal party. He calmly replied, 'It is some days since this invention has been spread among the deputies; I was aware of it from the first; but from its being utterly impossible to be listened to for a moment by any one, I did not wish to afflict you by the mention of an impotent fabrication, which I myself treated with the contempt it justly merited. Nevertheless, I did not forget, yesterday, in the presence of both my brothers, who accompanied me to the National Assembly, there to exculpate myself from an imputation at which my nature revolts; and, from ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... that I am changed, that right and wrong grow dark to me, that hypocrisy seems the atmosphere fit for earth. No; it is since the discovery that demands the vengeance. It is useless, sir," he continued impetuously,—"useless to argue with me. Were I to sit down, patient and impotent, under the sense of the wrong which I have received, I should feel, indeed, that debasement which you ascribe to the gratification of what you term revenge. I should never regain the self-esteem which the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he paced the floor of his little bed-chamber, fuming and swearing to himself in a mild, impotent fashion—and in some dread of the door. Such words and sentences as these fell from his lips:—"Nobody!" "Keeps me on the place!" "Because she's tender-hearted!" "I will fire her!" "Can't talk back to me!" "Damned Irisher!" And so on and so forth until he quite wore himself ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... the Colonel and his Lieutenant took place three days after that first one, in which the unexpected presence of a lady had prevented Ivan from giving his opponent so much as a suggestion of his vantage-point. It came about thus. When Brodsky, already in a state of impotent wrath at the audacity of his officer's reproof, received from Ivan's orderly the full sum of Petrovna's debt, together with a highly imprudent letter from Mademoiselle Irina, who did not scruple to mention ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... and threw myself back upon the divan. Karamaneh stretched out her hands toward me, and I shall never forget the expression which flashed into those glorious eyes; but, seeing me intolerant of her appeal, she drew back and quickly turned her head aside. Even in this hour of extremity, of impotent wrath, I could find no contempt in my heart for her feeble hypocrisy; with all the old wonder I watched that exquisite profile, and Karamaneh's very deceitfulness was a salve—for had she not cared she would not have ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... knew well in those early hours of Wednesday, the 5th, that the end had already come. He also knew the value of even a few hours' hopeless resistance, not perhaps to the material side of the Allied strategy, but to the support of those moral forces lacking which men are impotent in maintaining a challenge. Not only all that Wednesday, the 5th, but all the Thursday, the 6th, he maintained a line against the pressure of the invaders with his imperfect and ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... after another in the head of the girl and confused and tortured her, impotent as she was to set up against them some definite, all-conquering desire. Though she was in an anxious and compressing her lips. Smolin rose from his chair, made a step toward her and bowed respectfully. She was rather pleased with this low ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... though he had escaped from the house of his meditated crime, he was still in great peril. Doubtless Julius had given full information to the police of his name and residence, and even now they might be in pursuit of him. He ground his teeth when he thought of this, and clinched his fist in the impotent desire for vengeance. ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... with memories and conquered his qualms. He felt that it would be easy work and pleasant to drag James Finlay to earth and trample the life out of him. The thought of the insults of the brutal men who held Una and his own impotent struggles with the belt which bound him made him fierce enough. But the mood passed. His mind reverted to the subject which had never, all day, been far from his thoughts. He recalled each detail of his walk back to Dun-severic ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... rose quickly to her feet, gave an astonished glance at the grate, which was once more enveloped in impotent ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... the middle of the forenoon. Until then he was to be harassed by doubts and fears that would not be easy to suppress in his present unquiet frame of mind. While he was obliged to stand idle and impotent, the very foundation of all the future happiness of the girl he loved might be irreparably shattered. Silent, deadly, purposeful forces were working toward that end. Her mother would, no doubt, prepare her in a way for the crash, but there always would be the memory of the ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... ranchmen of the Frio country put forth Easter blossoms of new hats and gowns as faithfully as is done anywhere, and the Southwest is, for one day, a mingling of prickly pear, Paris, and paradise. And now it was Good Friday, and Tonia Weaver's Easter hat blushed unseen in the desert air of an impotent express car, beyond the burned trestle. On Saturday noon the Rogers girls, from the Shoestring Ranch, and Ella Reeves, from the Anchor-O, and Mrs. Bennet and Ida, from Green Valley, would convene at the Espinosa and pick up Tonia. With their Easter hats and frocks ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... Merenptah, seized Canaan and laid waste the land of Israel. A few years later, Rameses III. led his fleet and his army to the Syrian coast and defeated the Asiatics in a great sea-battle. He failed to hold the country, however, and after his death Egypt remained impotent for two centuries. Then, under Sheshonk I., of Dynasty XXII., a new attempt was made, and Jerusalem was captured. Takeloth II., of the same dynasty, sent thither an Egyptian army to help in the ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... woman, and child in the country. Surely, then, the statement which we make at the outset, that the coal trade of the United States is in the hands of monopolists; and that competition, where not killed, is almost impotent to keep down prices, is one ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... impotent end of his rebellion, but she held no delusions. This was only the beginning—if Bompard ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... his finger on the clean lozenge of the painted window one day when we three were alone together in the hall. "Here went your lucky guinea, Jacob," said he. And when Mr. Henry only looked upon him darkly, "O!" he added, "you need not look such impotent malice, my good fly. You can be rid of your spider when you please. How long, O Lord? When are you to be wrought to the point of a denunciation, scrupulous brother? It is one of my interests in this dreary hole. I ever loved experiment." Still Mr. Henry only stared upon him with a glooming ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... name of Donald and to the name of Jack, for they had found out where the foods were poured, and each took his station and waited there, Donald at the first of the course for his, Jack at the second station, while all the impotent fools ran round and round after the man ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fit of impotent rage, made a dash to reach the fireplace, but his feet were hampered by the ulster, and he would have fallen heavily had not the doctor caught him ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... meeting of ministers and elders to be held in Glasgow, November 21, 1638, five months hence, to re-organize the General Assembly. A cloud of war immediately darkened the heavens. Had the king's wrath been lightning, the meeting-place would have been struck; but his rage was impotent. ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters |
