"Incapacity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the fond attachment of the Spaniards to her, that they would probably have scrupled to recognize Philip as their sovereign, unless she had consented to assume him as her partner on the throne. Her utter incapacity for business rendered it impossible to obtain her consent. But her death, which happened this year, removed this difficulty; and as Charles, upon that event, became sole monarch of Spain, it left the succession open to his son. The war ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... their former friend and gracious host was shown to Louis Napoleon. This told against him with the French. Was the man who had led them into such misfortunes to be honored and comforted while they were suffering the consequences of his selfishness, recklessness, negligence, and incapacity? ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... to explain these phenomena as having been brought about by variation and natural selection, we start with the fact that white varieties frequently occur, and when protected from enemies show no incapacity for continued existence and increase. We know, further, that varieties of many other tints occasionally occur; and as "the survival of the fittest" must inevitably weed out those whose colours are prejudicial and preserve those whose colours are a safeguard, we require no other ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... they delivered up the said ship with what was in her to the said Governour Trott, and accordingly Major Trott took possession of her in the said Governours name and afterwards left her in the custody of the Governours Boatswain and a few Negroes, whose incapacity or number were not sufficient to secure the ship from hurtfull accidents, as this Deponent believes and also was informed, the which was made evident by the ships comeing a shoar about two dayes ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... few traits the entire polemics of the philosophers against the prisons of the State, against the censorship of literature, against the venality of office, against the privileges of birth, against the arbitrary power of ministers, against the incapacity of people in office, and still better, to sum up in one character every public demand, give the leading part to a commoner, bastard, bohemian and valet, who, by dint of dexterity, courage and good-humor, keeps himself up, swims with the tide, and shoots ahead in ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... bluebird this morning!" one exclaimed exultantly, so stirred as to forget momentarily her hearer's incapacity for enthusiasm. "Well, and did it sound any different from what it did last year, and the year before, and the year before that?" inquired in measured, world-wearied tones the dampener of ardors. No, my poor friend, it did not. And just because it sounded the same as it has in all ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... in frequent and long absences, he was not cognizant of what was going on. He depended "upon the judgment of the Court," as to its methods of proceeding; and was surprised when those methods were brought to his attention. Feeling his own incapacity to handle such a business, he was willing to leave it to those who ought to have been more competent. Indeed, he passed the whole matter over to the Deputy-governor. In a letter, for which I am indebted to Mr. Goodell, dated the twentieth of February, 1693, to the Earl of ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... indulgences. Still, his excusing himself so much on this ground was chiefly a pretense, his object being to gain time, and prevent his father from coming to any positive decision, in order that he might continue his life of indolence and vice a little longer undisturbed. Indeed, it was said that the incapacity to attend to the studies and perform the duties which his father required of him was mainly due to his continual drunkenness, which kept him all the time in ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... of all who have filled the Presidential chair by the choice of the people, the man least competent to perform its duties. He had been placed before his countrymen as a candidate in spite of his repeated avowals of incapacity, inexperience, and repugnance to all civil duties. Although sixty- four years of age, he had never exercised the right of suffrage, and he was well aware that he was elected solely because of his military prowess. But no sooner did he learn that he had ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... of the general's incapacity had been serious. The delay that had occurred in bringing about a result announced as easy of accomplishment had furnished sharp weapons to the opposition. It had forced the government to ask the Chamber of Deputies for large appropriations to conduct the war upon a ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... us flatter ourselves, as the enemy was still ignorant of our having got round Cape Horn, and as navigation was restored, that we might meet with some valuable captures, and might indemnify ourselves in that way, of our incapacity to attempt any of their considerable settlements on shore. This much at least we were certain of, from the information of our prisoners, that, whatever might be our success in regard to prizes, we had nothing to fear, weak even as we were, from the Spanish force in that part ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... of their formalities, and I hope age, which renders us less gallant, and more envious of the joys and liberties of youth, will never reduce me to so dull and thoughtless a Member of State) yet I have so small and single a portion of their power, that I am ashamed of my incapacity of serving you in this great affair. I bear the honour and the name, it is true, of glorious sway; but I can boast but of the worst and most impotent part of it, the title only; but the busy, absolute, mischievous politician finds no room in my soul, my humour, or constitution; and plodding ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... see that she was moulded more beautifully than the Graces,—by so much more as Nature is fairer than all Art,—and that she had an inward pure coldness, beside which Diana's was only stone. Yet it was not indifference, like that of the wild huntress,—not an incapacity to feel, but only that her time had not come; when it should, she would melt as well as another. Now she stood still and calm. She did not once look at him. She had seen human beings before,—plenty of them. Something ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... themselves;" of the rudiments of physiology, that he can ask, "what advantage of life could alter the shape of the corpuscles into which the blood can be evaporated?" Nor does the reviewer fail to flavour this outpouring of preposterous incapacity with a little stimulation of the odium theologicum. Some inkling of the history of the conflicts between Astronomy, Geology, and Theology, leads him to keep a retreat open by the proviso that he cannot "consent to test the truth of Natural Science by the word ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... The utter incapacity of the human refuse dumped into the fleet is justly stigmatised by one indignant commander, himself a patient long-sufferer in that respect, as a "scandalous abuse of the service." Six of these poor wretches had not the strength ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... crossing the ocean, of manoeuvring and of fighting under sail; to Drake the ship had become the fighting unit, to the Duke of Medina Sidonia a ship was simply a vehicle for soldiers, and a sea-fight was simply a land-fight on sea. The crowning illustration of Spain's incapacity to adapt itself to new conditions is perhaps the fact that only a marquis or duke could ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... Frank incapacity on the part of an artist is possible. To try and try and try again and utterly fail is possible. To write to the author and say, "I cannot visualize your character, or express it, and must decline to undertake the order," or to ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... construction on that legislative power which had been assumed, they declared that the true legal sense of the country was contained in the minority, on that occasion; and might, on a resistance to a vote of incapacity, be contained in ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... by other European powers, of interference in our internal affairs. The probability of such a demonstration by European meddlers can only have one of the following causes:—Our terrible disaster at Fredericksburg, or, what even is worse than that slaughter, the absolute incapacity of our leaders to cope with such great and terrible events as this last one. The bravery, the heroism of our soldiers will be applauded, admired, and pitied in Europe, but the utter intellectual marasmus, as shown by our administration, will and must embolden the European marplots to attempt ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... tricks with the knives and forks, balanced the glasses in extraordinary fashion, and reduced our waiters to a state of numbed and amazed incapacity. Every person who entered he seemed to have some slight acquaintance with. All the time he was acknowledging and returning greetings, and all ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "can be more rational or moderate than these sentiments; why then do you persist in pleading your incapacity for an employment which you can ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... course, in an agony of remorse that Dolly nursed her husband during his long month of enforced and bed-ridden idleness. Luckily, Bison Billiam behaved beautifully. He let the salary run on during the whole course of Charles-Norton's incapacity, and then, with genial inspiration, prevailed upon him, when he had recovered, to make his public reappearance with the heavy plaster-of-paris cast still upon the injured leg—which immensely increased the Flying Wonder's ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... in later times into the form which it bears in all the pictures of the council, and which is commemorated in the services of the Greek Church. Aware of his incapacity of argument he took a brick and said: "You deny that three can be one. Look at this: it is one, and yet it is composed of the three elements of fire, earth, and water." As he spoke the brick resolved itself into its component ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... this day, open to be seen, was not so much sin as ignorance of how to live, squalor, filthy surroundings acquiesced in as the natural order, wonderful patience in suffering and deprivation, incapacity, ill-paid labor, the kindest spirit of sympathy and helpfulness of the poor for each other. Perhaps that which made the deepest impression on her was the fact that such conditions of living could seem natural to those in them, and that they could get so much enjoyment of life in situations ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... for yourselves what an intensity of the negation of the faculty of sculpture this implies in the national mind! What measures can be assigned to the gulf of incapacity, which can deliberately swallow up in the gorge of it the teaching and example of three thousand years, and produce as the result of that instruction, what it is courteous ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... presumably reflected the popular mood in 1810, would not meet for thirteen months, while the old discredited Congress wearily dragged out its existence in a last session. Vigorous presidential leadership, it is true, might have saved the expiring Congress from the reproach of incapacity, but such leadership was not to be ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... understood,—that is, when he speaks about business. Ye ken yoursell, that Miss Clara is no just like other folk; and were I you—it's my duty to speak plain—I wad e'en gie in a bit scroll of a petition to the Lords, to be appointed Curator Bonis, in respect of her incapacity ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... put on to construe during the lecture, and if anything could have shaken the brazen tower of his self-confidence, it would have been the egregious display of incapacity which followed; but Hazlet rather piqued himself on his indifference to the poor blind heathen poets, on whose names he usually dealt reprobation broadcast. "Like lions that die of an ass's kick," those wronged great souls lay ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... water being either collected in cisterns from the tops of the houses, or brought at great expense from Santa Maria on the opposite coast by an aqueduct nearly 30 m. long. An English company started a waterworks in Cadiz about 1875, but came to grief through the incapacity of the population ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Mackenzie-Humberston repelled their attack, and by a rapid march regained the Fort of Panami, which the enemy attempted to carry, but he defeated them with great loss. He served under General Matthews against Hyder Ali in 1782; but during the operations of that campaign, Matthews gave such proofs of incapacity and injustice, that Colonels Macleod and Humberston carried their complaints to the Council of Bombay, where they arrived on the 26th of February, 1783. The Council ordered General Matthews to be superseded, appointed Colonel Macleod to succeed ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... illustrate the main point I insist upon respecting the pathetic fallacy,—that so far as it is a fallacy, it is always the sign of a morbid state of mind, and comparatively of a weak one. Even in the most inspired prophet it is a sign of the incapacity of his human sight or thought to bear what has been revealed to it. In ordinary poetry, if it is found in the thoughts of the poet himself, it is at once a sign of his belonging to the inferior school; if in the thoughts of the characters imagined by him, it is right or wrong ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... Page. He took the loss of his first mate greatly to heart, and thus the incapacity of the second contributed considerably to increase his malady. Day after day he grew worse, and I began to fear much that his illness would end fatally. He was as good and kind a man as ever ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... London have led to huge enterprise in "catering," and to a monopoly which has driven out of existence the smaller establishments, where alone the artist-cook can flourish. But it seems that the neglect of decent cooking is also due in this country to a racial incapacity and indifference which leads both men and women to despise "taking pains" about small things, and brings them into the world devoid of the desire to carry out with skill those small enterprises on which much of the sweetness and ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... said and done, There's nothing new beneath the sun, And many times before, a title Was incapacity's requital! ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... became opened. As in habitual intercourse the boy abandoned the reserve which awe and cunning at first imposed, Roland was inexpressibly shocked at the bold principles his son affected, and at his utter incapacity even to comprehend that plain honesty and that frank honor which to the English soldier, seemed ideas innate and heaven-planted. Soon afterwards, Roland found that a system of plunder was carried on in his household, and tracked it to the connivance of the wife and the agency of his son for the benefit ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... unspeakably pitiable and alarming," he writes in the Philanthropist, "in the state of that society where it is deemed necessary, for self-preservation, to seal up the mind and debase the intellect of man to brutal incapacity.... Truly the alternatives of oppression are terrible. But this state of things cannot always last, nor ignorance alone shield us from destruction." His interest in the question was clearly growing. But it was still in the gristle of sentiment waiting to be transmuted into the bone and ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... hearers and incapacity to understand the doctrine of Scripture are not the only obstacles those will have to contend against who undertake to preach "the [oe]onian gospel." There are the interests and attractions of the present world, ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... if I could help it, allowing to be imposed, any heavier task on your purse. As it has come to this in spite of my exertions, I will not conceal from you the low ebb of my own money affairs in the present moment,—that is, my absolute incapacity ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... The false prophet was forced to reap as he had sown. But an evil which is certain, may be retarded; and ravages which tend finally to confusion, may be limited for many generations. Now, in the case of the African provincials which we have noticed, we see an original incapacity of Islamism, even in its palmy condition, for amalgamating with any superior culture. And the specific action of Mahometanism in the African case, as contrasted with the Roman economy which it supplanted, is thus exhibited by Mr Finlay in a most instructive ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... of opinion that it is expedient to press this study to much extent, if at all, on those whom poverty or incapacity may have destined to situations in which they will never hear or think of it afterwards. The course of nature cannot be controlled; and fortune does not permit us to prescribe the same course of discipline for all. To speak the language which they have learned without study, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... not sacrifice the higher truths of his landscape to mere pitch of color as Titian does. He infinitely prefers having the power of giving extension of space, and fulness of form, to that of giving deep melodies of tone; he feels too much the incapacity of art, with its feeble means of light, to give the abundance of nature's gradations; and therefore it is, that taking pure white for his highest expression of light, that even pure yellow may give him one more step in the scale of shade, he becomes necessarily inferior in richness ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... not had a numbing and stupefying influence on the character of the inhabitants. Would not a man, under such perennial vexations, end in bowing his head and letting things take their course? I notice the climatic effect upon myself is a growing incapacity for mental effort. It is time to depart for the Djerid, where the sun, they say, still exhales a certain amount ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... Service, may be removed from office at the pleasure of the President. All other officers of the Executive Departments may be removed at any time by the President or other appointing power when their services are unnecessary, or for dishonesty, incapacity, inefficiency, misconduct, or neglect of duty, and when so removed, the removal shall be reported to the Senate, ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... were among the solid particles strained off. Secondly, he proved that these germs were competent to give rise to living forms by simply sowing them in a solution fitted for their development. And, thirdly, he showed that the incapacity of air strained through cotton- wool to give rise to life, was not due to any occult change effected in the constituents of the air by the wool, by proving that the cotton-wool might be dispensed with altogether, and perfectly free access left between the exterior air and that in the experimental ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... doctrine, and one that a judicious preacher had best keep his thumb upon. At last he asked Jamie Todd what he thought of the matter; for he was an easy examiner, and would put a question a yard long to be answered with "Yes" and "No"—a fool way of examining, which to me was clear proof of his incapacity. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... thought of Grantline and his treasure, there came to me a fear for Anita. In God's truth I had been, so far, a very stumbling inept champion—doomed to failure with everything I tried. It swept me, so that I cursed my own incapacity. Why had I not contrived to have Anita desert at the asteroid? Would it not have been far better for her there? Taking her chance for rescue with Dr. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... even to Lee's aide, Jack continued his tirade. "Ever since the general was put into office his subordinates have been scheming to break him down, and in Congress there has always been a party against him, who, through dislike or incapacity, clog all he advises or asks. With the recent defeats, the plotters have gained courage to speak out their thoughts, and your general goes so far as to refuse to obey orders that would make possible a brilliant stroke, because he knows ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... from the conduct of the lady during the journey—her long fits of profound silence, the irresolution and uncertainty which seemed to pervade all her movements, and the obvious incapacity of thinking and acting for herself under which she seemed to labour—Wayland had formed the not improbable opinion that the difficulties of her situation had in some ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... them. It is simply and sternly impossible for the English public, at this moment, to understand any thoughtful writing,—so incapable of thought has it become in its insanity of avarice. Happily, our disease is, as yet, little worse than this incapacity of thought; it is not corruption of the inner nature; we ring true still, when anything strikes home to us; and though the idea that everything should "pay" has infected our every purpose so deeply, that even when we would play the good Samaritan, we never take out our twopence and give them to the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... was called in. He said that the woman was the wife of the chief of the caucheros and that her life must be saved if possible. I explained my own incapacity in this field once more, but insisted that we would be justified in undertaking an amputation as the only ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... who has habitually given as well as received much not the least of the pangs of separation arises from the incapacity to render any further direct service. It fortified Browning's heart to know that much could be done, and in ways which his wife would have approved and desired, for her child. And as he himself had been also her care, it was his business now to see that ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... relative terms, and it remained to be seen what sort of power would have been brought against it, and to what attacks the Government would have exposed itself. The old Tory Ministry, which was voted out for incapacity by the House of Commons, was the strongest and longest that we have seen for many years, though opposed by all the talent and power of an Opposition more formidable than this can be. To be sure it must always be remembered that ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... of the nation," said Dr. Leete, "bear now like a feather the burden that broke the backs of the women of your day. Their misery came, with all your other miseries, from that incapacity for cooperation which followed from the individualism on which your social system was founded, from your inability to perceive that you could make ten times more profit out of your fellow men by uniting with them than by contending with them. ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... deepest shades, and are unable to endure the brilliancy of light. So fares it in the body politic, in times of distress and humiliation; a certain sensitiveness and soreness of humor prevail, with a weak incapacity of enduring any free and open advice, even when the necessity of affairs most requires such plain-dealing, and when the consequences of any single error may be beyond retrieving. At such times the conduct of public affairs is on all hands ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... already mentioned that the fault I most disliked in those children was their incapacity for being petted. Something of it still remains; but of late I have remarked a considerable improvement in this respect. They have not only grown in kindness, but in the gift of receiving kindness. I cannot but attribute this, in ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... astonished—fresh from the eager humanity on board ship—to meet with little but laughter. One of the young men even amused himself by incommoding me, as was then very easy; and that not from ill-nature, but mere clodlike incapacity to think, for he expected me to join the laugh. I did so, but it was phantom merriment. Later on, a man from Kansas had three violent epileptic fits, and though, of course, there were not wanting some to help him, it was rather superstitious terror than sympathy ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that a sudden change had been made in the military command of the troops of the city and harbor. General Dix superseded General Wool, and Canby, General Brown. That Wool should have been removed at any time, might have been expected; not from incapacity, but on account of his age, and because any one could perform the mere nominal duties that devolved on him. But why General Brown should have been removed at this critical moment, when he and the Police Commissioners were ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... important consideration that several canine species evince (as will be shown in a future chapter) no strong repugnance or inability to breed under confinement; and the incapacity to breed under confinement is one of the commonest bars to domestication. Lastly, savages set the highest value, as we shall see in the chapter on Selection, on dogs: even half-tamed animals are highly useful to them: the Indians ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... Dakshina in sacrifices. There is no ordinance, however, which lays down that so much should be given. This ordinance (about the gift of Dakshina) has not proceeded from motives connected with the distribution of wealth. The command of the ordinance, in consequence of the provision in cases of incapacity, is terrible. That command is blind to the competence of the sacrificer.[237] The audition occurs in the Vedas that a person should, with devotion, perform a sacrifice. But what can devotion do when the sacrificer is stained ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... faint ray of comfort came with the consideration that after all a certain practical incapacity is part of the ensemble of a literary artist, and then he found himself wondering what flowers of wisdom Montaigne might not have culled from such a day's experience; he began an imitative essay in his head and he fell asleep upon this at last at about ten minutes ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... to the use of tobacco is often through its use retarded in his career by mental languor or weakening will power, and by mental incapacity. The keenness of mental perception is dulled, and the ability to seize and hold an abstract thought is impaired. True, these effects are not sharply obvious, as it would be impossible to contrast the present condition of any one person with ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... O'Calligan, the handsome ruddy lady, whom we have met with once before, on that day when Mr. Jinks, remembering O'Brallaghan's incapacity to fight, challenged ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... upon working-class families quite beyond any provision which their utmost unaided industry and courage could secure for them. Left to themselves, left absolutely to themselves, they must be smashed to pieces, if any exceptional disaster or accident, like recurring sickness, like the death or incapacity of the breadwinner, or prolonged or protracted unemployment, fall ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... marriage. On the morning of their wedding-day they are seated at a table, to receive presents from their relations and friends; a yard of cloth from one, some silk from another, some beads from a third, according to the taste incapacity of the donors. My companions were not much struck with the beauty of the Queens, for they declared that some of the pretty young slave-girls had much more lovely looks. Each of the Duke's wives bring, or send, a jug of water for his large brass-pan bath every morning, and his favourite wife ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... condition I passed nearly a year, wholly unfit for business, while the effort to think was irksome and painful. My blood became impoverished, and I suffered from incapacity with an appalling sense of misery and general apprehension of coming evil. I passed sleepless nights and was troubled with irregular action of the heart, a constantly feverish condition, and the most excruciating tortures in my stomach, living for days on rice water and gruel, ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... biological enquirers like himself in their special researches. From so practised a logician, however, about the very last thing to have been here expected was that he should suggest creative 'ignorance and incompetence' as the only apparent alternative to denying a Creator altogether, as if incapacity for a comparatively easy process were a likely reason for choosing one greatly more difficult. It might have occurred to Mr. Lewes that, if there were any absurdity in the choice, the Being who made him and bestowed on ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... had always got well. Why should'nt she now? It is a strange vagary of old people to consider themselves just as young as they used to be, notwithstanding their advanced years. To the majority of the old people, the idea of death is not so appalling as the inability to work and the incapacity to enjoy the ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... around her; and she was irritated to see with what facility he modified in his own fashion the line of conduct which she had just previously dictated to the Duke de Beaufort. She was forced to confess that his authority prevailed over her own. One evening, disheartened by the incapacity of the grandson of the great Henry, and terrified by the dangers to which their imprudence exposed the Frondeurs, and esteeming the political talent of Gondi to be more truly worthy of her own, she opened her heart to him, and proposed that they should enter into a treaty of ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... were endless that were borne by the two girls rather than annoy Mr. Lyddell; perplexities, doubts whether they were doing what was wise or right by the house or by the servants; Marian's good sense making her judge the right, but her awkwardness, and Clara's incapacity, breaking down in the execution; continual worry ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... in one sense, to make out a case of scepticism against Pascal. He always writes strongly. There is passion in all his thought. He had a strong and deep sense of human weakness, and incapacity to attain the highest truth. He spoke of the philosophy of Descartes without respect. With most of the Port Royalists, indeed, he seems to have concurred in the Cartesian doctrine of automata, {176} strangely revived in our day by Professor Huxley. But he repudiated the notion of “subtle ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... day of lesser notoriety of Playboy-like quality on its presentation on February 13, 1908. It is a very obvious allegory, outlining under guise of an incident of '98 the weaknesses of contemporaneous Ireland, its love of talk; its lack of hold-together; its refusal to see things as they are; its incapacity in practical matters; the reckless temper of this faction of its people, the subjection to clerical influence of that, the suicidal patriotism of a third; in short, the Celts' willful rebellion ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... various streams, returned home. It was near the end of August before Shirley was in force at Oswego. Time was lost in building boats for the lake. Storms and head winds ensued; then sickness: military incapacity in the general completed the list of impediments. Deferring the completion of the enterprise until the following year, Shirley returned to Albany with the main part of his forces in October, leaving about seven hundred men to garrison the ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... it possible to be skeptical in the matter of religion when we design to return to its principles, and look closely into the idea of the God who serves as its foundation? Doubt arises ordinarily from laziness, weakness, indifference, or incapacity. To doubt, for many people, is to dread the trouble of examining things to which one attaches but little interest. Although religion is presented to men as the most important thing for them in this world as well as in the other, skepticism and doubt on this subject can be for the ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... can't help it. You are universally lovable, and the best of it is that you don't know it. You don't know it now. Even as I tell it to you, you don't realize it, you won't realize it—and that very incapacity to realize it is one of the reasons why you are so loved. You are incredulous now, and you shake your head; but I know, who am your slave, as all people know, for they likewise are ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... opportunity, and springing aside to avoid the blow with which he greeted me, succeeded in inserting my fingers within the folds of his neckcloth, after which I had little difficulty in choking him into a state of incapacity, when he submitted to the indignity of having his hands tied behind him, and was induced to resume his seat in the rumble as a prisoner, till such time as I should learn Mr. Framp-ton's opinion as to the fittest manner of disposing ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... him, and being so much used to sick people, perceived that he had need to have particular care taken of him. I would not permit him to be put into the hospital; for I am too well acquainted with their way of managing the sick, and am sensible of the incapacity of the physicians. I have caused him to be brought to my own house, by my slaves; and they are now in a private room where I placed him, putting on some of my own linen, and treating him ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... any talent to reign, nor possessed any one quality that fitted him for a higher situation than the head of a regiment or a lady's drawing-room. He made himself justly suspected of a moral corruption, as well as of a natural incapacity, when he announced his approbation of the Revolution against his benefactor, the late King of France, who, besides a regiment, had also given him a yearly pension of one hundred thousand livres. Immediately after his unexpected accession ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... to an incapacity to resist the temptation which clung to him, he again sent a messenger to Madame ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... evident among the majority in both houses, who, though they make no scruple in private to acknowledge the total incapacity of ministers, yet, in public, speak and vote as if they believed them to have every virtue under heaven; and, on this principle, some gentlemen,—as Mr. Gibbon, for instance,—while, in private, they indulge their opinion pretty freely, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... showed that ignorance and incapacity on the part of the employees were not confined to the surveyor's department, but were found in other branches of the service—creating delays and mistakes, imperiling the safety of the revenues and the interests of importers, and bringing the service into reproach. It was intimated ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... any Government pronounce against itself a more complete verdict of ignorance and incapacity. The Government had framed the Act; every clause of it was its own handiwork; it was passed through Parliament without being modified, amended, or in the slightest degree opposed, and yet, before it was brought into practical operation—for a single work had not been commenced under it at ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... incapable of completing the said work for publication in twelve monthly numbers as agreed, it shall be referred to John Forster, Esq, one of Her Majesty's Commissioners in Lunacy, or in the case of his death, incapacity, or refusal to act, then to such person as shall be named by Her Majesty's Attorney-General for the time being, to determine the amount which shall be repaid by the said Charles Dickens, his executors ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... through incapacity are unable to comprehend or appreciate music, are prone to wax facetious over it—the feeble joke is the last resort of the man who ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... 'agapai' of the early Christians. For this purpose, however, it might be necessary to substitute tea and coffee for wine. In other words, the church is to be made into a popular London University. The plan illustrates the incapacity of an isolated clique to understand the real tone of public opinion. I need not pronounce upon Mill's scheme, which seems to have some sense in it, but one would like to know whether Newman read ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... They were of the pseudo-democracy which wants to live without working, consume without producing, obtain posts without being trained for them, and arrive at honours without desert—the selfish and purblind pseudo-democracy of incapacity ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... mightily complimented by my Lady Peterborough in my Lord Sandwich's presence, whom she engaged to thank me for my kindness to her and her Lord. We also declared our minds together to the Duke of York about Sir John Minnes's incapacity to do any service in the office: he promised to speak to the King ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... real contradiction in combining those two subjects of belief; because the difficulty of reconciling the Trinity with the Unity of the Godhead in reality proceeds simply from our human and necessary incapacity to comprehend the nature of the union. Therefore they cannot for a moment allow to disbelievers in the Trinity the title of Unitarians, so as to imply that the latter monopolise the grand truth that 'the Lord our God is one Lord.' They consent reluctantly ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... workmen to the front, because they were the most reliable Communists, and the loss of them rendered their factories even more inefficient than they were under Kerensky. In this respect, and in the laziness and incapacity of the Russian workman, the Bolsheviks have had to face special difficulties which would be less in other countries. On the other hand, they have had special advantages in the fact that Russia is self-supporting in the matter of food; no other ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... refits his broken forces under the walls of strong Fort Union. Long before the trifling affairs of Glorietta and Peralta, Valois, disgusted with Sibley, is on his way east. He will join the Army of the West. His heart sickens at the foolish incapacity of the border commander. The Texan column melts away under Canby's resolute advance. The few raiders, who have ridden down into Arizona and hoisted the westernmost Confederate flag at Antelope Peak, are chased back by Carleton's ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... and stands there knowing that his victim is watching the door in an agony lest Mrs. Cole should suddenly come in and inquire what Jeremy had done, and that so the whole story of his insubordination be revealed and Miss Jones lose her situation for incapacity. ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... Strenuous exertions on the part of friends replaced privately the missing collection; but it was only just in time. I have often heard our Indian Missionaries say how great and frequent is the difficulty raised by the apparent incapacity of some otherwise excellent native Pastors to keep public and private money apart. They mean all that is honourable; but a friend comes in begging for a loan, and there is the church fund at hand, and of course the sum taken ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... be given—though there is so large a number to whom it is not given—to understand how a nature may be profoundly devout, and yet unable to accept a great deal of what is usually held as religious belief. No intellectual difficulties or uncertainties, no sense of mental incapacity to climb the heights of infinitude, could take from her the piety of the affections or 'the beliefs which were the mother-tongue of her soul.' I cannot doubt that she spoke out of the fulness of her own heart when ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... very rarely troubles House with ordered speech. A good deal on his mind looking after JACOBY, and keeping the Party straight. But his silence doesn't arise from incapacity to speak. This shown to-night in his speech on Railway Rates and Charges. Full of good matter, admirably delivered. After this, Dr. CLARK proposed to discuss Home Rule; but House didn't seem to care about ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 14, 1891. • Various
... and asked Madame de Maintenon what she thought. She smiled, shammed incapacity, said a word upon some other name, then returned, if she had not fixed herself there at first, to that which the minister had proposed; so that three-fourths of the favours and opportunities which passed through the hands of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... declared against the will and soul and heart and intellect of man; the devil of Jesuitry, with its sham learning, shameless lying, and casuistical economy of sins; the devil of vice-royal rule, with its life-draining monopolies and gross incapacity for government; the devil of an insolent soldiery, quartered on the people, clamorous for pay, outrageous in their lusts and violences; the devil of fantastical taxation, levying tolls upon the bare necessities of life, and drying up the founts of national well-being at their sources; the devil of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... experience shows, if we would but admit it, that under no system have the rulers been more incompetent and corrupt than under this which we call democratic. Is not the very word 'politician' everywhere a term of reproach? Is not a government office everywhere synonymous with incapacity and sloth? What a miserable position is that of a Member of Parliament, compelled to give his vote on innumerable questions of which he does not understand the rudiments, and giving it at the dictation of party chiefs who themselves are controlled ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... the amount of submarine denudation, we become sensible of the disadvantage under which we labour from our habitual incapacity of observing the action of marine currents on the bed of the sea. We know that the agitation of the waves, even during storms, diminishes at a rapid rate, so as to become very insignificant at the depth of a few fathoms, and is quite imperceptible at the depth of ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... choice of a wife will explain up to a certain point this national frailty. Thus, after indicating frankly the aching malady under which the social slate is laboring, we have sought for the causes in the imperfection of the laws, in the irrational condition of our manners, in the incapacity of our minds, and in the contradictions which characterize our habits. A single point still claims our observation, and that is the first onslaught of the evil we ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... conversation—O'Shimo's favour with her lord. The charms she used were evident enough, for Nature had been lavish with the kind to meet his lordship's wishes. How was it their own parents had spawned such incapacity? "Deign, O'Shimo Dono, to teach the art so sadly lacking. How bring to prominence such meagre gifts of proportion as one does possess? In turn shall be taught the art of the hanaike—the arrangement of flowers, of the koto and the biwa ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... to the vague convulsions of a drowning man, Morse, a skilled swimmer, managed to clutch his shoulder, and propelled him at arm's length, still struggling, apparently with as much reluctance as incapacity, toward the bank. As their feet touched the reeds and slimy bottom the man's resistance ceased, and he lapsed quite listlessly in Morse's arms. Half lifting, half dragging his burden, he succeeded at last in gaining the strip of meadow, and deposited the unconscious man ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... whatever you do or say, consciously or unconsciously, you are selling ideas about your capability or your incapacity. You are making more or less definite impressions—you are affecting your opportunities to succeed, and are forming good or bad habits—all the time. Control the effects of your words, tones, and acts by saying and doing, consciously and ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... of the classical system in its extreme exclusiveness are fond of adducing examples of very illustrious men who at college showed an utter incapacity for science in its simplest elements. They say that, by classics alone, these men are what they are, and if their way had been stopped by serious scientific requirements, they would have never come before the world at all. The allegation is somewhat strongly ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... reasons. And for all good ones. Before leaving port he had discovered the incapacity of the crew, so hastily scraped together. A bad lot, he could see at first sight—rough, ribald, and drunken. In all there are eleven of them, the second mate included; the last, as already stated, a Spaniard, by name Padilla. There are three others of ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... had divined life, and she saw nothing around her but the immense extent of an irreparable disaster. She had, moreover, the additional grief of tardily recognizing her husband's peculiar form of incapacity; he was a man unfitted for any purpose that required continuity of ideas. He could not understand a consistent part, such as he ought to play in the world; he perceived it neither as a whole nor in its gradations, and its gradations were everything. He was in one of those positions ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... tamen ... decretum erat. In 74 B.C. M. Antonius, son of the orator and father of the triumvir, was entrusted by the Senate with the task of clearing the seas from the corsairs. In spite of his extensive powers, the utter incapacity of Antonius, and the mismanagement of the Senate, caused the expedition to end in ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... again—stopped again—tore up the little that he had done—and began a new letter, ending in the same miserable result. It was impossible to witness his helplessness, to see how pitiably patient he was over his own incapacity, and to let the melancholy spectacle go on. I proposed to write the letter; authenticating it, of course, by his signature. When he allowed me to take the pen, he turned away his face, ashamed to let me see what he suffered. Was this the same ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... military abilities recommended him to the Consul Metellus (B.C. 100), who was anxious to restore discipline in the army and to retrieve the glory of the Roman name, which had been tarnished by the incapacity and corruption of the previous generals in the Jugurthan War, which now ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... pains can have little or nothing in common with ours. We try to imagine them by expanding or exaggerating and perpetuating ours—or some of them; but the attempt is demonstrably foolish, and leads straight to its own defeat. It comes of man's incapacity to form a conception of Eternity, or at any rate to grasp and hold it long enough to reason about it; by reason of which incapacity he falls back upon the easier, misleading conception of 'Everlasting ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... tyrant, so long as they are allowed to keep their snouts in the mess, Napoleon has done right. Let him gag them, the rabble, and exterminate them—this will never be too much for their hatred of right, their cowardice, their incapacity, and ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... arise and put a stop to this fooling—the people who give their lives and pay the cost of it all? If the present-day, diplomats and Foreign Ministers have sincerely striven for peace, then their utter incapacity and futility have been proved to the hilt, and they must be swept away. If they have not sincerely striven for peace, but only pretended to so strive, then also they must be swept away, for deceit in such a matter ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... youth Clara had been, without doubt, a disagreeable child; and as a young girl she had been only a little softer: self-willed, hot-tempered, vain, she had not got on particularly well with her father, whom she despised for his drunkenness and incapacity. He was conscious of this and did not pardon it in her. Her musical faculties showed themselves at an early age; her father repressed them, recognising painting as the sole art,—wherein he himself had had so little success, but which had nourished him and his family. Clara ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... narrow theories will accommodate itself to varying circumstances; and there is every danger that it will break up all that it can in order to remould the materials in its own way. Mr. Calhoun is as full as ever of his Nullification doctrines; and those who know the force that is in him, and his utter incapacity of modification by other minds, (after having gone through as remarkable a revolution of political opinion as perhaps any man ever experienced,) will no more expect repose and self-retention from him than ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... villain every virtue or triumph, but he cannot endure to deny him a telling word; he will ruin a man, but he will not silence him. In truth, one of Scott's most splendid traits is his difficulty, or rather incapacity, for despising any of his characters. He did not scorn the most revolting miscreant as the realist of to-day commonly scorns his own hero. Though his soul may be in rags, every man of Scott can ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... the courtesy with a gentle indifference that was not ingratitude, but rather incapacity for any feeling except that one great sorrow which seemed ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... kind. The author of the Rambler is supposed to receive a remonstrance upon his excessive gravity from the lively Flirtilla, who wishes him to write in defence of masquerades. Conscious of his own incapacity, he applies to a man of "high reputation in gay life;" who, on the fifth perusal of Flirtilla's letter breaks into a rapture, and declares that he is ready to devote himself to her service. Here is part of the ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... many others suffer from the same disease. . . . I thought about that 'improductivite slave' all night. He had his wits about him who summed the thing up in these two words. There is something in us,—an incapacity to give forth all that is in us. One might say, God has given us bow and arrow, but refused us the power to string the bow and send the arrow straight to its aim. I should like to discuss it with my father, but am afraid to touch a sore point. ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... of the telegram to you are among those who introduced and obtained the adoption of the Leavenworth resolution, and who are endeavoring to organize a force for the purpose of general retaliation upon Missouri. Those who so deplore my 'imbecility' and 'incapacity' are the very men who are endeavoring to bring about a collision between the people of Kansas and the troops under General ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... respected, or even be treated with common decency, at home.' J. H. Burton's Hume, ii. 479. On the 30th of this month of April—four days after the conversation in the text—John Home recorded:—'Mr. Hume cannot give any reason for the incapacity and want of genius, civil and military, which marks this ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... as he lay with eyes bandaged and a knowledge that to-morrow was the day fixed for the destruction of the bridge, was his own incapacity. It was unlikely that his head or his eyes would be right by to-morrow, or that Rockwell would allow him to get up. He felt in his own mind that the injury he had received was a serious one, and that the lucky horseshoe had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... begin to discern in his letters the outline of his character—his passionate absorption in study, his moodiness, his fits of despondency, his intense irritability; his incapacity to master his own tongue and temper. In happy moments he shows great tenderness of feeling for those whom he loves or pities; but this alternates with inconsiderate clamour and loud complaints deafening the ears of all about him, provoked often by slight and even imaginary ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... secondly, that it should be fixed, and not occasional. First, this power cannot be according to the first property of law; because no man does or can know it, nor do you yourselves know upon what grounds you will vote the incapacity of any man. No man in Westminster Hall, or in any court upon earth, will say that is law, upon which, if a man going to his counsel should say to him, "What is my tenure in law of this estate?" he would answer, "Truly, Sir, I know not; ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... think, and would say so. In fact, putting considerations of mere expediency aside, I think myself that he had much better not have done it. As for the justice of the general verdict, it is no doubt affected throughout by Thackeray's political incapacity, whatever side he might have taken, and by that quaint theoretical republicanism, with a good deal of pure Toryism mixed, which he attributes to some of his characters, and no doubt, in a kind of rather confused speculative way, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... brother prepared during more than two decades of study; the religious literature he transferred from English into Chinese; the hymns he wrote for others to sing, although he himself could not sing at all (he and I monopolising the musical incapacity of a family in which all the rest could sing well); the missionary stations he planted; the life he lived, will widen out and deepen and intensify through all time ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... as partner with capital. We must under all circumstances pay as a minimum a decent living wage to everyone who works for a living. We must devise means to cope with the problem of unemployment and to meet the dread advent of sickness, incapacity and old age in the case of those whose means do not permit them to provide for ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... tragedy of Stevenson's fate, the unescapable assurance that he would not live to do all which such a spirit in a sounder frame would have done for an art he loved so fondly, the magnetism of his friendship, his downright incapacity for envy, his genuine humility with regard to his own work and reputation, his unboastful and untiring courage, made a profound impression upon many of his contemporaries. It is, perhaps, small wonder if critical opinion ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... of A.D. 361. Julian the Apostate succeeded peacefully to the empire whereto he was about to assert his right by force of arms; and Sapor found that the war which he had provoked with Rome, in reliance upon his adversary's weakness and incapacity, had to be carried on with a prince of far greater natural powers and of much superior ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... said, is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion. And the great difference between man and monkey is in the larynx, he continued,—in the incapacity to frame delicately different sound-symbols by which thought could be sustained. In this I failed to agree with him, but with a certain incivility he declined to notice my objection. He repeated that the thing was so, and continued his account of ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... fallen and Christ-rejecting attitude before God. They are also incapable of comprehending the standards of God, whose thoughts and ways are above their thoughts and ways as the heavens are higher than the earth (Isa. 55:8,9). The quality and incapacity of the fallen race is accurately described in Rom. 3:10-18; this description of them being as they appear before the holiness of God, stripped of all externals: "As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... him. He says that "Paris" has grown to be so lazy and self-willed that John, the coachman, says he has no sort of government of him, as he did nothing that he was told to do, and everything he was not. The General adds that his incapacity as a postilion was such that he had determined to leave him behind when returning to Philadelphia, which would make one or two boys necessary in his stable at that place, as assistants, and asks whether it might not be possible to ...
— Washington in Domestic Life • Richard Rush
... the most exasperating pilgrim that Great Heart ever dragged over the road to the Celestial City. Mr. Feeble Mind was bad enough; but genuine weakness and organic incapacity appeal all the while to charity and sympathy. If people really cannot walk, they must be carried. Everybody sees that; and all strong people are, or ought to be, ready to lift babies and cripples. There are plenty of ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... some further remarks, but the grandmother had turned away and gone quickly towards her own room. She was surprised at what she had been told about Heidi's incapacity for learning, and determined to find out more concerning this matter, not by inquiries from the tutor, however, although she esteemed him highly for his uprightness of character; she had always a friendly greeting for him, but always avoided being drawn into conversation with ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... widening home. Among those "nobler loves and nobler cares" there is excitement without reaction, there is an unwearied and impersonal joy—a joy which can only be held cheap because it is so abundant, and can only disappoint us through our own incapacity to contain it. These delights of study and of solitude Wordsworth enjoyed to the full. In no other poet, perhaps, have the poet's heightened sensibilities been productive of a pleasure so unmixed with pain. The wind of his emotions blew right abaft; he "swam smoothly in the stream of his nature, ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... business, being merely a blind, was not pushed. But Henry gave his apprentice, Billy, instruction, and the youth began to show an aptitude which contrasted remarkably with his general incapacity. ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... through them and was back in France by November; Ferdinand II. with Spanish help was reinstated at Naples soon afterwards. The expedition, if it produced no material results, laid bare the weakness of the Italian political system and the country's incapacity for ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... too well aware of the average woman's distorted notion of abstract justice to accept her statement at its face value. Woman by her very nature is incapable of appreciating or applying impartial justice, and her incapacity grows in proportion to her immediate interest in the matter involved. This latter might apply with equal force to the average man; but man, less governed by emotions, will permit his sense of justice to prevail when not blinded by personal interest. Abstract justice will ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... sort of an ass who is storing up information and solving vast and intricate problems in order to be kind to my superiors when, struck with panic at their own tardily discovered incapacity, they rush to me in a body to ask me how ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... child, or in long diseases, to be still the same man; who also was a present and visible example unto me, that it was possible for the same man to be both vehement and remiss: a man not subject to be vexed, and offended with the incapacity of his scholars and auditors in his lectures and expositions; and a true pattern of a man who of all his good gifts and faculties, least esteemed in himself, that his excellent skill and ability to teach and persuade others the common theorems and maxims of the Stoic philosophy. ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... be through such prevention, not through such a cure as victory sometimes is supposed to represent, that warfare can be stopped. Warfare means some one's defeat, of course, and that implies his temporary incapacity for further war, but it goes without saying that all conquered nations must ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... another instance of the judicial short-sighted policy against which we might declaim: for, setting aside the absence of punishment to a black, where confinement is accompanied with ease and regular dietary; to which he has not hitherto been accustomed (to say nothing of his incapacity to understand the nature of his crime, or the cause of his incarceration); the contamination he receives during his sojourn in those fearful sinks of infamy, complete his immoral training; and when he again breathes the fresh air of freedom, he is as accomplished a ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... foe of the Maori, had set in; and he was in a pitiable condition when Mr. Marsden, by chance, remarked his brown face on the forecastle, and inquired into his history, which was confirmed by the master of the Ann, and was really only a specimen of a sailor's vague promises, and incapacity to understand that a dark skin ought to be treated with the same justice as a white one. Duaterra was a man of much intelligence, and even under these most unfavourable circumstances had been greatly impressed with the civilization of England, and was so desirous of improvement that, on ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... expression, indicating a vexed spirit, now more strongly than ever at work in a way which had, indeed, been one of the primest sources of his miserable life. It was a spirit ill at rest with itself—vexed at its own feebleness of execution—its incapacity to attain and acquire the realization of its own wild and vague conceptions. His was the ambition of one who discovers at every step that nothing can be known, yet will not give up the unprofitable pursuit, because, even while making the discovery, he still hopes ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... discovered a fatalistic tendency in Luther's teaching of justification by faith without works. They declare that Luther's theory of the utter depravity of man by reason of inherited sin and his incapacity to perform any work that can be accounted good in the sight of God kills every ambition to virtuous living in man. They argue that when you tell a person that he is not capable to do good, he is apt to believe you and make no effort to perform a good ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... herself, whose charms one would imagine should infuse alacrity into the limbs of a cripple sooner than the Bath waters, was to offer herself for his partner, he would answer he never danced, even though the ladies lost their ball by it. Nor doth this denial arise from incapacity, for he was in his youth an excellent dancer, and still retains sufficient knowledge of the art, and sufficient abilities in his limbs to practise it, but from an affectation of gravity which he will not sacrifice to the eagerest desire ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... waiting for a reply, now burst into complaints about the tiresome, oppressive duties of his office, the incapacity of the magistrates, the selfishness, malice and baseness of men. He lamented that Moor was a Netherlander, and not a Spaniard, called him the only friend he possessed among the rebellious crew in Holland and Flanders, and stopped him when he tried to intercede for his countrymen, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the secretary of the Comte de Serizy he heard of Madame Husson's pitiable condition, and he was able, before his own marriage, to get her an appointment as head-waiting-woman to Madame Mere, the Emperor's mother. But in spite of that powerful protection Clapart was never promoted; his incapacity was too apparent. ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... greater length in the lecture, with diagrams from Iffley and Poictiers, without which the text of them would be unintelligible. The sum of what I said was a strong assertion of the incapacity of the Normans for any but the rudest and most grotesque sculpture,—Poictiers being, on the contrary, examined and ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... because the evil done in dark places came back in injury to the family life.... We must make ourselves more terrible than an army with banners to despoilers of womanhood.... Men are no longer to be excused for writing in scarlet on their foreheads their incapacity for self-control. None of us is longer to be excused for cowardice and acquiescence in the sacrifice of womanhood. Not even that woman—vilest of all creatures on the face of the earth I do believe—the procuress, shall be beyond the pale of sympathy, for she is ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... soldiers in the world, but a force constantly active to undo the work of pacific statesmen and to find fresh occasion for war. There were occasional outbreaks of blind ferocity, and at all times there was the incapacity of an uncivilised race to understand the character and the interest of alien subjects more cultivated than themselves. But there was not at first the sense of unmitigated tyranny that arose later; and there was not so great a contrast with life as it ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... the individual school, we imagine. Daily tests covering the simplest descriptive information that should be retained from high school physics and requiring the intelligent use of arithmetic, elementary algebra, and geometry will reveal amazing incapacity in these things. Tuttle, in his little book entitled An Introduction to Laboratory Physics (Jefferson Laboratory of Physics, Philadelphia, 1915), gives on pages 15-16 an excellent list of questions of this sort. Any one with teaching experience ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... has been made and the words have been duly set down," said the Being. "If you maintain your high purpose to a prosperous end nothing can exceed your honour in the Upper Air; if you fail culpably, or even through incapacity, the lot of Fuh-chi himself will be enviable compared ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... discontent among the Irish. Their cause had already been well-nigh ruined by the interference and incapacity of the French generals, and, on the retirement of Lauzun, they had confidently expected that Sarsfield would be appointed commander-in-chief, and that henceforth there would be unity of design in their operations. Saint Ruth was accompanied by a ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty
... was, practically, his sole achievement in the campaign. Outnumbered, outgeneralled, bankrupt in health as in reputation, he soon resigned his command, but not before he had given signs of "downright dotage."[54] He had, however, achieved immortality: his incapacity threw into brilliant relief the genius of his young antagonist, and therefore appreciably affected the fortunes of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... beautiful and fit order, in poetry, which is part of God's order, which men have learnt ages ago, for they, too, had their teaching from above; to offend against which is absolutely wrong, an offence to be put down mildly in those who offend ignorantly; but those who offend from dulness, from the incapacity to see the beautiful, or from carelessness about it, when praise or gain tempts them the other way, have some moral defect in them; they are what Solomon calls fools: they are the enemies of man; and he will "hate them right sore, even as though ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... The incapacity of a weak and distracted government may often assume the appearance, and produce the effects, of a treasonable correspondence with the public enemy. If Alaric himself had been introduced into the council of Ravenna, he would probably have advised the same measures which were actually ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... lands they were making ready for more active defence. Many went beyond sea to ask for foreign help, specially in the kindred lands of Denmark and Northern Germany. Against this threatening movement William's strength lay in the incapacity of his enemies for combined action. The whole land never rose at once, and Danish help did not come at the times or in the shape when it could ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... on the terms offered, and willingly accepting such decision of his doubts, was reduced to half-pay. This was the end of his soldiering: some five or six years in all; from which he had derived for life, among other things, a decided military bearing, whereof he was rather proud; an incapacity for practicing law;—and considerable uncertainty as to what his next course of life was ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... Here again I learnt that to refuse payment was impossible, and that all I could hope was that each note changed would give me a clue as to the whereabouts of the thief. Each forward step in the matter showed me more plainly the difficulties of the task I had undertaken, and my own incapacity for such work. Nothing is so good for a man's vanity as contact ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... have looked into her head that morning and seen what thoughts were distracting her from hearing about the great play, he would have been more amused and disgusted than ever with feminine frivolity of mind and incapacity in serious matters. For, it so happened that at the moment Susan was concentrating on a new dress. He would have laughed in the face of anyone saying to him that this new dress was for Susan in the pursuit of her scheme of life quite as ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... culminate in one of the most curious and interesting revolutions of modern history. In the first place, it marks the termination of the Adelsvaelde, or rule of the nobility. By their cowardice, incapacity, egotism and treachery during the crisis of the struggle, the Danish aristocracy had justly forfeited the respect of every other class of the community, and emerged from the war hopelessly discredited. On the other hand, Copenhagen, proudly conscious of her intrinsic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... always adequately represent to the concrete, and transform into distinct images, abstract notions derived from the pure intellect. But this contradiction, which is in itself merely subjective (i.e. an incapacity in the nature of man), too often passes for an incongruity or impossibility in the object (i.e. the notions themselves), and seduces the incautious to mistake the limitations of the human faculties for the limits of things, as ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... than it would require for family devotion. And further, can you spend your time to better purpose than in family prayer? I think not. It is the best husbandry of time. Says Philip Henry to his children, "Prayer and provender hinder no man's journey." But another pleads incapacity. He has not the gift of speech, and cannot make an eloquent prayer. This is no excuse. Prayer is the gift of the Holy Spirit; and if you have the spirit of prayer, you will find words for its utterance. ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... the letter quoted. He wished the two armies of Edward and himself to sweep a large stretch of territory as they marched toward each other. The one thing that he objected to was a consolidation of the two forces. Incapacity to turn an unexpected or an unwelcome situation to account was one of the duke's most deeply ingrained characteristics. He showed no inventiveness or resourcefulness. He held his own army at a distance from the English, much to ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... she had not shone had made her rather meek about her own capacities. She had always taken it impudently for granted that she was attractive, because the fact had been, so to speak, forced on her. But there had been a very humble-minded feeling about her incapacity for a business life. Miss Kaplan, for instance, she of the exuberant emotions and shaky English, had a record for accuracy and speed in her particular line which was unsullied by a single lapse. And Lucille, lazy, luxury-loving Lucille, concealed behind her fluffinesses an undoubted ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer |
