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More "Incapable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Colonel's orders as unmoved as if nothing had happened. I did my duty with habitual precision,—my hand was steady, my limbs were firm; but my tongue was incapable of uttering a word. My comrades as they came towards me, suddenly halted, and turned aside,—strangers looked at me, as if I bore the impress of some fearful thing. I was removed, as it were, out of myself—I was in another state ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 399, Supplementary Number • Various
... of the new aeon on which we are entering. What are to be the final consequences of this wide intercourse? Can a people change its character? Can a nation fully possessed by one type of civilization reject it, and adopt one radically different? Do races have "souls" which are fixed and incapable of radical transformations? What has taken place in Japan, a profound, or only a superficial change in psychical character? Are the destinies of the Oriental races ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... count and countess expressing my feelings as to this magnificent gift, and will send the letter to the embassy to be forwarded at the first possible opportunity. And now what is the next thing to be done, for I feel almost incapable of forming ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... born in him have been fed and trained by any of the "sane and mighty masters of English song"; but, born to the inheritance of a narrow and ferocious creed, with no power left to even admit the existence of the beautiful, he was "forever incapable of giving utterance to his genius—except in a dialect unworthy of it," and became simply "the explicit and unshrinking rhymer of ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... eyes that turned from the one to the other half questioningly, but content without reply. The mother seemed physically overwhelmed by the shock, and ready to accept absolute collapse, if not indeed incapable of movement. She made no attempt to ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... this sleep is a state of torpidity— from which the animal is incapable of awaking himself or of being awakened, until the regular period of indulgence in it may have passed. This, however, is not the case; for bears are often surprised in their sleep, and when aroused by the hunters act just as is usual ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... suit me," replied Morgan, in a tone of sadness of which he seemed incapable, "if the duel itself could take place. You have taken an oath, and you mean to keep it, you say. Well, every initiate who enters the Company of Jehu swears that he will not expose in any personal quarrel a life that belongs to the cause and ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... general poll tax, which was to be paid by every one above sixteen years of age, was established in 1379 and another one in the following year to meet the expenses of the hopeless French war which was now being conducted by incapable ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... chromatophores must have been in a state of relaxation; and this specimen was as distinct from its companions as from the bottom of the aquarium. Closer investigation proved that the creature was totally blind,[99] and thus incapable of assuming the color of the objects around it, the eyes being unable to act as a medium of communication between them and the chromatophores of the skin."[100] Thus far Pouchet had only confirmed Lister's observations, although it is highly ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... very soon have been succeeded by another if a very unexpected & most shocking domestick calamity had not rendered me wholly incapable of attending to every kind of business. I have however lately read your Tragedy over & over with the strictest attention, and after considering it again & again, not without a real partiality to the Author, & the strongest desire of encouraging the ...
— A Pindarick Ode on Painting - Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. • Thomas Morrison
... his mother's heart and dashed her hopes by an unfeeling letter, in which he declared her incapable of being treated with, since she was a prisoner and deposed. The not unreasonable expectation, that his manhood might reverse the proceedings wrought in his name in his infancy, was frustrated. Mary could no longer believe that he was constrained by ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... two hours afterward I thought almost every moment that the next would be my last, for the Taugwalders, utterly unnerved, were not only incapable of giving assistance, but were in such a state that a slip might have been expected from them at any moment. After a time we were able to do that which should have been done at first, and fixt ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... before his canvas. He could never imitate his illustrious master. He was incapable of painting anything but what he saw, and his brush, after reproducing the blue and white raiment, stopped, hesitating at the face, calling in vain on imagination. After futile efforts it was the grotesque mask of Rodriguez that ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... immediate change of tone, and unfortunately the difference of view becomes at once a difference of aim. The moral element enters immediately, and those who believe otherwise are designated unbelievers, though we do not at once stamp those who think otherwise as incapable of thought. Here lies the great difficulty in considering and treating calmly religious, or rather, theological questions. There is little hope of reaching a mutual understanding when the first attack is characterised ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... Thebans, he expected, would, in return for the services done them, allow him in everything else to have his way, and, so far from thwarting or impeding him, would fight on his side if he required it. You are judged by these to be the only people incapable of betraying for lucre the national rights of Greece, or bartering your attachment to her for any obligation or benefit. And this opinion of you he has naturally formed, not only from a view of present times, but by reflection on ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... the Powers have in the past been so hampered by the traditions of a tortuous diplomacy, so tossed and perturbed within by the cross-currents of intrigue, that they have shown themselves almost childishly incapable of arriving at clear-cut decisions. Old policies, old formulae, old jealousies, old dynastic influences still hold control of the majority of the chancelleries of Continental Europe, and these things it is that have made questions simple in themselves ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... And I felt some difficulty whom to choose of the few who had not yet spoken, so as to avoid, as far as possible, a tone that would jar upon our mood. Finally, I selected Coryat, the poet, knowing he was incapable of a false note, and hoping he might perhaps begin to pull us, as it were, up out of the pit into which we had slipped. He responded from the darkness, with the hesitation and incoherence which, in him, I have always found ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... had lived in the closest intimacy for many years. He understood perfectly my love for my mistress and had several times intimated that bonds of this kind were sacred to a friend, and that he would be incapable of an attempt to supplant me even if he loved the same woman. In short, I had perfect confidence in him and I had perhaps never pressed the hand of any human creature more cordially ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... then!" he said, greatly daring. (He knew perfectly well that the dignity of Lady Ambermere would not permit rude vulgar whistling, of which he was hopelessly incapable, to summon her motor. She made a feint of stopping her ears ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... transplanting, is not the work of a blind destiny. While civilisation in the East succumbed and died out before the advance of races incapable of culture, it was welcomed in the West by races possessing the requisite capacity, which by their inborn force gave it new forms and indestructible bases for its outward existence. Nor have the nations and kingdoms arisen each from its mother earth, as it ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... that melted the frozen torrents and set them boiling; with that sun removed, they froze again, and the army and all France became what they had been before, mere dead corpses—that and nothing more; incapable of thought, hope, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... one premise, and want of power over another, infer want of power over a conclusion. {335} As "Some men are not capable of tracing consequences; we cannot be sure that there are beings responsible for consequences who are incapable of tracing consequences; therefore, we cannot be sure that all men are responsible for the ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... morning she tried to get up, but fainted away on the floor. Her children were still asleep, and were not even awakened by her fall. It was some time before she recovered sufficiently to crawl upon the bed; and there she lay; almost incapable of thought or motion, for hours. As feeble nature reacted again, and she was able to think over her situation, she made up her mind to send in her little boy again to Mrs.—, with an apology for not using the sago, and request her to give her some little thing from ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... the greater part of this letter, with her extreme reluctance to bring the writer of it and her cousin Edmund together, would have made her (as she felt) incapable of judging impartially whether the concluding offer might be accepted or not. To herself, individually, it was most tempting. To be finding herself, perhaps within three days, transported to Mansfield, was an image of the greatest felicity, but it would have been a material drawback ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... "History of the Blacks," that Mrs. Embree once distinguished herself on a trip from Eastport to the Isthmus. The captain was incapable of managing the boat through drink, and there was no man to take his place. Mrs. Embree took the helm and brought the ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... of unanalysed sensations she was incapable of making a plan which should have any effect upon her state of mind. She abandoned herself to the mercy of accidents, missing Terence one day, meeting him the next, receiving his letters always with a start of surprise. Any woman experienced in the progress of courtship would ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... direction. He thought the matter over for a time, and then, finding himself unable to sleep, got up and wrote an article for a leading review on the subject of the Doxology. The article was subsequently rejected—which proves that Providence is not altogether incapable of a kindly action—but it served its purpose by ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... danger. Capable, besides, of high flights of idealism, which result in epics, but rarely in actions, owing to the Slavonic inaptitude for sustained and organised effort. The Englishman by contrast appears cold and calculating, incapable of rising above questions of practical utility; neither interested in other men's antecedents and experiences nor willing to retail his own. The catechism which Plato puts Pierre through on their first encounter ("War and Peace") as to his family, possessions, and what not, are precisely similar ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... unfamiliar dress was introduced to awaken the critical spirit. The young men, looking in their Sunday clothes like awkward and tawdry imitations of their workaday selves, were instructed by Brother Spence; and Brother Bowden, being the kindliest, gentlest, most incapable man of the band of brothers, was given the charge of the boys' Second Class, a class of youthful heathen, rampageous, fightable, and flippant, who made the good man's life a misery to him, and were at war with all authority. Peterson, ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... frequently she said these words angrily and in a choked voice, 'Husbands, or sons, or friends, or brothers, or father, have I none! Nor have I thee, O thou slayer of Madhu, for ye all, beholding me treated so cruelly by inferior foes, sit still unmoved! My grief at Karna's ridicule is incapable of being assuaged! On these grounds I deserve to be ever protected by thee, O Kesava, viz., our relationship, thy respect (for me), our friendship, and thy ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... Alice, however, was carefully searched every time she passed in and out of the Tower, to see that she supplied no books nor writing-materials to the prisoner, nor took any letters from her. Poor Margery! the care was needless, for she was just then as incapable of writing as if she had ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... Incapable of the least utterance or composition, Emendation, conservation of the "better tradition", Refinement of medium, elimination of superfluities, August attraction ...
— Hugh Selwyn Mauberley • Ezra Pound
... to cover with mirth-provoking material, to those other books by the same author, in which humour acts chiefly as train-bearer to tragedy. The determination of Charles to invent for himself a greatness which he is incapable of otherwise achieving, and its effect on his circle of intimates, are set forth in an exceedingly lively story, the plot of which it would be ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... of professional authorship; he had studied the literary world both high and low, and had seen enough to convince him that it was an impossible thing to produce art in such a society. The modern world did not know what art was, it was incapable of forming such a concept. That which it called "art" was fraud and parasitism—its very heart ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... that infuriated him. He could not get free: and he was ashamed. He had one or two sweethearts, starting with them in the hope of speedy development. But when he had a nice girl, he found that he was incapable of pushing the desired development. The very presence of the girl beside him made it impossible. He could not think of her like that, he could not think of her actual nakedness. She was a girl and he liked her, and dreaded violently even ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... revived by Coper'nicus and fully established by Newton. With respect to God, Pythagoras appears to have taught that he is the universal, ever-existent mind, the first principle of the universe, the source and cause of all animal life and motion, in substance similar to light, in nature like truth, incapable of pain, invisible, incorruptible, and only to be comprehended by the mind. His philosophy and teachings are thus ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... woman has only to be obedient. That is her whole duty, The line does not mean, as it has been said, that 'she is incapable of good or evil;' but it is not her part to take the initiative even ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... bronze (the spoils of the Pantheon and of the temple of Jerusalem); the profusion of gilding and ornament of all sorts and where in spite of this profusion there seems rien de trop. At first entrance the eye is so dazzled with the magnificent tout ensemble as to be incapable for a long time of examining any thing in detail. Each chapel abounds in the choicest marbles and precious stones: in a word it would seem as if the whole wealth of the Earth were concentrated here. Without impiety or exaggeration, I felt on entering this ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... his eyes with his hand. He was drinking just then a very bitter cup: and it was none the sweeter for the recollection that he had mixed it himself. His favourite child—for Blanche was that—seemed to be going headlong to her ruin: and her mother not only refused to aid in saving her, but was incapable of seeing any need that she should ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... spite of the wounded man's groans, he was quickly dressed and his hands tied behind him. As he opened his mouth to give expression to his protests, he found himself suddenly gagged by Brandt, who stood behind him. Then a strap was buckled about his feet, and he lay on the floor helpless and incapable of making ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... kind): but the general mass, tempered with such admixtures, is of the Platt-Deutsch, Saxon or even Anglish character we are familiar with here at home. A patient stout people; meaning considerable things, and very incapable of ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... it retains for a time its spiral form; it then straightens itself, and again commences to revolve. The long, much-inclined shoot of the Ceropegia previously alluded to offered some curious peculiarities. The lower and older internodes, which continued to revolve, were incapable, on repeated trials, of twining round a thin stick; showing that, although the power of movement was retained, this was not sufficient to enable the plant to twine. I then moved the stick to a greater distance, so that it was struck ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... assurances of her husband's death and of her own complete freedom. To this he may have intended to add some final messages of love and confidence from the man she had been so ready to forget; but nothing worse. Wallace Pfeiffer was incapable of anything worse, and if she had only resigned herself to her seeming fate and consented to see ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... admiring herself; she was incapable even of suspecting that so expensive a pendant could not suit ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... communicated a whistling small vibration to my whole frame. This intensified, became more pronounced. Perceptibly, in that magnificent refinement of speed, our enormous pace I felt to decrease ever so little. Still we had so far outstripped intelligence as that I was incapable of considering the ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... strange impressiveness with which the request was proffered, or that the softened mood of Hedges rendered him incapable of contention, certain it was that he granted it; and most likely would wonder at himself for it all his after-life. Crossing the hall with silent tread, and taking up a candle as he went, he led the way to ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... We have left behind the theoretic enthusiast, perplexed by the contrast between the semi-barbarism of the country and the old-fashioned apathy of its rulers; we have no more descriptions, serious or sarcastic, of rakish subalterns and disorderly regiments under ancient, incapable colonels; we are introduced to a reformed Anglo-India, full of hard-working, efficient officers, civil and military, and sufficiently decorous, except where hill-stations foster flirting and the ordinary dissipation of any garrison town. It is, however, still ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... concerning such wonderful mysteries as the Immaculate Conception (the Mystic Birth), the Crucifixion (the Mystic Death), the cleansing blood, the atonement, and other doctrines of the Church, which the intellect refuses to believe, as they are incapable of demonstration, and seemingly at war with natural law. Material advancement may be furthered when intellect is dominant and the longings of the heart unsatisfied, but soul growth will be retarded until the heart ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... "and speaking to you as a gentleman who is incapable of betraying me, I will confess, that if I thought myself a prisoner here, neither walls nor water should ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... suppose our tete-a-tete was long, but it was a lively period while it lasted. He drank like a fish or an Englishman; shouted, beat the table, roared out songs, quarrelled, made it up again, and at last tried to throw the dinner-plates through the window, a feat of which he was at that time quite incapable. For a party of fugitives, condemned to the most rigorous discretion, there was never seen so noisy a carnival; and through it all the Colonel continued to sleep like a child. Seeing the Major so well advanced, and no retreat possible, I made a fair ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... saw God in all the manifestations of Nature. This did not satisfy him nor resolve his doubts, and he therefore confessed that reason could not compass the exalted aims of philosophy. But there was no cynicism in his doubt. It was the soul-sickening consciousness that reason was incapable of solving the mighty questions that he burned to know. There was no way to arrive at the truth, "for," said he, "error is spread over all things." It was not disdain of knowledge, it was the combat of contradictory opinions that oppressed him. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... a man who can only use it to read the signs on the public houses and possibly a pamphlet which he is incapable of understanding—the kind of education we have had from the time of Riurik: and village life has remained exactly as it was then. Not education is wanted but freedom for the full development of spiritual capacities. Not schools ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... their anxiety to become masters of his possessions, they grew at last impatient and, weary of his living so long, formed a conspiracy against him, and accused him before the Areopagus, of being insane, a driveller incapable of governing his family, or managing his concerns—in short, a fool, a madman. He had fortunately, at that time, just finished his OEDIPUS AT COLONOS. When he heard the charge made against him by his ingrate sons, he offered no defence but this tragedy, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... he had lost five thousand men. The hospitals were crowded with sick. The tribesmen had ceased to send in provisions. Even should he succeed in taking the town after another assault, his force would be so far reduced as to be incapable of further action. Its strength had already fallen from sixteen thousand to eight thousand men. Ten of his generals had been killed. Of his eight aides-de-camp, four had been ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... Suppose your own heredity had proven tricky—it does sometimes, you know—and you had been found incapable of scientific thought. You would have been deranked and perhaps made a record clerk—no personal reflections, but such things do happen—and if you now were filing cards all day you would surely be much ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... struck with a passage in a powerful article upon 'The Hope that is within Us,' in a late foreign periodical, wherein the fruitful theme of our correspondent is touched upon. 'If matter,' says the writer, 'be incapable of consciousness, as JOHNSON so powerfully argues in Rasselas, then the animus of brutes must be an anima, and immaterial; for the dog and the elephant not merely exhibit 'consciousness,' but a 'half-reasoning' power. And ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... you see, and no longer able to serve them [her grown children]. When they kill game, I am too feeble to aid in carrying home the flesh; I am incapable of gathering wood to make fire, and I cannot carry their children on my back as ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... their entire self-possession, their elegant but unaffected bearing, and the choiceness of their language, would enable them to make a creditable appearance in any foreign drawing-room." Their natural talents are of a high order; but we must add that the senoras are uneducated, and are incapable of either great vices or great virtues. Their minds, like the soil of their native country, are fertile, but uncultivated; and their hearts, like the climate, are of a mean temperature. Prayer-books and French novels (imported, as wanted, for there is not ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... true Protestant and a heroic patriot—"I own all authority that hath its prescriptives and limitations from the word of God; but I cannot own this usurper as lawful king—seeing both by the word of God, such a one is incapable to bear rule, and likewise by the ancient laws of the kingdom, which admit none to the crown of Scotland until he swear to defend the Protestant religion, which a man ...
— The Life of James Renwick • Thomas Houston
... under-parts of a lioness. The other, then, was a lion! With a sort of gurgling in his throat he turned his eyes to it, and he saw it trotting up straight for him, its shaggy mane giving to its head and shoulders an enormous size. He felt spell-bound, incapable of moving hand or foot. It was the silence of the ferocious beasts that paralyzed him. Then the jackal howled behind him, and his blood rushed through his veins. His tongue no longer clave to the roof of his mouth, and when the great beast was within ten yards of ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... our pinnace incapable of farther use, we took out her four bases, anchor, and every thing of value, and set her on fire, after which we ran along the coast. On the 3d February we anchored about 4 leagues from a town, which we saluted with two guns, on which the chief ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... means to fasten both rulers and people in her thrall. With far-sighted policy she perceived that in order to enslave men effectually, the shackles must be bound upon their souls; that the surest way to prevent them from escaping their bondage was to render them incapable of freedom. A thousandfold more terrible than the physical suffering which resulted from her policy, was the moral degradation. Deprived of the Bible, and abandoned to the teachings of bigotry and selfishness, the ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... in England, in which a large number of children have been allowed to grow up unvaccinated, have always been visited sooner or later by a serious outbreak of smallpox. It must be so; the laws of natural phenomena can not be changed to suit the taste of those persons who are mentally incapable of understanding them. They can not be evaded; ignorance of the law is no more an excuse in the realm of ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... of his broken-heart theory. But even if Shakespear had had no failures, it was not possible for a man of his powers to observe the political and moral conduct of his contemporaries without perceiving that they were incapable of dealing with the problems raised by their own civilization, and that their attempts to carry out the codes of law and to practise the religions offered to them by great prophets and law-givers were and still are so foolish that we now call for ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... speaker who brings in this kind of argument makes use neither of reasoning nor of legitimate persuasion. He neglects his proposition and attempts to excite the feelings of his audience to such an extent as to render them incapable of forming a dispassionate judgment upon ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... in love. These young men were sure of themselves and of each other; the enemy of one was the enemy of all; the most urgent personal considerations would have been shattered if they had clashed with the sacred solidarity of their fellowship. All alike incapable of disloyalty, they could oppose a formidable No to any accusation brought against the absent and defend them with perfect confidence. With a like nobility of nature and strength of feeling, it was possible to think ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... room where the explosion took place?" asked Jennie. "Yes." "And is this the only entrance?" "The only entrance, madame." "Were the men on guard in this doorway injured by the explosion?" "Yes. They were not seriously injured, but were rendered incapable for a time of attending to their duties." "Then a person could have escaped without their seeing him?" "A whole regiment of persons might have escaped. You will understand the situation exactly if I compare this corridor to a long cannon, the room at the ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... existed between the family of the proprietor of the Knoll and his own, growing no narrower; and an active cupidity, with the hopes of confiscations, or an abandonment of the estate, came in aid of this rankling jealousy of station; the most uneasy, as it is the meanest of all our vices. Utterly incapable of appreciating the width of that void which separates the gentleman from the man of coarse feelings and illiterate vulgarity, he began to preach that doctrine of exaggerated and mistaken equality which says "one man is as good as another," a doctrine that is nowhere engrafted ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... Mensheviks object to the identification of the Trades Unions with the Government apparatus on the ground that when this change, which they expect comes about, the Trade Union movement will be so far emasculated as to be incapable of defending the town workers against the peasants who will then be the ruling class. Thus they attack the present Trades Union leaders for being directly influenced by the Government in fixing the rate of wages, on the ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... ridiculous complications, you know—that must be the explanation of it. You have only to talk to him, and clear up the whole affair," said the Squire, recovering himself a little. He believed in "talking to," like Louisa, and like most people who are utterly incapable of talking to any purpose. He took some courage from the thought, and recovered his colour a little. "There is the bell for luncheon, and I am very glad of it," he said; "a glass of sherry will set me all right. Don't say anything ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... or honor, or shall, without the consent of Congress, accept and retain any present, pension, office, or emolument of any kind whatever from any emperor, king, prince, or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of profit or trust under them, or either of them." This proposed amendment did not become a part of the Constitution, failing of ratification by ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 10. • James D. Richardson
... confesses, there is no doubt as to that; but the country finds in them one more cause to be proud: "It hath ben often seen in Englond that three or four thefes, for povertie hath sett upon seven or eight true men and robbyd them al." The thieves of France are incapable of such admirable boldness. On this account "it is right seld that French men be hangyd for robberye," says Fortescue, who had never, judging by the way he talks, passed by Montfaucon, nor come across ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... the dreadful slaughter in their ranks seemed to render the affrighted creatures incapable of action, for they came to a ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... kindred doctrines may be inferentially drawn from Carlyle's defence of Cromwell; namely, that a popular assembly is incapable of guiding successfully the destinies of a nation; that behind all constitutions lies an ultimate law of force; that majorities, as such, have no more right to rule than kings and nobles; that the strongest are the best, and the best are the strongest; that the right to rule lies with those who ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... shot past, pursued by mounted men. And very soon the herd was gone, and all was again quiet. Then followed a moment that was full of embarrassment. Keenly, Lounsbury looked from father to daughter, the one striving to assume an easy air, the other incapable of hiding alarm. All at once, he felt certain they shared Old Michael's information. He determined to tell them that he, too, knew what ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... complainings of a cabinet piano, wasting away, a string a day, and faintly resounding to the noises of the street in its jangling and distracted brain. Of motionless clocks that never stirred a finger, and seemed as incapable of being successfully wound up, as the pecuniary affairs of their former owners, there was always great choice in Mr Brogley's shop; and various looking-glasses, accidentally placed at compound interest of reflection and refraction, presented to ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... "I'm incapable of caring now," I groaned, "what has happened to any of them. If an earthquake has swallowed up our mountain, and Anthony's married Monny, and Brigit's been abducted, or vice versa, and Miss Guest has gone off with the jewels, it will ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... would clear most minds—especially old ones. You see, the brain is a muscle and thought is its physical exercise. It learns certain thoughts—to go through certain exercises. These become a habit, and in time the muscle becomes stiff and incapable of learning any new movements—also incapable of leaving off the old. The religion of an old person is merely so much reflex nervous action. It is beyond the reach of reason. The individual's mind can affect it as little as it can teach the ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... up! Git up, honey, an' go in the house. You ought to 'a' been abed long ago. Git up honey." Chichester stood like one paralyzed. For the moment, he was incapable of ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... darted about at its own will. It had an object; was advancing somewhere rapidly. The thing had something of the form of a jester's bauble with points, which hung flabby and undulating. It seemed covered with a dust incapable of being washed away by the water. It was more than horrible; it was foul. It seemed to be seeking the darker portion of the cavern, where at ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... clucked her tongue in sympathy. It must be terrible not to be sure, so ... well, it must be just terrible. And I was such a kind man, too. I didn't quite get the connection, until I remembered there are some patterns which believe a human being would be incapable of being kind unless through hope of reward ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... unfortunately, does inebriate, although whether from joy or grief at the anticipated change does not transpire; anyhow, the result was that on attempting to drive Mr and Mrs Montefiore back from the ball he was found totally incapable of guiding the horses, and, notwithstanding the efforts made by the footman to come to his assistance, they had to leave the carriage before arriving at their destination, and complete ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... merely repeated themselves over and over, just as so many delicious syllables which tickled the ear and rolled succulently under the tongue. For, you see, Tom was only an ordinary battered Arizona cow-puncher, and so, of course, according to the fireside moralists, quite incapable of the higher feelings. But the words reacted to arouse memories of black-eyed Anne, and the memories in turn brought ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... beautiful France has experienced. These errors have necessarily led to the rule of the men of blood. In fact, who has proclaimed the principle of insurrection as a duty? Who has paid adulation to the nation while claiming for it a sovereignty which it was incapable of exercising? Who has destroyed the sanctity and respect for the laws, in making them depend, not on the sacred principles of justice, or the nature of things and on civil justice, but simply on the will of an assembly of men strangers to the knowledge of civil, criminal, administrative, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the Malay race seems rather deficient. They are incapable of anything beyond the simplest combinations of ideas, and have little taste or energy for the acquirement of knowledge. Their civilization, such as it is, does not seem to be indigenous, as it is entirely confined to those nations who have been converted to the Mahometan ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... been accustomed to consider the Gypsy as a wandering outcast, incapable of appreciating the blessings of a settled and civilised life, or - if abandoning vagabond propensities, and becoming stationary - as one who never ascends higher than the condition of a low trafficker, will be surprised to learn, that amongst the Gypsies of Moscow ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... popular about the end of the eleventh century. The idea of woman is purer in the early poems. There is no description of the body; there is no gallantry. The beautiful Aude apprehends the death of Roland; she falls dead. In the second half of the twelfth century our poets would have been incapable of so simple and noble a conception. We find, even in 'Amis et Amelis,' women who are still very German in physiognomy, and alluring, but they are Germans, so to say, of the second manner. They have a habit ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... challenge became more marked upon the swarthy face. The smile had vanished. "And you think I am incapable of that?" ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... may come for that by and by," said Mr Jefferson. "In the meantime let us be content to hold our own till assistance can arrive from the town, or till the rebels have discovered that they are incapable ...
— The Heir of Kilfinnan - A Tale of the Shore and Ocean • W.H.G. Kingston
... task of the Canal Department in the Panjab has been the extension of irrigation to the Rechna and Jech Doabs and the lower part of the Bari Doab. All three contained large areas of waste belonging to the State, mostly good soil, but incapable of cultivation owing to the scanty rainfall. Colonization has therefore been an important part of all the later canal projects. The operations have embraced ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... its mere vital organization, might ravage and destroy, as the tiger and the serpent may destroy and ravage, and, the moment after, would sport in the sunlight harmless and rejoicing, because, like the serpent and the tiger, it is incapable of remorse." ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had stood motionless, growing paler and paler. Like most noble natures, when absolutely in the right, he was incapable of defending himself against misunderstandings. He was too wounded; he was hurt to ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... The man that takes this as the sole principle by which to guide his moral conduct, not only writes himself down "depraved," but an intellectual imbecile. What does he mean? He means that he is incapable of thinking for himself; that he has no fixed chart, but is tossed about in the eddy of fashion; that he has no principle to guide his own conduct by, but has to look to the street and follow where ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... I contemplated the possibility that they had a scheme to develop a nuclear bomb, and to explode it over Greater Washington in the belief that in the resulting confusion they might seize power. But, on the face of it their membership is incapable ...
— Status Quo • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... word, not a question," Lance implored. The mere suggestion increased a panic which seemed incapable of increase. "And for the shadow, why, that's true. The pipe's the shadow, and the shadow frightens me. A shadow! Yes! A shadow is a horrible, threatning thing! Show me a shadow cast by nothing and I am with you. But you might as easily ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... men become the most one-sided beings, perhaps, in the whole human family. To moral beauty Mr. Taylor seemed quite blind; his mental vision resembled the physical sight of those individuals whose eyes, though perfect in every other respect, are incapable of receiving any impression of an object tinged with blue—the colour of the heavens. Even the few ideas he had upon religious subjects partook of the character of loss and gain; the simple spirit of true piety could never enter into a mind in the state of his. ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... Halbert, "I am incapable of a lie. I should choke on one were my life to require that I pronounced it. I say, that this sword of my father was through the body—the point came out behind his back—the hilt pressed upon his breast-bone. And ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... more pleasure in commending the beauties than exposing the blemishes of a laudable writing. Like Horace, in a long work he can bear some deformities, and justly lay them on the imperfection of human nature, which is incapable of faultless productions. When an excellent drama appears in public, and by its intrinsic worth attracts a general applause, he is not stung with envy and spleen; nor does he express a savage nature in fastening upon the celebrated author, dwelling upon his imaginary defects, and ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... in his public life. Possessed of an astonishing memory, knowledge of vast extent, and an unfailing flow of ready and effective speech, he shone alike as a parliamentary orator and a conversationalist. In his writings he spared no pains in the collection and arrangement of his materials, and he was incapable of deliberate unfairness. Nevertheless, his mind was strongly cast in the mould of the orator and the pleader: and the vivid contrasts, antitheses, and even paradoxes which were his natural forms of expression do ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Mr. Thomas Mitton and to Mrs. Hulkes (an esteemed friend and neighbour) are graphic descriptions of this disaster. But they do NOT tell of the wonderful presence of mind and energy shown by Charles Dickens when most of the terrified passengers were incapable of thought or action, or of his gentleness and goodness to the dead and dying. The Mr. Dickenson[14] mentioned in the letter to Mrs. Hulkes soon recovered. He always considers that he owes his life to Charles Dickens, the latter having ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... into confusion. It is an event which the ministry would find it difficult to resist, and therefore cannot, I presume, be willing to encounter."[1] But he added, "There is here an opinion, which many do not hesitate to avow, that the United States are, by the nature of their Government, incapable of any great, vigorous, or persevering exertion."[125] This impression, for which it must sorrowfully be confessed there was much seeming ground in contemporary events, and the idiosyncrasies of Jefferson and Madison, in their full dependence upon commercial ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... traits of Grant's character was that which lay always on the surface, visible to all who had eyes to see it. That was his moral and intellectual integrity, sincerity, veracity, and justice. He was incapable of any attempt to deceive anybody, except for a legitimate purpose, as in military strategy; and, above all, he was incapable of deceiving himself. He possessed that rarest of all human faculties, the power of a perfectly ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... an enuious sliuer broke, When downe the weedy Trophies, and her selfe, Fell in the weeping Brooke, her cloathes spred wide, And Mermaid-like, a while they bore her vp, Which time she chaunted snatches of old tunes, As one incapable of her owne distresse, Or like a creature Natiue, and indued Vnto that Element: but long it could not be, Till that her garments, heauy with her drinke, Pul'd the poore wretch from her melodious buy, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... to meet alone the hostile proceedings and influence of the London Wesleyan Committee. In order to sustain myself in these reverses, and especially in the last, but most painful one, I have been compelled to put forth physical and intellectual efforts that I am absolutely incapable of repeating. ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... his loyalty cried out that he was wronging her. Juliet—his Juliet of the steadfast eyes and low, sincere voice—was surely incapable of double dealing! Whatever her life in the past had been, however frivolous, however artificial, it had been given to him—perhaps to him alone—to know her as she was. A great wave of self-reproach went over him. How had he ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... again resume my pen. I was willing you should be acquainted with all the distress and softness of my heart. I was willing to furnish you with every motive to redeem the character of a man, before it were too late. Do not however think me incapable of a spirited and a steady resolution. It were easy for me to address a letter to the family of Aranda, I might describe to them all my wrong, and prevent that dreaded union, the thought of which distresses me. My letter might probably arrive before ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... of the Southern regiments disappeared in the deep woods, Dick and many of those around him sank exhausted upon the ground. Even had they been ordered to follow they would have been incapable of it. Complete nervous collapse followed such days and nights as those through which they ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... ability to command. The people looked to their rulers to repel the invaders; the rulers looked to the people. There was no common intelligence or will between them. Everything was wanting; nothing was as it should be. And so Mandalay fell without a shot, and King Thibaw, the young, incapable, kind-hearted ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... him on board my barge (he was a native of France): he was much indisposed from his sudden fall into the sea, and incapable of speaking; after some time, however, he recovered, and gave the following account of himself, viz.: "About seven or eight days since, I cannot tell which, for I have lost my reckoning, having been most of the time where the sun never sets, I ascended from the ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... the peace and the guardians of the public safety? It was incredible, it was monstrous, degrading, nay, intolerable, and a remedy would have to be found either in the reorganisation of an inefficient police force or in the resignation of an incapable Ministry. ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... the man at first sight—gathered from different quarters and confided to Jacob were often disquieting. It was said that at Simla he had entrapped this little heiress, and her obviously foolish and incapable mother, by devices generally held to be discreditable; and it had taken two angry guardians to warn him off. What was the state of the case now no one exactly knew; though it was shrewdly suspected that the engagement was only ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sycee. This want of a currency arises from their utter lack of confidence in the coinage of their own country. No currency that the Imperial Government might issue, not like the copper cash, or tsien, incapable of adulteration, would be above suspicion; and while the shameless system of mandarin plunder and fraud continues, it is hopeless to expect a proper currency in China, unless the foreigners interfere ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... not two nations among them—two nations radically opposed to each other and incapable of coalescing? Supposing a resurrection of the people, which of the two is to prevail—the numerical majority, or the so far influential minority? In either event, it is fair to suppose a new state of helotism for the one party or the other. Is this the spectacle which ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... possible this defect of Imagination may not be in the Soul it self, but as it acts in Conjunction with the Body. Perhaps there may not be room in the Brain for such a variety of Impressions, or the Animal Spirits may be incapable of figuring them in such a manner, as is necessary to excite so very large or very minute Ideas. However it be, we may well suppose that Beings of a higher Nature very much excel us in this respect, as it is probable the Soul of Man will be infinitely ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... to those bitter words, for it was only too easy just then to make her accuse herself of anything. She sat meekly suffering, and thinking that the other was quite justified in all her anger. Mrs. Roberts was, of course, quite incapable of appreciating her mood, and continued to pour out her sarcasm, and to grow more and more bitter. To tell the truth, the worthy matron had not been half so unselfish in her hopes about Helen as she liked to pretend, and she showed then that like most people of the world who are perfectly ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... seething with excitement, and a few notable men went out with the Earl, his personal following did not exceed seventy in all. Then followed the march which ended so disastrously in pitiful surrender at Preston that fatal November day. However gallant personally, Forster was an incapable soldier, no leader of men, and General Wills had but to spread wide his net to sweep in the bulk of the insurgents—Forster, Derwentwater, Kenmure, Nithsdale, Carwath, Wintoun, and men less exalted in rank by the score and the hundred. ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... of furnishing products useful for the social economy. But all the elements indispensable for obtaining such a result fail us utterly just here. We do not yet know what ought to be, in general terms, the composition of a soil incapable of producing malaria, yet retaining those properties which are suitable for vegetation. When we shall have arrived at this first stage, there will still be a long road to travel; and the most difficult part will be to discover a practical means of imparting this ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... avoid the faces that were familiar to him, but he had forgotten that he must be seen and recognized by people unknown to him. Miss Giltinan's clear and candid mind rejected these rumours for lying inventions, incapable of belief that her idol, Jonah, would carry on with any woman. They talked about him going upstairs to hear the piano. What was more natural when he couldn't play it himself? And she dismissed the matter from her mind and went ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... great severity. The consequence might have been fatal, had I not immediately interposed, and with some difficulty rescued the officers from the hands of the enraged multitude. My children, who looked upon my delivery now as certain, appeared transported with joy, and were incapable of containing their raptures. But they were soon undeceived, upon hearing me address the poor deluded people, who came, as they ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... seemed to be incapable of further speech. The waiter looked sympathetic; it was no fault of his. And the salt was there, ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... I had not resolved to become invulnerable to woman, but I had determined that she by whom I would let myself be wounded should be one vastly unlike any in Catherine's train. When I should find the woman pure as beautiful, incapable of guile, I would love. "Somewhere in France," I often said to myself, "that woman exists. I shall know her when I see her." As in the former affair, I had my ideal already formed, and was already in love, watching for the embodiment of that ideal to appear. But this second ideal was different ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... sympathy that will be felt for Lady Ida is the sympathy which is commonly felt for the spendthrift—for the person who, no matter what his income, is congenitally incapable of making ends meet. The miser has no friends; but the spendthrift has generally too many. We avoid Harpagon as though he were a leper; but Falstaff, who, like Lady Ida, could "find no cure for this intolerable consumption of the purse," never lacked ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... the Comte he knew him to be absolutely incapable of telling a deliberate lie, and absolutely incapable of bartering his word of honour for the ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... punishment of their sins. The idea—the miserable fancy rather—has terribly corrupted the preaching of the gospel. The message of the good news has not been truly delivered. Unable to believe in the forgiveness of their Father in heaven, imagining him not at liberty to forgive, or incapable of forgiving forthright; not really believing him God our Saviour, but a God bound, either in his own nature or by a law above him and compulsory upon him, to exact some recompense or satisfaction ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... Bursting with anger, but incapable of speech, Innes shouldered his rod, made a gesture of farewell, and strode off down the burn-side. Archie watched him go without moving. He was sorry, but quite unashamed. He hated to be inhospitable, but in one ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... path of the gods to the world of Brahman, there to remain for ever in some blissful state. But, according to /S/a@nkara, all these texts are meant to set forth the result of a certain inferior knowledge only, of the knowledge of the conditioned Brahman. Even in a passage apparently so entirely incapable of more than one interpretation as B/ri/. Up. VI, 2, 15, the 'True,' which the holy hermits in the forest are said to worship, is not to be the highest Brahman, but only Hira/n/yagarbha!—And why?—Only because ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... other day to come on board of my ship and talk with me, and your refusal has occasioned many disasters. But now that we have met again, let us profit by this opportunity to talk seriously and like rational men. You see you are here on a floating ice-bank, without food, and seriously wounded, incapable by your own efforts of escaping the most cruel death. My adopted father and myself have all that you need, food, fire-arms, and brandy. We will share with you, and take care of you until you are well again. In return for our ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... minds cannot imagine motion without some Power moving through the medium of some subordinate agency, ever acting on the sun, to send such floods of light and heat to our otherwise cold and dark terrestrial ball; but it is the overwhelming magnitude of such power that we are incapable of comprehending. The agency necessary to throw out the floods of flame seen during the few moments of a total eclipse of the sun, and the power requisite to burst open a cavity in its surface, such as could entirely engulph our earth, will ever set all the ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... anything equal to it on shore. We were seated on the deck, women and all, in the serenest evening that can be imagined. Not a single cloud presented itself to our view, and the sun himself was the only object which engrossed our whole attention. He did indeed set with a majesty which is incapable of description, with which, while the horizon was yet blazing with glory, our eyes were called off to the opposite part to survey the moon, which was then at full, and which in rising presented us with the second object that this world hath offered to our vision. Compared to these the pageantry ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... Hopes have indeed been expressed by some Austrophils in the good-will of the new Austrian Emperor on account of his amiable character. The Slavs have ample reason to distrust the Habsburgs who have proved to be treacherous autocrats in the past, and whose records show them as an incapable and degenerate family. As a political power Kaiser Karl is the same menace to his subject Slavs as his predecessors. Above all, however, he is of necessity a blind tool in the hands of Germany, and he cannot possibly extricate himself from her firm ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... hesitation. "The Old Prospector, you know, before his death had made a very rich find, but died without staking his claim. The secret of its location he entrusted to Mr. Macgregor and the doctor. The doctor, in a fit of drunkenness, gave the secret away to Carroll and Crawley, who, leaving him incapable from drink, set off at ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... was said on the subject of adaptation as a universal phenomenon of nature. It was not contended that perfection is attained by any living mechanism, but it was held that no place exists in nature for an organism that is incapable of adjusting itself to the manifold conditions of life. A modus vivendi must be established and some satisfactory degree of adaptation must be attained, or else an animal or a species must perish. With this ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... inevitable. When a political refugee is quiet his person should be held sacred; and it was very dastardly on the part of the French to demand to have this Arab Sheikh given up. But the French mind is incapable of comprehending what is a political asylum, or even what is constitutional freedom. Local politics still stick close to our ghafalah, and the people have such faith in my power and influence, that they really believe I could, if I would, get Ghadames ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... slave-driving, Virginian, Jeffersonian school; principled against all improvement; with all the interests and passions and vices of slavery rooted in his moral and political constitution; with talents not above mediocrity, and a spirit incapable of expansion to the dimensions of the station on which he has been cast by the hand of Providence, unseen, through the apparent agency of chance. To that benign and healing hand of Providence I trust, in humble hope of the good ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... after a girl is fifteen years old, in this country, she considers herself a person of sound judgment, and the parents look up to these sprites with a sort of deferential fear. These girls are simply living pictures walking about the earth, deriding everything they are incapable of understanding. And who could be charmed with such women? with such 'Grecian Bends,' Grecian noses? The genuine well-bred woman will shine out from beneath the plainest garb; and shoddy vulgarity, even should it be incased ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... second boche who like the first had been squatted down rose to his feet, slowly, it seemed, alongside me. We were both bereft of speech from the surprise; the fellow under me was incapable of locomotion as well, for while I felt him squirm ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... despair, was only a bondage and a pain to her. She loved best of all the animals, that were single and unsocial as she herself was. She loved the horses and cows in the field. Each was single and to itself, magical. It was not referred away to some detestable social principle. It was incapable of soulfulness and tragedy, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... works of other writers who could see. That foolish fellow Spence has laboured to explain philosophically how Blacklock may have done, by his own faculties, what it is impossible he should do. The solution, as I have given it, is plain. Suppose I know a man to be so lame that he is absolutely incapable to move himself, and I find him in a different room from that in which I left him, shall I puzzle myself with idle conjectures that perhaps his nerves have, by some unknown change, all at once become effective? No, sir; it is clear how he got into ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... to lose!" cried Mr. Effingham, on whose bosom Eve lay, nearly incapable of motion. "The food and water are in the boat, and in the name of a merciful God, let us escape from this scene of ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... may be pursued, and such works may be performed, with a common share of judgment, experience, and industry. The genius of Cicero and Virgil was more sensibly felt, as each revolving age had been found incapable of producing a similar or a second: but the most eminent teachers of the law were assured of leaving disciples equal or superior to themselves in ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... women will redeem mankind. On men he builds little hope. To speak roughly, men are all in Peer Gynt's case, or Torvald Helmer's. They are swathed in timid conventions, blindfolded with selfishness, so that they cannot perceive, and unable with their own hands to tear off these bandages. They are incapable of the highest renunciation. "No man," says Torvald Helmer, "sacrifices his honor, even for one he loves." Those who heard Miss Achurch deliver Nora's reply will not easily forget it. "Millions of women have done so." The effect in the ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... was never above mediocrity, and was dropped as corporal in the junior class and served the last year as a private. W. H. Seward was called "too stupid to learn." Napoleon graduated forty-second in his class. "Who," asks Swift, "were the forty-one above him?" Darwin was singularly incapable of mastering any language. "When he left school," he says, "I was considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect. To my deep mortification, my father ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... present moment, the great majority of Buddhists would probably be quite incapable of understanding the abstract speculation of their ancient masters. The view taken of Nirvana in China, Mongolia, and Tatary may probably be as gross as that which most of the Mohammedans form of their ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... Rhyme is incapable of expressing the greatest thoughts, naturally; and the lowest, it cannot, with any grace. For what is more unbefitting the majesty of Verse, than 'to call a servant,' or 'bid a door be shut' in Rhyme? And yet, this miserable necessity ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... Boyden is a gentle, brave and honest man, and utterly incapable of committing such a crime," cried Violet, with much feeling. "Besides, sir, he can have had no possible reason ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... the stone mazes furrowing this Atlantic seafloor, Captain Nemo moved forward without hesitation. He knew this dark path. No doubt he had often traveled it and was incapable of losing his way. I followed him with unshakeable confidence. He seemed like some Spirit of the Sea, and as he walked ahead of me, I marveled at his tall figure, which stood out in black against the ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... that the Church is not susceptible of being reformed in her doctrines. The Church is the work of an Incarnate God. Like all God's works, it is perfect. It is, therefore, incapable of reform. Is it not the height of presumption for men to attempt to improve upon the work of God? Is it not ridiculous for the Luthers, the Calvins, the Knoxes and the Henries and a thousand lesser lights to be offering their amendments to the Constitution of the Church, as if it were ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... the 18th Brumaire, to you within an hour?"—"I defy you to do it."—"I have made myself responsible for him, and I know what I am about. He is violent in his politics; but he is a man of honour, incapable of failing in his word."—" Well, we shall see. Go and find him." I was very sure of doing what I had promised, for within an hour before I had seen M. Moreau de Worms. He had been concealed since the 13th Brumaire, and had not ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v3 • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... than the former, though this was done only at the tower of Antonia. So Caesar went his rounds through the legions, and hastened on the works, and showed the robbers that they were now in his hands. But these men, and these only, were incapable of repenting of the wickednesses they had been guilty of; and separating their souls from their bodies, they used them both as if they belonged to other folks, and not to themselves. For no gentle affection could touch their souls, nor could any ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... opposite shore—another commodious pan. In the black water of the arm there floated white blocks of ice. Some were manifestly substantial: a leaping man could pause to rest; but many—necessary pans, these, to a crossing of the lane—were as manifestly incapable of ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... below the Enns, only 3.8 per cent. of the soil is barren; in the Tyrol, 29 per cent.; in Dalmatia, 48.1 per cent. (Springer). In the French Pyrenees, 43 per cent. is considered incapable of cultivation; in the Alps, in Landes and Morbihan, 42 per cent.; in the departments of Nord and Somme, 1.3 per cent. (Schnitzler). Franscini considers 36 per cent. of Switzerland unfit for tillage. The idea "barren" is a very vague one, and hence a ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... restore the fortune of the day. Much room could not be found in this disorderly battle for the talents of a general; but the king fled before the hero, and the Vandals, accustomed only to a Moorish enemy, were incapable of withstanding the arms and ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... Romans and the Emperor Anastasius. Now when this Ambazouces had reached an advanced age and was near to death, he sent to Anastasius asking that money be given him, on condition that he hand over the fortress and the Caspian Gates to the Romans. But the Emperor Anastasius was incapable of doing anything without careful investigation, nor was it his custom to act thus: reasoning, therefore, that it was impossible for him to support soldiers in a place which was destitute of all good things, and which had nowhere in the neighbourhood a nation subject to the Romans, ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... said that the constant progression of the powers of the mind affords another proof of its immortality. Concerning this, Addison remarks, "Were a human soul ever thus at a stand in her acquirements, were her faculties to be full blown and incapable of further enlargement, I could imagine that she might fall away insensibly and drop at once into a state of annihilation. But can we believe a thinking being that is in a perpetual progress of improvement, and traveling on from perfection to perfection after having just looked abroad into the ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... candle in his hand, than she started back in a most terrible fright, and might perhaps have swooned away, had he not now recollected his being undrest, and put an end to her terrors by desiring her to stay without the door till he had thrown some cloathes over his back, and was become incapable of shocking the pure eyes of Mrs Deborah Wilkins, who, though in the fifty-second year of her age, vowed she had never beheld a man without his coat. Sneerers and prophane wits may perhaps laugh at her first fright; yet my graver ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... morning could not be far off. He rode mechanically, his horse, which knew the road, taking him at its own pace. The night was cold, but he did not feel it. All power of feeling anything seemed gone from him. The last two days and nights of suspense and high-strung emotion seemed to have left him incapable of any further sensation at present beyond that of ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... a word?" She would have thought herself to be utterly incapable, before Ruth had come, of showing so much weakness; but her reserve gave way as she admitted in her own heart the kindness of Rebecca, and she became conquered and humbled. She was so terribly in want of his love at this moment! "And has he sent no word of a message ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... comes to them. Oftentimes the most immediate and drastic means of bringing them to themselves is to elect them to legislative or executive office. That will reduce over-sanguine persons to their simplest terms. Not because they find their fellow legislators or officials incapable of high purpose or indifferent to the betterment of the communities which they represent. Only cynics hold that to be the chief reason why we approach the millennium so slowly, and cynics are usually very ill-informed ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... twelve Jane Haden, who had been sitting quietly at home, went up to the "Chequers" to look after her husband, and to see about his being brought home should he be incapable of walking. The music was still playing in the dancing booths, but the dancing was kept up without spirit, for a number of young men and lads were gathered outside. As she passed she caught a few words which were sufficient to inform her of what was going on. ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... which echoed from three or four different corners of the house. The waiters were so distracted by a variety of calls, that they stood motionless, in the state of the schoolman's ass between two bundles of hay, incapable of determining where they should ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... XV., vicious, selfish and incapable, always tied to the petticoat and caprices of some new mistress, and the unfortunate Nicholas II., well-intentioned, and almost fanatically religious, the affectionate father and the devoted husband, no comparison is possible, except as regards their ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... out her paper and blotting-book, intending, as she said to herself, to write to Fanny, knowing, however, that the letter when written would be destroyed; but she was not able even to form a word. Her hand was unsteady and her eyes were dim and her thoughts were incapable of being fixed. She could only sit, and think, and wonder and hope; occasionally wiping the tears from her eyes, and asking herself why her present frame of mind was so painful to her? During the last two or three months ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... that day, saying she certainly was tired; but, the next, she insisted on getting up; and Dr. Donaldson gave his consent to her returning into the drawing-room. She was restless and uncomfortable in every position, and before night she became very feverish. Mr. Hale was utterly listless, and incapable of deciding on anything. ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... "You are incapable," answered Morton, boldly, "of appreciating my feelings towards that young lady; but all that I have done I would have ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... What was his standpoint? He explained it to you. He was detached, unbiased, putting on to his canvas that which he saw behind the mere outer mask. When I saw Forbes's bust, one of two things was certain: either he was incapable of seeing below the surface, or in this particular case he was incapable of doing so. I could not decide until I had seen other work of his. To-day I know he is as capable with his chisel as Musgrave is with his brush. You have only to study the standing ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... a regiment of which he commanded, he writes: "I often have seen them march with a broken or compound fractured arm in splints, and using the other to fire the rifle or revolver. Those with a fractured thigh or wounds which rendered them incapable of removal, shot themselves. Such men do not turn up in the average of everyday life, nor do I ever expect to see their like again. All military science failed on a suddenly given field before such assailants, who came at a run to close with their revolvers and who thought little ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... always say the same thing. It is none the less certain that after the lapse of a year she retained but an indistinct recollection of some of the important acts of her life. Finally, her constant hallucinations generally rendered her incapable of distinguishing between the ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... could hear was the gurgle and hissing of the water as it curled over the gunwales and eddied in the bottom of the boat. Bagg felt the water rise over his legs—creep to his waist—rise to his chest—and still ascend. Through those seconds he was incapable of action. He did ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... he was incapable of moving, of helping himself, at any rate until assistance came. And the water was rising, of course. Would rescue or the water ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... justice, endeavor to punish him for another's misdeeds by telling him that, if he please, you would prefer to ride alone. As he reins back, you feel a decided sinking of the heart and again become conscious that you are oddly incapable of doing anything properly, and then, suddenly, it flashes upon you that the master was right in his judgment, and you fly into a small fury of determination to show him that you can exist "without a gentleman." Down go your hands, ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... assassins in the dark, undermined their fair fame, and morally murdered them, long before their deaths, by daily traducing virtues the slanderers never possessed, from mere jealousy of the glory they knew themselves incapable ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... sell his children, "a girl up to fourteen, a boy under seven." And after that period a wayward or troublesome son or daughter, or any of the offspring, when the parents could be proved financially incapable of their care, could be ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... advance to the propositions laid down by Professor Rankine, as the exponent of the hitherto received theory of the whole subject. When a screw or paddle wheel is put in motion, a body of water is driven astern and the ship is driven ahead. Water, from its excessive mobility, is incapable of giving any resistance to the screw or paddle save that due to its inertia. If, for example, we conceive of the existence of a sea without any inertia, then we can readily understand that the water composing such a sea would offer no resistance to being pushed astern by paddle or screw. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... supposing that principles, which are to regulate the conduct of responsible beings, should be left to the chance of being unfolded by processes of reasoning, in which different minds may arrive at different conclusions, and in regard to which many are incapable of following out any argument at all. What is called the argument a priori for the existence and attributes of the Deity, for instance, conveys little that is conclusive to most minds, and to many is entirely incomprehensible. The same observation may be applied to those well-intended and able ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... the King spoke very harshly to Louvois, but certainly he did not treat him as has been pretended, for the King was incapable of such an action. Louvois was a brute and an insolent person; but he served the King faithfully, and much better than any other person. He did not, however, forget his own interest, and played his cards very well. He was horribly depraved, and by his impoliteness and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... sun, in the change of day and night, of spring and winter, of birth and death. But, although the Divine presence was felt everywhere, it was impossible in that early period of thought, and with a language incapable as yet of expressing anything but material objects, to conceive the idea of God in its purity and fullness, or to assign to it an adequate and worthy expression. Children cannot think the thoughts ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... United States. Some of them I fear are unfit for the positions they occupy. But the cause in which we are embarked will require, to be successful, the efforts of every man. Those capable of performing military duty, must perform it; and those physically incapable of wielding the bayonet and the sword, must wield the pen. It is no time to stand on ceremony or antecedents. The post of duty is the post of honor. In the mighty winnowing we must go through, the wheat will be separated from the chaff. And many a true man who this day ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... me. Worn out in mind and body alike, I was perfectly incapable of pursuing any regular train of thought. I vaguely felt—if I left things as they were—that I could never hope to remove the shadow which now rested on the married life that had begun so brightly. We might live together, so as to save ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... dear wife.' You understand that, Raoul. However brutal my reasoning may appear, I conjure you, then, to believe me, and to turn away your thoughts from those early days of youth in which you took up this habit of love—days of effeminate carelessness, which soften the heart and render it incapable of consuming those strong, bitter draughts called glory and adversity. Therefore, Raoul, I repeat to you, you should see in my counsel only the desire of being useful to you, only the ambition of seeing you prosper. I believe you capable of ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... one but two. This being premised, let us consider whether one is capable either of motion or rest. For motion is either change of substance, or motion on an axis, or from one place to another. But the one is incapable of change of substance, which implies that it ceases to be itself, or of motion on an axis, because there would be parts around the axis; and any other motion involves change of place. But existence in place has been already shown to be impossible; and yet more impossible ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... so till after long ages it is re-discovered, and valued as belonging to a neo-rubbish age—containing, perhaps, traces of a still older paleo-rubbish civilisation. So when people are old, indigent, and in all respects incapable, we hold them in greater and greater contempt as their poverty and impotence increase, till they reach the pitch when they are actually at the point to die, whereon they become sublime. Then we place every resource our hospitals can command at their disposal, and ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... little friend's reproach, and saw that she had done her injustice in thinking her youth rendered her incapable of that perfection of friendship, which might justify the accepting of her offer; she acknowledged her error, and assured her she would comply if she had no other means of obtaining the instruction she proposed to purchase for her; but that was not the ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... never heard the story of the return of Captain Bartlett in detail; his Esquimo boys were incapable of telling it, and Captain Bartlett is altogether ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... possessed me, I spoke of the revival as a possible thing in the hearing of the servants. The whole household accompanied us to the Deadhouse, at the opposite extremity of the building. What we saw there, I am utterly incapable of describing to you. I was in time to take the necessary measures for keeping Mrs. Wagner composed, and for removing her without injury to Mr. Keller's house. Having successfully accomplished this, I presumed that my anxieties were at an ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... he said. "I think I will," and he turned and left the room. He still seemed dazed and incapable of realising what was ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... rather penetrated by sudden affliction than by joy. But how different was all within to what appeared without! My partner-in-all received it at his bureau, and felt an impatience so unconquerable to communicate so extreme a pleasure that he quitted everything to hasten home; for he was incapable of going on with his business. How satisfactory, also, is all the intelligence ! how gaily, with what spirit written ! . ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... which you cite, are justified by remarks in this Report and some previous judgments of the same tribunal, which appear to you so inconsistent with each other as to make it difficult to believe that the Court was impartial, or "incapable of regarding the documents before it in the light of a plastic material, which might be made to support conclusions held to be advisable at the moment, and on independent grounds." I wish these words had never been written. They will, I fear, be understood as conveying ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... demonstrated scientific truths, and the uncertain, though probable conclusions deduced from them; and when the latter, as occasionally happened, proved to be at variance with practice, it is not surprising: that this should have produced a feeling of distrust on the part of persons incapable, from an imperfect, and still oftener from no knowledge of science, of drawing the line of demarcation, which Liebig frequently omitted to do, between the positive fact and the hypothetical inference, which, however ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... active in disintegrating feldspar and the clay derived from its decomposition. ... The leaves belong to the soil. Without them it cannot preserve its fertility, and cannot furnish nutriment to the beech. The trees languish, produce seed incapable of germination, and the spontaneous self-sowing, which is an indispensable element in the best systems of sylviculture, fails altogether in the bared and impoverished soil." [Footnote: Vaupell, Bogens Indvandring i ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... in his utterances? was there no cant, no hypocrisy? Did he never conceal the ambition and domineering spirit of the soldier under the humility of the saint? Another matter quite. Because a man is religious in the main, it follows not that he is incapable of occasionally practising hypocrisy: he may lapse as well into this, as into any crime of the decalogue. Although we might find it difficult to put our finger exactly upon the spot, and say, Here speaks the hypocrite, we are not without suspicion ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... events do spring. The skipper sprang four yards, and let off a screech which was the subject of much comment on the barque which had just passed. When Bob, who came shuffling up at the double, reached him he was leaning against the side, incapable of speech, ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... vultis and the enclitic -ne, which is used to introduce a question, and is incapable of translation. Num (line 21) introduces a question to which a negative answer is expected, and is likewise not to be translated, except in so far as its effect is reproduced by the form of the question or the tone of incredulity with ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... been claimed for Father Lana and his mathematical and other attainments that it seems only right to insist on the weakness of his reasoning. An air ship simply drifting with the wind is incapable of altering its course in the slightest degree by either sail or rudder. It is simply like a log borne along in a torrent; but to compare such a log properly with the air ship we must conceive it ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... judgment and discretion were so necessary in political affairs, all the circumstances combined to hasten a perilous crisis, and to give full scope to the passionate impulses of Mackenzie's nature. Sir John Colborne was replaced in the government of the province by one of the most incapable governors ever chosen by the colonial office, Sir Francis Bond Head. He had been chiefly known in England as a sprightly writer of travels, and had had no political experience except such as could be gathered in the discharge of the duties of a poor-law commissioner in Wales. ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... of a second marriage, and by a first marriage her mother had given birth to a son and a daughter, who were the inheritors of the peerage, both of whom were still living. The son was, however, an idiot, had been declared incapable of attending to his affairs, and was shut up in Saint Lazare, at Paris. The daughter had taken the veil, and was mistress of the novices at the Abbaye-aux-Bois. The peerage had thus, it might almost be said, become extinct, for it was vested in an idiot, who ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... father was a stern, silent man, with but one bright thing in his life,—his love for my mother. Whenever she came before his eyes, the sun rose in his face, but for me he had no great affection; he was incapable of dividing his heart. I have now and then seen a man with ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... It must, of course, be held anywhere except "dead on," for then the part round the axis would not get ground; this inoperative portion of the rotating tool must therefore be allowed to distribute its incapable efforts evenly over the nest ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... and Protestants, and summer people. It was generally inert and negative in spirit, seldom actively loyal. At its best it was willing that leaders should lead and pay the price, and be more admired than upheld. At its worst it was alert to private and blind to public interests, peevish of change, incapable of foresight. ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... acute change of feeling so that the subject who, before dinner, had felt she would like to play a new composition on the piano so as to obtain the opinion of the guest who had exhibited the critical tone, after dinner felt incapable of doing so. Her feelings had been hurt on many former occasions by critical remarks made by him in that tone. The critical remarks were not called to memory but there arose the feeling that under no circumstances could she play ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... "He [Paine] is utterly incapable of comprehending his subject. He has not even a moderate portion of learning of any kind. He has learned the instrumental part of literature, without having ever made a previous preparation of study for the use of it. Paine has nothing more than what a man, whose audacity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... thus, I conceive that I am simply honest and truthful, and show a proper regard for the economy of time. So Hume's strong and subtle intellect takes up a great many problems about which we are naturally curious, and shows us that they are essentially questions of lunar politics, in their essence incapable of being answered, and therefore not worth the attention of men who have work to do in the world. And he thus ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... wealth could move him. The subject had not only lost interest, but mere casual thought of its details brought on a faint repetition of the mental lethargy. The sight of the press and its varied appurtenances threw his mind into the defensive blank coma which rendered him incapable of the simplest intellectual effort. This was something as outside Bobby's control as the beating of his heart. He did not understand it, nor attempt ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... uneasiness which arises from the misfortunes of another, so envy is an uneasiness that proceeds from the good success of another: therefore whoever is capable of pity, is capable of envy. But a wise man is incapable of envy, and consequently incapable of pity. But were a wise man used to grieve, to pity also would be familiar to him; therefore to grieve, is a feeling which cannot affect a wise man. Now, though these reasonings ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... quite plainly towards what rock we were drifting. We had met losses at Hochstedt, Gibraltar, and Barcelona; Catalonia and the neighbouring countries were in revolt; Italy yielding us nothing but miserable successes; Spain exhausted; France, failing in men and money, and with incapable generals, protected by the Court against their faults. I saw all these things so plainly that I could not avoid making reflections, or reporting them to my friends in office. I thought that it was time to finish the war before we ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... of handling a complicated business like the railways; as for the Provisional Government, it has shown itself incapable ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... at the highest estimate," he said, "I do not know that you, or even I, Miss Rexford, need hold ourselves incapable of entering into them." This was not exactly what he would have felt if left to himself, but it was what her upbraiding wrung from him. He continued: "Even if we had the sure expectation for to-night ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... married a man she did not love, that she might mount one step higher, and finally she sacrificed her child to her devouring ambition. When she reached the goal she had visioned from the first, she was no longer a human being, with powers of enjoyment or suffering. She was, instead, a monster, incapable of appreciating what she had won, and ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... with all his efforts, he is not able to perform, is undoubtedly to be justified in addicting himself rather to easier studies, and endeavouring to quit that which is above his attainment, for that which nature has not made him incapable of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... turned away. Still, looking back, I caught the waft of a light dress among the fern, and frowned as the sound of laughter came down the wind. These people had been making merry, I thought, at my expense, though I had fancied Miss Carrington incapable of ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... father had accused her of untruthfulness; but an imploring look from her mother, just as she was going to speak, silenced her, and she suffered to herself till her father had gone, and then indignantly declared that John Grange was incapable of telling ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... the proportion of a level teaspoonful to the quart of water. Parents will find the little ear syringe, which may be purchased at any drug store, a most satisfactory instrument for giving enemas to infants, as they do not hold too much, and being soft, are incapable of tearing the delicate tissues of the child. It is of the utmost importance to remember that the salt solution should be tepid, yet not sufficiently hot to scald the infant. As the water when given in this way is expelled very quickly ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... are young intellects so imperfect as to be incapable of distinguishing between fancy and falsehood, it is most desirable to develop in them the power to do so, but, as a rule, in childhood, we appreciate the distinction with a vivacity which as elders our care- ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... Whilst I was thus employed, Mr. Poole and Mr. Stuart were on the ranges, and both, as well as the men generally, continued in good health; but I was exceedingly anxious about Mr. Browne, who had a low fever on him, and was just then incapable of much fatigue; nevertheless he begged so hard to be permitted to accompany me on my contemplated journey, that ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... Louisiana, viz., in 1808, 1825 and 1870. The marriage laws are substantially the same in all, but bear different numbers in each code. The following references are to the code of 1870. Except in a very limited number of cases the husband and wife are incapable of making binding contracts with each other during the marriage. Hence all settlements of property, to be binding, must be executed before marriage and in solemn form, that is, before a notary and two male witnesses having the proper qualifications. The betrothed are ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... do as you think fitt, but let me beg of you to give such Comitions to somebody else; as I never could be the author of any such advice, so I am incapable of acting in an affair that will do you, Sir, infinite prejudice, and cover me with dishonour, and am, besides these Considerations, grown so infirm that I beg your R.H. will be graciously pleased to give me leave to retire. . . . I may have been mistaken in ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... strange if children were quite incapable of doing what is so plainly required of them. It is true that they can be taught to reach the extreme of foolishness in the insignificance of the details that they mention. But it is also true that a fair ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... researches or papers, he would turn away abruptly, as if highly indignant. If he was appealed to as authority upon any point, he would dart away, and perhaps quit the hall for the evening. This man of great genius and vast acquirements was incapable of understanding or enduring praise or flattery. He sought in every possible way to escape recognition or notice, listened attentively to conversation, but seldom asked questions; never spoke of himself, or of what he had accomplished in the ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... as his spirit is free; but let him once be persuaded that his soul is chained down forever in adamantine fetters, and, though, like Prometheus, he may endure with silence, patience, even divinely, he is nevertheless utterly incapable of any positive effort towards recuperation. His faith becomes, by a subtile law of our being, his fact; the mountain is gifted with actual motion, and rewards the temerity of his zeal by falling upon him and crushing ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... downstairs, directing her maid, who cried for joy at the news, and then going out to purchase those needments which had become such tokens of exquisite hope and joy. After this had once begun, she seemed really incapable of sitting still, for every moment she thought of something her boy would want or would like, or hurried to ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... failures of representative government as they knew it. So far, as I have knowledge, no Irishman during the past century of effort for political freedom took the trouble to think out a form of government befitting Irish circumstance and character. We left it absolutely to those whom we declared incapable of understanding us or governing us to devise for us a system by which we might govern ourselves. I do not criticize those who devised the new machinery of self-government, but those who did not devise it, and who discouraged the ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... their structure may be frail, and they may be incapable of violence or harm, but the depth of the footprints indicates a weight of at least one hundred and thirty pounds, and it certainly requires some muscular strength to break off a branch ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... thereafter till the day of his death he may feel it almost a physical impossibility to gulp down a morsel of the offending fruit. So, too, there are people who can bolt their food with the best of us, who yet declare themselves incapable of ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... thousand acres there, and when you have passed your present Inclosure Bill, your income will be doubled, (there's a metaphor, worthy of a Templar, namely, pert and low,) while my wild common is too remote to incommode you, and quite incapable of such fertility. I send you (which return per post, as the printer would say) a curious letter from a friend of mine[83], which will let you into the origin of 'The Giaour.' Write soon. Ever, dear Moore, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... never, unless their views of him are changed. They have no fear of God before their eyes. If mercy absorbed every other attribute, there could be no place for fear. And of what enormity are those incapable who have lost the fear of God? Such corruption of principle is the bane of practice, and prelude of ruin and wretchedness. The history of the Hebrews, and the history of mankind, confirm the truth of ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... was," said he weakly, his shaken mind incapable of comprehending things as they were, his abasement over the breach that he had committed being so profound. She withdrew her hand. When it was gone out of his, he remembered how warm it was with the tide ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... a weak, undeveloped brain center would be incapable of receiving strong mental impulses from its coordinated mind center, and of transmitting them in full strength to the particular muscles governed by that mind center. This is why, if a man's brain center of courage is undeveloped, even ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... Gaea, Demeter and Isis, the deities of inexhaustible fertility and abundance. These early races of men realised themselves only as a part of nature; they had not yet conceived the idea of rising above their condition and setting their intelligence to battle with its blind laws. Incapable of realising their individuality, they bowed in passive submission to nature's undisputed sway. They were members of a tribe, and the fragmentary existence of the single individual was of no importance when it clashed with the welfare of the clan. The family—centred round the mother—and the ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... kind, so hostile, so terrible, that he dared not penetrate it. It was not that an actual restraint lay upon him: he knew, that is, that the door was open; yet it needed an effort of the will of which his paralysis of terror rendered him incapable.... ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... arising from the combustion of coke, producing carbonic acid gas, which in large quantities was fatal to life. He showed, for instance, that in the proposed Box tunnel, on the Great Western Railway, the passage of 100 tons would deposit about 3090 lbs. of noxious gases, incapable of supporting life! Here was an uncomfortable prospect of suffocation for passengers between London and Bristol. But steps were adopted to allay these formidable sources of terror. Solemn documents, in the form of certificates, were got up and published, signed by several of the most distinguished ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... servant is a chilly and statuesque image of propriety. The French is an intelligent and sympathizing friend. You can make of him what you like. But the Italian, and still more the Spaniard, is as gay as a child, and as incapable of intentional disrespect. The Castilian grandee does not regard his dignity as in danger from a moment's chat with a waiter. He has no conception of that ferocious decorum we Anglo-Saxons require from our manservants ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... him—the thought made her smile. But no, he had brothers and sisters, probably uncles and aunts and cousins. He would have to share his half with them. And one of his sisters was the sort of woman she had been taught to despise and abhor. It was all a horrible tangle, which she felt herself incapable to see through at once. She was not sure that she could tell Archie or even her new cousin, anyway not until she had thought it out more clearly and knew the case in ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... much worth having without expense. The main question is only—what is worth doing and having:—Consider, therefore, if this be not. Here is your iron railing, as yet, an uneducated monster; a sombre seneschal, incapable of any words, except his perpetual "Keep out!" and "Away with you!" Would it not be worth some trouble and cost to turn this ungainly ruffian porter into a well-educated servant; who, while he was severe as ever in forbidding entrance to evilly-disposed people, should yet have a kind ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... reason why it is so hard to form any just opinion of detectives in general is that (except by their fruits) there is little opportunity to discriminate between the able and the incapable. Now, the more difficult and complicated his task the less likely is the sleuth (honest or otherwise) to succeed. The chances are a good deal more than even that he will never solve the mystery for which he ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... or too destitute of fellow-feeling, should rather reflect on ourselves, who have been so much better favoured, yet have neglected to teach them, than on those who, whilst they are sinning, know not what they are doing. To say a negro is incapable of instruction, is a mere absurdity; for those few boys who have been educated in our schools have proved themselves even quicker than our own at learning; whilst, amongst themselves, the deepness of their cunning and their power of repartee ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... brains in civilization, is but slightly drawn upon or exercised; she is not so much wasted as not used. Having by fortune and tradition nothing to do, she remains passive till events and time make her incapable of doing, while the world glitters past in its various activity, throwing her incapacity into ever stronger relief, till her time is over and the general muddle is given a kind of sacredness, even of beauty, by ceasing. She has done nothing but live and been nothing but alive, both ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... his system of morals on the severest mathematical lines, taking as his starting-point a vacuum and atoms, and who after stretching his intellect on a constant rack of searching inquiry for years, came at last to the unhappy conclusion that man is absolutely incapable of positive knowledge, and that even if truth is in his possession he can never be certain of it. Was he, Theos Alwyn, wiser than Democritus? ... or was this stately Chaldean monk, with the clear, pathetic eyes and tender smile, and the symbol of Christ on his breast, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... cards had only been dealt and the hand was yet to play. Put your marks on each of the places named—Mafeking, Kimberley, De Aar, Naauwport, Stormberg—note their individual and relative importance, the distances severing them from one another, the small bodies of men scattered among them, incapable through weakness and remoteness of supporting each other, and with no common supports behind. Mafeking is from Kimberley 223 miles; Kimberley from De Aar, 146; De Aar from Naauwport, 69; Naauwport from Stormberg 80, as the crow flies over a difficult country, at least 130 by rail. All ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... a long time after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the State remaining, in the meantime, exposed to all the dangers of invasions from ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... these islands, within fifteen days one hundred and sixty adults and five children forsook the dark wilderness of infidelity for the light of the gospel. Among them was one old woman one hundred and thirty years of age—blind, deaf, incapable of motion; for, wherever she was carried, there she remained like an unmoving stone. Afterward in other places there were baptized five hundred adults and two infants. When they returned on a second mission, after an interval of three months, eight hundred and thirty-seven were ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume XI, 1599-1602 • Various
... who are incapable of invention, are tempted at once by their indolence, and by the hope of not being discovered or minded in their borrowing from others, to give stale or hackneyed compositions, which having seen in one country, they flatter themselves they may palm for new and original upon the ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... difference of view becomes at once a difference of aim. The moral element enters immediately, and those who believe otherwise are designated unbelievers, though we do not at once stamp those who think otherwise as incapable of thought. Here lies the great difficulty in considering and treating calmly religious, or rather, theological questions. There is little hope of reaching a mutual understanding when the first attack is characterised by such vigour as was shown by the Horseherd ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... cannot help breaking out into an expression of impatience. Indeed, not only Plato, but Athens itself, represents to Dr. Draper's mind the mere raw youth, the mere ambitious immaturity of Grecian intellect, amusing itself with "faith" because incapable of "reason." He finds its higher and only rational stage at Alexandria, at Syracuse, or wherever results in physical science were attained. In Aristotle, indeed, he is able to have some complacency, since the Stagirite ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... read no more, for the tall printer, seemingly incapable of coherent speech, kicked the desk impotently, threw his arms above his head, and, his companions confidently looking to see him foam at the mouth, lost his balance and toppled over backward, his extensive legs waving wildly in the ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... one made on even ground, and that from the roofs. [363] Respecting the connection of nisi—videtur, instead of the complete expression nisi hoc constat—eum videri, see p. 92, note 2 [note 153]. Intestabilis, properly, 'a person unfit to give his evidence, and incapable of making a will;' hence, according to Roman usage, equivalent to 'infamous;' detestabilis, which also properly signifies 'one deserving to be excluded in the will,' or 'to ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... from the beggar's position, from the place of weakness. There are some whose existence depends upon the response given to their supplications, who throw themselves directly on the charity and tender-heartedness of society. Inefficient, incapable of separate existence, this parasitic class is known to every social service group, to every rich or powerful man who helps at least in part to maintain them. I do not mean those who are physically or intellectually unable to cope ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... regard as a wise policy by sympathy with the oppressed, by generosity towards the fallen, by a philanthropy so enlarged that it took in all nations, by love of peace,—a love which in him was second only to the love of freedom,—and by the magnanimous credulity of a mind which was as incapable of suspecting as of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... attempt has ever been made to lead out the water either of the Zambesi or any of its tributaries; no machinery has ever been used to raise it even from the stream, but droughts and starvations are endured, as if they were inevitable dispensations of Providence, incapable of being mitigated. ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... verses have been written, proclaiming its waters to be so sweet that any one who drinks of them never desires to leave Bucarest. What its retentive properties may have been in former times we are not able to say, but we can quite imagine any person who ventures to drink of the water being incapable of leaving the city for ever afterwards. However, the prosaic authorities are not greatly impressed by their national poetry in this instance. The river is being 'canalised,' or confined within stone embankments, and there is a plentiful supply of apa dulce from another ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... this time. Jo was a good fellow but wholly incapable of grasping, single-handed, the problem of daily life for himself and brood. There were ten children in almost as many years. Understanding so little of life's responsibilities the man's dependence upon his wife was pitiful, if not criminal. With tears streaming ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... to tremble again. All her body felt weak and incapable, like the body of an old person whose life was drawing to an end. The hill, not very steep, faced her like a precipice, and it seemed to her that she would not be able to mount it. In the road the deep dust surely clung to her feet, refusing to let her lift them. And she felt sick and contemptible, ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... evil and good, for which and against which much may be argued on both sides, and many things that are true be said for and against both. To some such choice as this has our poor country now come. Experience has taught us that she is incapable of uniting all her forces and of making of herself one compact, united kingdom. That course, and that alone, would be her true salvation; but that course she will not take, and failing that, she has to choose between being torn and rent by ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... powerless souls! you are better fitted to answer God's purposes, and, if you are faithful, your devotion will be more pleasing to Him, than that of those great intellects which make prayer a study rather than a devotion. More than this, I say that such souls as these, who appear so powerless and so incapable, are worthy of consideration, provided they only knock at the door, and wait with a humble patience until it be opened to them. Those persons of great intellect and subtle understanding, who cannot remain a moment in silence before God, who make a continual Babel, who are so well able ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... know, so that he who does not know this could not be numbered with the Christians nor be admitted to any Sacrament, just as a mechanic who does not understand the rules and customs of his trade is expelled and considered incapable. Therefore we must have the young learn the parts which belong to the Catechism or instruction for children well and fluently and diligently exercise themselves in them and keep ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... existence in the best and truest manner. The brain and other organs of the body are affected by the quality of the blood which nourishes them, and since the blood is made of the food eaten, it follows that the use of poor food will result in poor blood, poor muscles, poor brains, and poor bodies, incapable of first-class work in any capacity. Very few persons, however, ever stop to inquire what particular foods are best adapted to the manufacture of good blood and the maintenance of perfect health; ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... or slay them. In theology? No; it has not yet forgiven the daughters of Eve the fault which ruined us,—a sin of which they have retained at least a little share. In the records of the law, then? No, again; for men make the laws. Woman is, in their eyes, nothing but a minor, legally incapable of governing herself. God only knows what is, here, as in all things, the difference between the fact and the law. Are these good women to be found in plays, romances, or novels? No, still; for they are but the perpetual ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... person, or the English Constitution? Every fear, taken separately, is so glaringly absurd, that no man has the folly or the boldness to state it. Every one conceals his ignorance, or his baseness, in a stupid general panic, which, when called on, he is utterly incapable of explaining. Whatever you think of the Catholics, there they are—you cannot get rid of them; your alternative is to give them a lawful place for stating their grievances, or an unlawful one: if you do not admit them to the House of Commons, they will hold their parliament ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... take my word for it? I am incapable of telling a lie. I have come to you to defend my own cause; and yet I can only do it by my bare word of assertion. You are not a stranger to the circumstances of my family, Mr. Dean; and I honestly avow that if this post is taken ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... "How utterly incapable of affording satisfaction is wealth unless honestly obtained and righteously employed!" he remarked. "We have also before us an example of the little reliance which can be placed on wealth. These two poor men have lost theirs and their minds at the same ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... for as a matter of fact the latter was not visible at all, but only the snow that covered its upper heights, surrounded above, below, and on all sides by the thin gray sky of evening. By night there was music in the plaza. But how can there be life and laughter where a half-dozen blankets are incapable of keeping the promenaders comfortable? In all the frigid town there was not a single fire, except in the little bricked holes full of charcoal over which the place does its cooking. Close to my hotel was ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... officialdom in Australia, and he did not like it. The tent was thronged with miners eager to secure their papers; they were met with cold-blooded intolerance by a class of officials often bred to their business in the infamous convict system, and now incapable of putting off their tyrannous insolence in the faces of free men. Several foot police—Vandemonians from the convict settlements—were stationed in the tent to enforce the mandate of Commissioner McPhee, or any understrapper who might resent the impatience of a ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... French, also. To this day, a French system of theology is the strongest and most coercive over the strongest of countries—Scotland and America; and yet shallow thinkers flippantly say the French are incapable of ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Alone among the hydrogen lines, crimson C glows in its spectrum, while all the others are dark. Luminosity of the Wolf-Rayet kind is particularly constant, both in quantity and quality. It seems to be incapable of developing save under galactic conditions. All the stars marked by it lie near the central line of the Milky Way, or in the Magellanic Clouds. They tend also to gather into groups. Circles of four degrees radius include respectively ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... conscious of the background. Fielding, on the other hand, although he had recognised that the novel was nothing else than an epic in prose, wrote in the spirit not of the epic, but of the drama. This is not, of course, to say that the drama was in any way incapable of a regeneration similar in kind to that of which I am now speaking with regard to the novel. The notorious contrary fact is sufficient to guard the reader against such a misconstruction. All that is meant is, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the type of innocence and purity, without a tinge of colour, although her dreadful confession was enough to paint the cheeks of the most degraded woman with the colour of shame. She seemed to have no bashfulness, no sense of shame, and to be wholly incapable of realising her offence. And I had not believed in a Devil! Here he was before me, in the shape of this fair woman, who had tempted me with her angel's mien to sell my soul for her, and now she was dragging me down with her to eternal ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... a modern play or novel as a kind of degenerate; a shifty-eyed moral maniac with a twist in his soul's backbone and green blood in his veins. The mediaevals were quite capable of boiling him in melted lead, but they would have been quite incapable of despairing of his soul in the modern fashion. A striking a fortiori case is that of the strange mediaeval legend of Robert the Devil. Robert was represented as a monstrous birth sent to an embittered woman actually in answer ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... the entire piece an elegiac mood prevails. The composer paints with psychologic truthfulness a fragment out of the life of a deeply clouded soul. He lets a broken heart, filled with grief, proclaim its sorrow in a language of pain which is incapable of being misunderstood. The heart has lost— not something, but everything. The tones, however, do not always bear the impress of a quiet, melancholy resignation. More passionate impulses awaken, and the still plaint becomes ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... rediscovered classical culture; and in discussing this problem, and developing the theories of the Pleiad, he has lighted upon many principles of permanent truth and applicability. There were some who despaired of the French language altogether, who thought it naturally incapable of the fulness and elegance of Greek and Latin—cette elegance et copie qui est en la langue Grecque et Romaine—that science could be adequately discussed, and poetry nobly written, only in the dead languages. "Those who speak thus," ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... though the county was seething with excitement, and a few notable men went out with the Earl, his personal following did not exceed seventy in all. Then followed the march which ended so disastrously in pitiful surrender at Preston that fatal November day. However gallant personally, Forster was an incapable soldier, no leader of men, and General Wills had but to spread wide his net to sweep in the bulk of the insurgents—Forster, Derwentwater, Kenmure, Nithsdale, Carwath, Wintoun, and men less exalted in rank by the score and the hundred. The bag ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... have come back. She can never change, though her beauty grow graver, and all knowledge of the vile usage of the world have passed before her young eyes. Artemis no more, for she has stooped to the lot of women; but still invincibly pure, incapable of sin, though she know it all. It can never touch her; she goes her way. She wears a blue gown now, not a white one. Demeter, the sad, bountiful Mother she will be—yet the same woman, the sweet and grave, the inflexible, the eternal. And, standing as she has ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... wife like Natalie without a penny. Such a treasure bestowed upon him might surely release her from a guardianship account. How many men had bought the women they loved by greater sacrifices? Why should a man do less for a wife than for a mistress? Besides, Paul was a nullity, a man of no force, incapable; she would spend the best resources of her mind upon him and open to him a fine career; he should owe his future power and position to her influence; in that way she could pay her debt. He would indeed be a fool to refuse such a future; and for what? a few paltry thousands, more or less. He would ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... was ill again, but both Mr Sargent and the Judge were very kind to him; so also was M'Carthy, who declared that a person incapable of protecting himself, and sickly, such as this little Jew, is always sure of kind treatment and compassion, even from the ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... me a-thinking. How was it that the existing hammers were incapable of forging a wrought-iron shaft of thirty inches diameter? Simply because of their want of compass, of range and fall, as well as of their want of power of blow. A few moment's rapid thought satisfied me that it was ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... constables, and was being inspected by a large crowd. He looked very quiet, and upon listening to the affidavits, remarked that Mr. Hyatt must have misunderstood the ladies, for he was perfectly incapable of having alarmed them to the extent indicated; that he certainly admired Miss Ida, and desired to marry her, but that he would not willingly injure or alarm the humblest creature—adding reproachfully that those affidavits would suffice to condemn him to State ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... expected that the boy either would or could do all that he undertook; but the world was full of compromises; and there was hardly any engagement which would bear being interpreted literally. Human language was too gross a vehicle of thought—thought being incapable of absolute translation. He added, that as there can be no translation from one language into another which shall not scant the meaning somewhat, or enlarge upon it, so there is no language which can render thought without a jarring and a harshness somewhere—and so forth; all ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... any person shall offend against any of the prohibitions of this act he shall be deemed guilty of a high misdemeanor and forfeit to the United States the penalty of $3,000, and shall upon conviction be removed from office and forever thereafter incapable of holding any office under the United States: Provided, That if any other person than a public prosecutor shall give information of any such offense, upon which a prosecution and conviction shall be had, one-half the aforesaid penalty of $3,000, when recovered, shall be for the use ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... is a characteristic letter to General Crawford, concerning the dismissal of an officer, whom Cromwell would have restored. "Ay, but the man is an Anabaptist. Are you sure of that? Admit he be, shall that render him incapable to serve the public? Sir, the state, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions. Take heed of being too sharp against those to whom you can object little but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... elaborated. So I have examined a heifer with a properly formed but very small womb and an extremely narrow vagina and vulva, the walls of which were very muscular, that could never be made to conceive. A post-mortem examination would probably have disclosed an imperfectly formed ovary incapable ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... himself with four languages—that is to say, he laid in a stock of four words for one idea. Then he came back, and certain tedious dowagers, styled 'conquests' abroad, were left disconsolate. Godefroid came back, shy, scarcely formed, a good fellow with a confiding disposition, incapable of saying ill of any one who honored him with an admittance to his house, too staunch to be a diplomatist, altogether he was what we call ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... new species. But we may thus deceive ourselves, for to ascertain whether a small isolated area, or a large open area like a continent, has been most favourable for the production of new organic forms, we ought to make the comparison within equal times; and this we are incapable of doing. ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... has had the courage to do so. Greatness is spontaneous; simplicity, trust in some one clear instinct, are essential to it; but the spontaneous variation must be in the direction of some possible sort of order; it must exclude and leave behind what is incapable of being moralised. How, then, should there be any great heroes, saints, artists, philosophers, or legislators in an age when nobody trusts himself, or feels any confidence in reason, in an age when the word dogmatic is a term of reproach? Greatness ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... bell, said, "No matter; it is of no importance," and turning around again toward the Prince asked indifferently how other things were going in Dresden and what had occurred during his absence. Then, incapable of hiding his inner state of mind, he saluted him with a wave of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... in allusion to his mother's familiarity with David Rizzio. And in this very passage of the essay on Atheism we also see the grovelling side of Lord Bacon, with a corresponding perversion of intelligence. Being incapable of understanding martyrdom, except under the expectation of a reward in heaven, his lordship cannot appreciate the act of an Atheist in suffering for his convictions. His concluding words are positively mean. Surely the Atheist might trouble ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... were some ships which proceeded quietly to their positions and others which did the same after tumult amounting to rebellion. And naturally there were a few others which seemed incapable of co-operation with anybody. They went careening through the other ships' paths in what must have seemed to the planet's sunset area like a most ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... money enough so that they all could live in comfort; the rest of their lives. As the professor was getting quite old, and incapable of making any more wonderful inventions, he closed up his workshop and settled down to a quiet life. As for Washington, Andy, and Bill and Tom, they invested their money received from the sale of the diamonds in different business ventures, and ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... expressions; now how can we be benefited by the excitement of these feelings? Pity is at the best but a feminine virtue, and by giving way to it, the mind, if not enervated, is at any rate not strengthened; and with regard to terror, a man under its influence is incapable of any reflection whatever. When we witness, for instance, the tragedy of Macbeth, the mind, after such a scene of human villany is rather inclined to become morbid than to feel either dignified ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... were lost to sight in the coming blackness and wondered that so intelligent a creature as a crow should waste his energies in that vain chase. Still one could understand it and even sympathize with him. For the kestrel is a most insulting creature towards the bigger birds. He knows that they are incapable of paying him out, and when he finds them off their guard he will drop down and inflict a blow just for the fun of the thing. This outraged crow appeared determined to have ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... and Thursa's good-humour came back. "Now, then, Arthur, run along, because I am going to have a long sleep, and then I have some very serious thinking to do. The aunts said that is what I am incapable of doing, but I've done some that would have surprised them if they had just heard me at it. Now I am going to do some more. It's so horrible to be in a quandary. It is as bad as it was when I was choosing a gown for my first party; I lay awake nearly a whole night trying to decide between ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... he is suffering, from, I can't say," the doctor stated, "but it is something serious, I fear. It was something that made him incapable of helping himself or ...
— Joe Strong, the Boy Fish - or Marvelous Doings in a Big Tank • Vance Barnum
... political, in the social world, who through intellectual pride are so wrapped in their own conceits and prejudices that larger and later revelations of truth can find no entrance to them; and instead of growing and expanding, they are becoming dwarfed and stunted, and still more incapable of receiving truth. Instead of actively aiding in the progress of the world, they are as so many dead sticks in the way that would retard the wheels of progress. This, however, they can never do. Such always in time get bruised, broken, and left behind, ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... distinguish between pure wool and the raw fibre. The incrusting substance is technically known as "Yolk," or "Suint," and is principally composed of a kind of natural soap, consisting of the potash salts of certain fatty acids, together with some fats which are incapable ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... circumstance, to which my situation exposed me, was the caprice of ignorant people. Had I been incapable of acting, they would have carried the boat on shore as soon as we made the island of Timor, without considering that landing among the natives, at a distance from the European settlement, might have been as dangerous as among ...
— A Narrative Of The Mutiny, On Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty; And The Subsequent Voyage Of Part Of The Crew, In The Ship's Boat • William Bligh
... was invited by the Lombard town of Brescia to assist it against the Lord of Verona, Mastino della Scala. King John at once dropped the useful business, dashed in amongst the squabbling Italians and won a number of victories which gave him possession of a fair slice of Italy. He proved quite incapable of holding it, and his gains rapidly melted away like snow on the sunny southern slopes of those mountains that shut off the smiling plains of Venetia against the barbarous north. Here John's eldest son Charles comes upon the ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... German wings rested on the sea; one on the Euxine, one on the North Sea. That in itself would not have given strength; for the Roman fleets were masters of the seas. But the lands in the rear, on either flank, were deserts, incapable of supporting an army. What would have been the fate of a force landed at the mouth of the Weser on the north, or at the mouth of the Dnieper at the west? Starvation among wild moors, and bogs, and steppes, if they attempted to leave their base of operations on the coast. The Romans ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... guilty of leze-majesty, and shall forfeit their lives and possessions. The lives of their sons, though justly forfeited, are spared only by the particular bounty of the Emperor; but they are declared incapable of holding any property, honor, or dignity, and doomed to perpetual poverty. The daughters are permitted to enjoy ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... painting, you will get a notion of trying to write mine in ignorance of music. Bradlaugh was a tremendous platform heavyweight; but he had never in his life, as far as I could make out, seen anything, heard anything or read anything in the artistic sense. He was almost beyond belief incapable of intercourse in private conversation. He could tell you his adventures provided you didn't interrupt him (which you were mostly afraid to do, as the man was a mesmeric terror); but as to exchanging ideas, or expressing the universal part of his soul, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... tongues, these two. They were born in different lands. They were children of the same God, although one might have doubted it, but no one could mistake the woman's name. For there Frank Yeovil and Jean Marteau, incapable of doing each other any further harm, each ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... perplexing, we can only be thankful that the work of Farmer Green and Tom Robinson, the two despoilers mentioned by the earliest investigators, has been prevented in their descendants, and that though the circles are incapable of restoration, the few stones that remain will be preserved ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... external causes it is dependent. When it is conditioned by internal causes which are part of its own nature, it is free. No other freedom is known. An Indian would say that a man's nature is limited by Karma. Some minds are incapable of the higher forms of virtue and wisdom, just as some bodies are incapable of athletic feats. But within the limits of his own nature a human being is free. Indian theology is not much hampered by the mad doctrine that God has predestined ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... as surely as American women persist in disregarding this subtle yet unmistakable truth, just so surely will they lay themselves open to these soul-bruises from foreign husbands which American men, as a race, are incapable of inflicting. I say they are incapable of inflicting them, because American men, in the face of everything said and written to the contrary, are, in regard to women, the finest-grained race of men in ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... mass, have their efficacy. Therefore he was offered but once with the shedding of blood—viz. upon the cross; today he is offered in the mass as a peace making and sacramental victim. Then he was offered in a visible form capable of suffering; today he is offered in the mass veiled in mysteries, incapable of suffering, just as in the Old Testament he was sacrificed typically and under a figure. Finally, the force of the word shows that the mass is a sacrifice, since "mass" is nothing but "oblation," and has received its name from the Hebrew word misbeach, altar—in Greek thysiasterion, on account ...
— The Confutatio Pontificia • Anonymous
... drift into Chancery, just when a vigorous policy is required to make the venture a success. If Monty were here and in his right mind, I think we could come to terms, but, when I saw him last at any rate, he was quite incapable, and he might become a tool to anything. The Bears might get hold of him and ruin us all. In ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... because it had no rudder; an ornamental butterfly driving aimlessly before the nearest breeze. He meant well, in a general way, but his good intentions proved descending paving-stones because he was constitutionally incapable of meaning ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... four months of the year, two or three negro servants. Though all the negroes at the quarters, which were only a quarter of a mile from the mansion, knew the valuable contents of the chest, it was never disturbed. They stole small things, but seemed incapable of committing ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... which it was easy to lose one's way. Her assurance, her satisfaction, her enthusiasm had vanished. Nothing was well ordered; everything was haphazard. People did the most unexpected things. And there was ugliness and deceit parading about in broad daylight. She suddenly felt herself utterly incapable of passing judgment ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... plant has proven by no means a vision incapable of realization. To-day men and women realize painfully the need for one in their home community and are prevented from the fulfilment of their dream by only two obstacles—lack of funds and adequate organization ...
— Keeping Fit All the Way • Walter Camp
... my wife thinks me a fool," he once complained to me. "She thinks I don't see it. Do you understand, David? She looks up to me for my learning, but otherwise she thinks I have no sense. It hurts, you know." He was absolutely incapable of keeping a secret or of saying or acting anything that did not come from the depths of his heart. He often talked to me of God and His throne, of the world to come, and of the eternal bliss of the righteous, quoting from a certain book of exhortations and adding ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... appealed to the head rather than to the emotions. Unlike Lloyd George, he was not by way of being a prophet. He could not by sheer intensity sway the House of Commons. Mr. Asquith, moreover, was quite incapable of stirring a public audience on the platform outside the House, and he lacked that terrific energy which distinguished his principal colleague. But he was, nevertheless, a first-rate partner. His steady, cold brain would carry into effect with precision an intricate, ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... my deliverance from this temptation, such strange apprehensions of the grace of God, that I could hardly bear up under it, it was so out of measure amazing, when I thought it could reach me, that I do think, if that sense of it had abode long upon me, it would have made me incapable for business.' ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... full retreat, and Joe's squad was part of the rear-guard. The terrain had been mountainous, the High Sierra Military Reservation. Four of his men had copped one, two so badly that they had to be left behind, incapable of being moved. Joe, under the pressure of long hours of retreat under fire, had finally sent the others on back, and found himself a crevice, near the top of a sierra, which was ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... and country, by the unbounded fury of the Presbyterians, he changed his religion, and went beyond sea, in order to recommend himself to some Popish preferment in Paris; but being a mere scholar was incapable of executing his new plan of a livelihood. Mr. Abraham Cowley hearing of his being there, endeavoured to find him out, which he did, and to his great surprize saw him in a very miserable plight: this happened in the year 1646. This generous ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... you could cut his ear off and it wouldn't bleed. I ain't going to run the Judge against no such proposition like that." Of course the poor chap was speaking his own backwoods metaphor, as I am quite sure he would have been incapable of mutilating Belknap-Jackson, or even of imprisoning him in a goods van of beef. I mean to say, it was merely his way of speaking and was not to ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... appear, I conjure you, then, to believe me, and to turn away your thoughts from those early days of youth in which you took up this habit of love—days of effeminate carelessness, which soften the heart and render it incapable of consuming those strong, bitter draughts called glory and adversity. Therefore, Raoul, I repeat to you, you should see in my counsel only the desire of being useful to you, only the ambition of seeing you prosper. I believe you capable of becoming ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... think that those who are fit for the greater functions of politics are incapable of qualifying themselves for the less? Is there any reason, in the nature of things, that the wives and sisters of princes should, whenever called on, be found as competent as the princes themselves to their business, but that the wives and sisters of statesmen, and administrators, and directors ...
— Women and Politics • Charles Kingsley
... body, that carried him through the labours of the field and of the cabinet. In speaking on this subject Napoleon himself observed that. nature had endowed him with two peculiarities: one was the power of sleeping at any hour or in any place; the other, his being incapable of committing any excess either in eating or drinking: "If," said he, "I go the least beyond my mark my stomach instantly revolts." He was subject to nausea from very slight causes, and to colds from any change ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... brought back to their original composition and condition, we have the cell just as it was before we used it for the production of an electrical pressure. The cell can now again be used as a source of electricity as long as the electrolyte acts upon the electrodes, or until it is "discharged" and incapable of any further production of electrical pressure. Sending a current through a discharged cell, so as to reverse the chemical actions which brought about the discharged conditions, ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... womanly; and a woman is incapable of a benevolence and sympathy that are measured out by the yard—so much to each one, according to the dictates of judgment. You were so fortunate as to move Mrs. Yocomb somewhat as she touched your feelings; and ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... The new Prince, himself incapable, disliked and distrusted talent. The years passed, and the Baron obtained no appointment. Still he strained his resources to the utmost to visit the Court as often as possible; still he believed that sooner or later a turn of the wheel ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... hour for the interview arrived, he went to the rendezvous in a pitiable state of hope and fear. He had always his whole life through carried all his eggs in one basket, and had been incapable of undertaking more than one emotional enterprise at a time. To lose Madge now would be to lose everything, and his former experiences of the healing powers of time—which were possibly numerous and striking enough—were of no value to him. Obeying ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... and remained in that crushed attitude while Heyst talked to him soothingly with the utmost courtesy. The Swede was as much distressed as Morrison; for he understood the other's feelings perfectly. No decent feeling was ever scorned by Heyst. But he was incapable of outward cordiality of manner, and he felt acutely his defect. Consummate politeness is not the right tonic for an emotional collapse. They must have had, both of them, a fairly painful time of it in the cabin of the ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... conclusions to which science had, up to that time, been led in its investigations of matter. Throughout the natural universe it had been shewn, by Spectrum Analysis, that matter is built up of {69} molecules. These molecules, according to the most competent judgment, were incapable of sub-division without change of substance, and were absolutely fixed for each substance. "A molecule of hydrogen, for example, whether in Sirius, or in Arcturus, executes its vibrations in precisely the same time." The relations of the parts and movements of the planetary systems ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... hand, and her eyes were caught by two other eyes, and held as if by a spell. She was conscious, as she stood blushing, that the stranger had been astonished at her appearance, but she certainly did not dream that it was her great beauty which had for one moment made him incapable of controlling his sense of it. It was only one moment, in the next he turned to David, and offered to pay him two shillings a day for the use of his vacant room, and a share of ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... listen. "You taunted me with being a woman," she said through a fresh burst of tears. "A woman was incapable of friendship and sacrifices. She was intended to be a man's plaything. Do you think I want to be my husband's mistress? I want to be his wife, to share his fate, whatever it may be, for good or ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... especially under this state of facts —nothing could excuse or palliate that shocking and disgraceful and barbarous crime against humanity; and the human mind is incapable of understanding how such savagery can be accounted for, except upon the theory that "He that nameth Rebellion nameth not a singular, or one only sin, as is theft, robbery, murder, and such like; but he nameth the whole puddle ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... pathological lying had been a prominent symptom. As an example, when he married against his father's will, he at the wedding read a false dispatch, pretending it to be congratulations from his family. Koppen suggests that this individual was incapable of meeting life as it really was and he therefore wove a mass of phantasies. II. A young man charged with grave falsifications. He had come from an epileptic family and himself had slight attacks in childhood. He bore various pathological stigmata. Koppen considered ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... than a year since his misadventure in the mountains. He had suffered for his own wrong-headedness over that matter, but he had not profited by his experience; he was incapable of doing so. His length of service and reputation for hard work had saved him from dismissal, but Chillingwood was less fortunate; subordinates in Government service generally are less fortunate ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... pride of this Cuban libre. It is manifested the very first time you suggest anything like manual labor—he is incapable of any other—even for such purposes as camp sanitation, carrying rations, or for any other purpose. His manly chest swells with pride and he exclaims in accents of wounded dignity, "Yo soy soldado!" Still his pride does not by any chance get him knowingly under fire. ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... the subject of the blessed hope that sustained the dying Christian. He only survived Pat's departure four days. On the third of February the last symptoms came on; the death-damps began to ooze out, his legs were swelled to the size of his body, and he sat in that state, incapable of receiving warmth, scarcely able to swallow, yet clear, bright, and tranquil, for thirty hours. The morning of the last day was marked by such a revival of strength that he walked across the room with little help, and talked incessantly to me, and to all who came near ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... have not become hard and suspicious, they are generally obtuse to the minor indications by which shrewd men of education know the impostor, and they are perversely indulgent to little meannesses in their fellows which they are incapable of committing themselves. In Lincoln this was aggravated by an immense good-nature—as he confessed, he could hardly say "no";—it was an obstinate good-nature, which found a naughty pleasure in refusing to be corrected; and if it should happen that the object of ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... over, and with returning sobriety came profound contrition and disgust. A few still held out against the return of reason. There are some men who never own that they have been in the wrong, and a few men who are forever incapable of seeing it. Stoughton, with his bull-dog stubbornness, that might in other times have made him a St. Dominic, continued to insist that the business had been all right, and that the only mistake was ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various
... he was inactive and apathetic, confining his operations to an aimless expedition whose advance extended only as far as Blain's crossroads, whence it was soon withdrawn. Meanwhile General Foster had superseded Burnside, but physical disabilities rendered him incapable of remaining in the field, and then the chief authority devolved on Parke. By this time the transmission of power seemed almost a disease; at any rate it was catching, so, while we were en route to Dandridge, Parke transferred ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... of them are incapable of noticing anything." A cynical smile stirred on his face. "It is no wonder," he commented, "that we are known as a danger to provincial towns. You see the state of confusion we reduce the young bloods to." His eyes passed ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... damn happy, Kelly thought. Too contented. If they ran into a real emergency now, the ship would be finished. The Crew in the tank was, itself, incapable of action of any overt kind. It could not manipulate anything. It could ...
— Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly? • Bryce Walton
... derivative creation, physical science is also incapable of conflict; for the objections drawn by some writers seemingly from physical science, are, as has been already ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... I purposely render it as concise as possible, but I am utterly incapable of imparting to it the dramatic effect of her recital, heightened and added ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... Englishman, and there are not any mean things told about him, though," Steven Strong continued, "and indeed sometimes he lives the simplest country life with his horses and dogs, and his own people worship him, I believe. But there is no wildest prank he is incapable of if ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... touches it through and through, is in one way entirely favourable. Many of the most telling popular objections to the idea of Atonement rest on an atomic conception of personality—a conception according to which every human being is a closed system, incapable in the last resort of helping or being helped, of injuring or being injured, by another. This conception has been finally discredited by biology, and so far the evangelist must be grateful. The Atonement presupposes ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... 'S.E.' homophones: and that something better should win the first place, I hold to be the most desirable of possible events. But perhaps our 'S.E.' is not yet so far committed to the process of decay as to be incapable of reform, and the machinery that we use for penetration may be used as well for organizing a reform and for enforcing it. There is as much fashion as inevitable law in our 'P.S.P.' or 'S.E.' talk, and if the fashion for a better, that is a more distinct and conservative, pronunciation should ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... with fatigue and want of sleep, and with the perspiration dropping from the point of his enormous nose, plucked up heart to raise himself and assert that that was true. He further suggested that Colonel Blare might play to them on the cornet. But Colonel Blare was incapable by that time of playing even on a penny trumpet. Dr Bassoon was reduced so low as to be obliged to half whisper his incapacity to sing bass, and as for the great tenor, Lieutenant Limp—a piece of tape was ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... withdraw the light, I should turn again to be dead and hard, as iron on the cold anvil." In this way, Shanty often used to talk to Mrs. Margaret, and after a while to Tamar; but the old lady for many years remained incapable of entering so entirely as he could wish, into his views of the sufficiency of the Redeemer. She could not give up entirely her notions of the need of some works, not as evidences of the salvation of an individual, but as means of ensuring that salvation, and ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... crowd, with the forced composure of one who well knew that authority was most efficient when most calm. The command of the vessel was now virtually with him, Baptiste, enervated by the extraordinary crisis, and choking with passion, being utterly incapable of giving a distinct or a useful order. It was fortunate for those in the bark that the substitute was so good, for more fearful signs never impended over the Leman than those ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... land have had lavished upon them the blessings of education to an extent that was unprofitable both to them and to the cause. They have received an education and training which not only carried them away far outside the social realm for which they were intended by nature; it also left them incapable of doing the higher thing for which they ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... Treasury authorised the construction of seven sloops for service off the coast of Scotland. The smugglers had in fact become so desperate, the English Channel was so thoroughly infested with them, and the Revenue service was so incapable of dealing with them in the manner that was obviously essential for effectiveness, that the Admiralty ordered the captains and commanders of His Majesty's ships to assist the Revenue officers all they could in order to prevent the ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton
... lain at Okazaki town, Dentatsu incapable of movement after the mad run along the classic highway in the darkness of that fearful night. As refugees from the stricken town they met with kind reception. The greater part of Yoshida town lay in ashes; and so great the disaster, so unsuspected ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... any disposition, or any level of capacity, since there is nothing to make them read the same papers, gather in the same places, or feel any sort of sympathy with each other beyond the universal sympathy of man for man, they will, one may anticipate, be incapable of any concerted action to defend the income they draw from society against any resolute attack. Such crude and obvious denials of the essential principles of their existence as the various Socialistic bodies have proclaimed ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... strength of some of Mohamad's people being present, "We want to buy ivory too;" not knowing its value they think that this is a mere subterfuge to plunder them. Much palm-wine to-day at different parts made them incapable of reasoning further; they seemed inclined to fight, but after a great deal of talk ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... enforced by the unanimous verdict of his comrades; and even if it were so that he had more than made amends for his crime, the rules that held good for ordinary sinners were not applicable to an officer of the army. He must be a man above suspicion, incapable of wrong or fraud, and once stained he was forever ineligible as a gentleman. It was a subject on which she waxed declamatory rather too often, and the youngsters of her own regiment wearied of it. As Mr. Foster once expressed it in speaking of this very case, "Mrs. ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... where a dramatist must be content to pull the wires. Shakespeare is really as much present in his plays as Fielding in his novels; but he does not let us know it; whereas the excellent Fielding seems to be quite incapable of hiding his broad shoulders and lofty ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the Earl, his personal following did not exceed seventy in all. Then followed the march which ended so disastrously in pitiful surrender at Preston that fatal November day. However gallant personally, Forster was an incapable soldier, no leader of men, and General Wills had but to spread wide his net to sweep in the bulk of the insurgents—Forster, Derwentwater, Kenmure, Nithsdale, Carwath, Wintoun, and men less exalted in rank by the score and the hundred. ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... all accord with Mr. Kendal's views. He had an unavowed distrust of Gilbert's letters, he did not fancy a tutor thus selected, and believed the boy to be physically incapable of the proposed amount of study. So he wrote a very grave but merciful ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wife being one person could not contract nor enter into a business partnership with each other; neither could one convey property to the other without the intervention of a third party. The wife was incapable of receiving a legacy unless it was willed to another person as trustee, for her use and benefit, and if a legacy were paid directly to her, the husband could compel the executor to pay it again ...
— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson
... Bridemaids, as it was mentioned, are to come again alone; and so much the more, because her Master is daily expected home. Who then finally coming in, is not ordinarily welcomed, for she is so full of joy that her husband is come home, that both her tongue and actions are incapable of demonstrating her felicity; and he on the t'other side, is so glad to find his dearly Beloved in good health, and all things in decent order, that it ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... the Company's affairs, more might be said to his prejudice—not in respect of his integrity, for, I believe him to have been a most honourable man, and incapable of any meanness—but in regard to his management. Although, as the original projector of the Canada Company, he evinced much cleverness, and afterwards displayed considerable judgment in the choice of the best situations for building towns and ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... 600-300 than it came to be afterward. For the Macedonian conquests had the effect of diluting and corrupting Hellenism, by spreading an exterior varnish of Hellenic tastes and manners over a wide area of incongruous foreigners who were incapable of the real elevation of the Hellenic character; so that although in later times the games continued undiminished both in attraction and in number of visitors, the spirit of pan-Hellenic communion which had once animated ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... hours afterward I thought almost every moment that the next would be my last, for the Taugwalders, utterly unnerved, were not only incapable of giving assistance, but were in such a state that a slip might have been expected from them at any moment. After a time we were able to do that which should have been done at first, and fixt rope to firm rocks, in ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... gleam of amusement flitted through the mind of Caius at the thought of the sidelight this threw on Jim's character. For Jim was not incapable of casting stones at even so rare a ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... the most determined opponents of every kind of improvement. So, too, the lack of lawyers, editors and physicians of sufficiently broad and thorough training to be able to defend their weaker brethren against designers or incapable advisers is a very discouraging feature of the situation. The negroes do not, as a rule, seek the leadership or counsel of competent and honest whites in matters of religion or of business, hence the greater need of well-qualified men ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... part of this letter, with her extreme reluctance to bring the writer of it and her cousin Edmund together, would have made her (as she felt) incapable of judging impartially whether the concluding offer might be accepted or not. To herself, individually, it was most tempting. To be finding herself, perhaps within three days, transported to Mansfield, was an image of the greatest felicity, but it would ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... and violence increase until the "reign of terror" appears with all its indescribable horrors. The rest is plain. Having levelled all government to the ground, having destroyed all authority, having shown themselves incapable of self-government, the French people are ready for Napoleon. Under his command and pretense they march forth to liberate humanity from oppression in other nations, but in reality ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... Branston delights in society. He is generally well enough to sit in the drawing-room and look on at his wife's parties. He doesn't talk much on those occasions. Indeed, I believe he is quite incapable of conversing about anything except the rise and fall of Indian stock, or the fluctuations in the value of indigo. And, you see, Adela married him with the intention of enjoying her life. She confesses as much sometimes with ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... were on a much higher plane of material civilization than the Hebrews, they ultimately fell a prey to those hardy invaders of the desert: (1) Because they were incapable of strong united action, and (2) because their civilization was corrupt and enervating. Courage and real patriotism were almost unknown to them even as early as the seventeenth century B.C., when the Egyptian king Thutmose III invaded the land of Palestine. Their strong walls and their ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... more insensible to the impressions of a life thus passed among the ensigns of mortality. His mind was closed against all general considerations. He was incapable of interest in the fate and fortunes of another, the slave of his own desires and low ambitions. Cold, light, and selfish in the last resort, he had that modicum of prudence, miscalled morality, which keeps a man from inconvenient drunkenness or ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... subject, as burning does a house and death a man. But as to that, Cornelius informed him that there was a natural death and a logical death; and that though a man after his natural death was incapable of the least parish office, yet he might still keep his stall among the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... against the other it had flattered itself with being able to retain its power. Yet the opposition was not stated on any special ground. The manifestoes of the Whigs attacked it on the ground of incapacity; but in what they were incapable was not shown. The Duke of Wellington was said by them to be a domineering soldier, unfitted to conduct alone the government of the nation, yet determined to surround himself with men of mean capacity and dependent spirit, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... were sent out at a cheaper rate in another way, and the consequence was that, instead of the whole force going together in one large vessel, with ample and comfortable accommodation, they were sent out in two parties, in two miserable little vessels totally unfitted for such work, and quite incapable of berthing more than half the number packed on board. The first ship to start was a small screw boat, re-christened for the occasion the Melazzo, after the late Garibaldian victory. The men were huddled ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... is the reading sanctioned by the Commentator, viz. putro' nanya'sritadravyah, signifying, that, on failure of those before designated, a son who would be otherwise incapable, by reason of blindness, &c. is to be deemed capable. Another reading may be, as suggested by the Commentator, putro nu'aya'sritadraoyah, "not the son whose paternal estate another holds," which is adopted by Colebrooke, and by his ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya
... truth, who, incapable of submitting their reason to Holy Scripture, distort at will the meaning of the Holy Scriptures, pretend that these words mean matter. For it is matter, they say, which from its nature is without form and invisible—being ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... atmosphere are much obliged to you, but we must stand up for the rights of other atmospheres. I know a great deal more about Mr Marlowe's atmosphere than you know about mine even now. I saw him constantly for several years. I don't pretend to know all about him; but I do know that he is incapable of a crime of bloodshed. The idea of his planning a murder is as unthinkable to me as the idea of your picking a poor woman's pocket, Mr Trent. I can imagine you killing a man, you know... if the man deserved it and had an equal chance of killing you. I could kill a person myself in some circumstances. ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... through the town dispelled the Lord George Sanger illusion at one fell blow, the rustic-urban mind being incapable of conceiving that that self-named nobleman could demean himself to the ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... without consciousness of free will or individual thought. It was enough that for one moment his anger should cease to give life to his resistance; it was sufficient that Unorna should touch him thus, and speak softly, his eyelids quivered and his look became fixed, his strength was absorbed in hers and incapable of acting except under her direction. So long as she might please the ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... their souls in efforts to clothe in the stiff garments of European conventionalities, the naked, brown limbs of Orientalism. The natives, who, for the most part, are frank Vandals, also admire efforts of which they are aware that they are themselves incapable, and even the laudator temporis acti has his mouth stopped by the cheap and often tawdry luxury, which the coming of the Europeans has placed within his reach. So effectually has the heel of the white man been ground into the face of Perak and Selangor, that these Native States are now ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... was likely to be, whether a few years or many centuries, he would still have her image in his memory so. And here she lay among his broken hopes, now shattered as completely as the goblet which held his draught, and as incapable of being ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... All who fall on the pavement of Paris rebound against these yellow-gray walls, on which a philanthropist who was not a speculator might read a justification of the numerous suicides complained of by hypocritical writers who are incapable of taking a step to prevent them—for that justification is written in that ante-room, like a preface to the dramas of the Morgue, or to those enacted on the Place de ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... not true, then I know not what truth is. If it is not a perfectly plain and patent truth, on the very face of it, then I am utterly incapable of distinguishing between truth and falsehood. Yet, if it is true, how account for the tight-lacing among women who are in a position to be just as intelligent as the doctor and the ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... pleasure of knowing? What if intellect, or what is now called intellect, did not make the world, or the smallest wheel or cog of it? What if, for want of obeying the laws of nature, parents bred up neither a genius nor an athlete, but only an incapable unhappy personage, with a huge upright forehead, like that of a Byzantine Greek, filled with some sort of pap instead of brains, and tempted alternately to fanaticism and strong drink? We must, in the great majority of cases, have the CORPUS ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... its very virtues as a paper were its defects as an address. The points wanted elaboration. Before they had fairly mastered one argument, the jury were hurried on to another. Mr. Ramsey is by no means incapable of making a forcible speech, and I think he should have trusted to his power of improvisation. There was no need for a long effort. He might have concentrated himself on a few salient points of our defence, and pressed them on the jury with all his might. His own sentiments, ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... Outside, and can [therefore] only frame a Judgment of us from our exterior Actions and Behaviour; but how unfit these are to give us a right Notion of each others Perfections, may appear from several Considerations. There are many Virtues, which in their own Nature are incapable of any outward Representation: Many silent Perfections in the Soul of a good Man, which are great Ornaments to human Nature, but not able to discover themselves to the Knowledge of others; they are transacted in private, without Noise or Show, and are only visible to the ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... light breaking in upon her. "I see, but I did not then understand you, I suppose;" rallying from her embarrassment, "my mind was so occupied with our feast, I was incapable of thinking of anything else; so please consider this an apology for the condition in which you find us, to yourself and your friend, whom, you will pardon me for reminding you, you have not introduced," and Cyn looking laughingly at ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... to carry in the wood for him, might moreover be construed as indicating a desire to make amends to him for unjust suspicions secretly cherished. As for asking Prudence directly whether she was expecting to go away, that would have been a piece of hardihood of which the bashful youth was quite incapable. If he could not have ascertained her intentions otherwise than by such a desperate measure, he would have waited till the Hamlins set out, and then been on hand to see for himself whether she went ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... property holders to vote for representatives in Parliament, and who claimed that the word "man" in Parliamentary statutes should be interpreted to include women. In the case of the 5,346 householders of Manchester, the court held that "every woman is personally incapable" in a legal sense.[288] This legal contest had been fully reported in The Revolution, and disappointing as the verdict was, Susan looked upon this attempt to establish justice as an indication of a great ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... wide into the Realm of night, Scorning surprize. Or could we break our way By force, and at our heels all Hell should rise With blackest Insurrection, to confound Heav'ns purest Light, yet our great Enemie All incorruptible would on his Throne Sit unpolluted, and th' Ethereal mould Incapable of stain would soon expel 140 Her mischief, and purge off the baser fire Victorious. Thus repuls'd, our final hope Is flat despair: we must exasperate Th' Almighty Victor to spend all his rage, And that must end us, that must be our cure, To be no more; sad ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... heat and occasional fatigues of the preceding campaign, have so impaired my health and constitution as to render me incapable of immediate service. I have, for three months past, taken every advisable step for my recovery, but have the mortification to find, upon my return to duty, a return of sickness, and that every relapse is more dangerous than the ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... was of little use. Again I trusted in Providence to come to our help. Both plans involved thousands of kilometres of navigation of a diabolical river, in an almost uncontrollable canoe, with an insufficient and absolutely incapable crew. Then would come the crossing of the virgin forest on foot, for some hundreds of kilometres—nobody knew how many. The least number of men necessary in order to be able to carry provisions sufficient to execute ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... away from her. She did not change colour, but for the moment her delicate features appeared thickened, as by a rush of blood. She was almost plain. Yet the effect was inexpressibly touching. It was as though she had received some mysterious injury which she was dumb, incapable to express. She let her hands drop at her sides, turned away and walked to the far end ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... never dreamed of, but which in reality she had only declined because it did not present itself to her under all the conditions required by her refined and sensitive mind. Claude, who was an excellent fellow, but incapable of comprehending her or sacrificing himself, never swerved from grateful deference to her; but I could observe, that as the state of her feelings became more apparent, he took greater care to mark the character of his sentiments ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... laugh' will doubtless prefer this book, which is packed from cover to cover with mirth-provoking material, to those other books by the same author, in which humour acts chiefly as train-bearer to tragedy. The determination of Charles to invent for himself a greatness which he is incapable of otherwise achieving, and its effect on his circle of intimates, are set forth in an exceedingly lively story, the plot of which it would be unfair to ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... to Henry IV. by transferring to him his ring. A paper was put into Richard's hands, from which he read an acknowledgment of being incapable of the royal office, and worthy, from his past conduct, to be deposed; that he freely absolved his subjects from their allegiance, and swore by the holy Gospels never to act in opposition to this surrender: adding, that if it were left wholly to him to name the future monarch, it should ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... temptation, and have fought, and won or lost, our battles with sin. It is one of the weaknesses of nations, as well as of children, that they come to consider their political fathers as saints. I smile when I think of the way people nowadays think of our great President, as of a mild genius, incapable of being moved to anger or great mirth, a man unspotted of the world. They should have heard him at Monmouth, when Lee failed him in a time of peril, or seen him, as I have seen him, soberly merry over his wine with Knox. But some day you ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... eldest and the family and sphere to which she belonged. Julia, she hoped, would one day do her honour. As for the islands of the South Seas, or the peculiar views and habits of life entertained by those white people who chose them for their residence, Mrs. Powle declared she was incapable from very ignorance of understanding or giving judgment about them. She made the whole question, together with her daughter, over to her sister Mrs. Caxton, who she did not doubt would do wisely according to her notions. But as ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... each may move without injuring others are fixed by the law, as the boundary between two fields is fixed by the fence. The freedom in question is the freedom of the individual as an isolated atom thrown back upon itself. Why, according to Bauer, is the Jew incapable of receiving the rights of man? "So long as he is a Jew, the limiting quality which makes him a Jew must triumph over the human quality which binds him as a man to other men, and must separate him from gentiles." But the right of man to ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... persons have, at several times, suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy, but the books of the Big-endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable, by law, of holding employments. During the course of these troubles, the Emperors of Blefuscu did frequently expostulate, by their ambassadors, accusing us of making a schism in religion, by offending against a fundamental doctrine of our great prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth chapter of ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... now proposed by the Viceroy. This was, to execute him solemnly in effigy, to drag his escutcheon through the streets at the tails of horses, and after having broken it in pieces, and thus cancelled his armorial bearings, to declare him and his descendants, ignoble, infamous, and incapable of holding property or estates. Could a leaf or two of future history have been unrolled to King, Cardinal, and Governor, they might have found the destined fortune of the illustrious rebel's house not exactly in accordance with the plan of summary ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... this book defines its scope, it does not indicate its main purpose. That is to show that the Celtic race has been misrepresented by a number of historians, from Mommsen to Froude, as incapable of self-government; and to prove, by inference, its fitness for Home Rule.... The major argument is based by Mommsen and his school on the assumption of permanent distinctions among races; and therefore ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... style of her class, conveying a vague impression that she and the Duke had arranged to commit suicide together if Perkins didn't "chuck" any previous engagement he had made. And Perkins had felt in a slipshod sort of way—for at this period he was incapable of ordered thought—he might as well be ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... may be better understood we must go back. Ivan had killed his ablest son, as told in a previous story, and Feodor, the present czar, was a feeble, timid, sickly incapable, who was a mere tool in the hands of his ambitious minister, Boris Godunof. Boris craved the throne. Between him and this lofty goal lay only the feeble Feodor and the child Dmitri, the sole direct survivors of the dynasty of ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... without pleasure, because he could not see that it proved any thing. But we are not to judge from the taste of such men, of what is suitable to affect the majority. The multitude are not mere thinkers or great readers. From their necessary habits they are incapable of following a long discussion except it be made inviting by the circumstances attending it, or the manner of conducting it. Their attention must be excited and maintained by some external ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... after thanking him. He hoped that she was not going to interrogate the Italian in his presence. Surely she would be incapable of such clumsiness! Still, women without imagination—and the majority of women were without imagination—did ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... conduct of a subordinate who is incapable of understanding the merit of a maneuver which has been ordered, and who will commit grave faults in its execution, may produce the same result of causing the failure of the plans ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... 28. Turgenef therefore was incapable of creating a Levin, because he had not the faith which makes the Levins of Tolstoy possible. He was filled with the pessimistic woe of the world, believed at bottom that man, born in sorrow, must also live in sorrow. With the sublimity of a prophet, Turgenef cries: "From the inmost depths ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... must also follow that our thought, in its purely logical form, is incapable of presenting the true nature of life, the full meaning of the evolutionary movement. Created by life, in definite circumstances, to act on definite things, how can it embrace life, of which it is only an emanation or an aspect? Deposited by ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... oh, happy day!" he murmured, "when the sun rises, no other rival will that bright orb have but me. That man shall fall so low, that when people look at the utter ruin which my anger shall have wrought, they will be forced to confess at least that I am indeed greater than he." The king, who was incapable of mastering his emotions any longer, knocked over with a blow of his fist a small table placed close to his bedside, and in the bitterness of feeling from which he was suffering, almost weeping, and ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... he said, "going through the farce of asking what I do wrong, because I know the answer. It's not the right one, but you seem incapable of giving any other." ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... concluded the argument in a tone of sorrow, which deeply expressed her sense of the degradation of her people, embittered perhaps by the idea that Ivanhoe considered her as one not entitled to interfere in a case of honour, and incapable of entertaining or expressing sentiments of ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... early part of his life this unlucky author had not been without ambition; it was only when disappointed in his political projects that he resolved to devote himself to literature. As he was incapable of attempting original composition, he became known by his detestable versions. He wrote above eighty volumes, which have never found favour in the eyes of the critics; yet his translations are not without their use, though ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... disturbed about it," she said slowly, "I can reassure you. You say that you do not know Dr. Callandar. But I do know him. The whole situation rests upon that. He is a man incapable of the caddish villainy you impute. Why he could not repair the car, I cannot say. I think," with a smile, "that he does not know quite as much about cars as he thinks he does. But he did his best, I know that! When we found his efforts useless we took the only course possible and made at once ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... all the obstacles to her marriage with the man she loved; but, alas! before the triumph was fully accomplished, the love was gone. Darnley was selfish, unfeeling, and incapable of requiting affection like Mary's. He treated her with the most heartless indifference, though she had done every thing to awaken his gratitude and win his love. She bestowed upon him every honor which it was in her power to grant. She gave him the title of king. She admitted him to share ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... past, everything comes out better and brighter than before,—not a bird is killed, not the frailest flower destroyed. But man comes, and in one day he will make a desolation that centuries cannot repair. Ignorant boor that he is, and all incapable of appreciating the glorious works of Nature, it seems to be his glory to be able to destroy in a few hours what it was the work of ages to produce. The noble oak, that has been cut away to build this contemptible ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... dreadfully muddy state, and for five miles we went plunging through the swamps. Most of the mules fell several times, and we had great difficulty in getting them up again. We passed two travellers with their mules up to their girths in mud, and incapable of extricating themselves, but could not help them, as we dared not allow ours to stand, or they would stick fast also. We had met, at San Ubaldo, the son of Dr. Seemann, on his way home to England. His pack-mule had stuck fast in the plains the night before, and he ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... that to the virtues and merits of the civilised Westerner there has become historically added—though this is not his chief point—a capacity for acquiring capital; whereas, not only is the Russian incapable of acquiring capital, but also he exhausts it wantonly and of sheer folly. None the less we Russians often need money; wherefore, we are glad of, and greatly devoted to, a method of acquisition like roulette—whereby, in a couple of hours, one may grow rich without ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... waste for ever—that concerns not thee. Indifferent thou tramplest in the dust Their happiness, who most are thine. The god Whom thou dost serve, is no benignant deity. Like as the blind irreconcileable 50 Fierce element, incapable of compact, Thy heart's wild impulse only dost ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... this to be the case. But now it struck him as a very strange thing that Miss Annie did not attend to her husband, but allowed his mistress and himself to do everything that was done for him. It was a question which his mind was totally incapable of solving, but when he reached the house, he spoke to Letty on the subject. "Bress your soul!" exclaimed that well-nourished person, "dat's not Mister Null, wot married Miss Annie. Dat's Mister Crof', an' he aint married to nobody. Mister ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... same time he observed that Humphrey had descended from the tree, recovered his gun, and was now safe again upon the lower bough. The first bull was advancing again to attack Smoker, who appeared incapable of getting away, so much was he injured by the fall, when the other bull, who apparently must have been an old antagonist of the first, roared and attacked him; and now the two boys were up in the tree, ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... happiness is to be sought in the conscience, not in external objects, can give a real zest to life. In less than one month I had made up my mind, I will not say perfectly, but in a tolerable degree, as to the part I should adopt. I saw that, being incapable of the mean action of obtaining impunity by procuring the destruction of others, the only prospect that lay before me was the scaffold, or long protracted captivity. It was necessary that I should prepare myself. I will live, I said to myself, so ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... the savage conqueror of Gaul was incapable of examining the proofs of a religion, which depends on the laborious investigation of historic evidence, and speculative theology. He was still more incapable of feeling the mild influence of the Gospel, which persuades and purifies the ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... found, whereby this or that Concrete, if not all Firme Bodies, may be resolv'd into parts so very minute and so unapt to stick close to one another, that none of them may be fixt enough to stay behind in a strong Fire, and to be incapable of Distillation; nor consequently to be look'd upon as Earth. But to return to Helmont, the same Authour somewhere supply's me with another Argument against the Earth's being such an Element as my Adversaries would have it. For he ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... died on the way,—and nine-tenths of them would have perished, had they encountered the storms of the preceding winter among the mountains. But the majority hung around the camp. To some of these the Quartermaster was able to furnish work, but he was obviously incapable of affording this assistance to all. Thefts and assaults became frequent, and promised to multiply as the season advanced. To remedy this trouble, Colonel Johnston assumed the responsibility of organizing a volunteer battalion. The term of service for which the men enlisted was nine months. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... for my advice," he says to Philip V. (20th August, 1704), "and I write you what I think; but the best advice becomes useless when it is only asked for and followed after the mischief has happened.... You have hitherto given your confidence to incapable or interested persons.... (And speaking of the recall of Orry and of another agent) it seems, however, that the interest of those particular persons wholly engages your attention, and at a time when you ought only to have ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... the muscles at the base of the skull were sore and sensitive, but the hurt had not gone deep. He felt incapable of thinking it out—the reasons, and all that it meant. He wondered if his attacker had thought to ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... followed her into her room, when she went to prepare for bed, and there in the gentlest manner informed her of the truth. Helen at first was in such a state of violent grief, that she could listen to nothing her father said, and indeed for some hours was utterly incapable either of reasoning or exertion; but at last, lifting up her head, and seeing her poor father, pale and exhausted, leaning over her, she started up, and throwing herself into his arms, cried "Forgive me, ...
— The Eskdale Herd-boy • Mrs Blackford
... that an army looks ill without its general and a castle without its castellan, and I say that a young married woman looks still worse without her husband unless there are very good reasons for it. I find myself so ill at ease without you, and so incapable of enduring this separation, that unless you return quickly I shall have to go for relief to my parents' house, even if I leave yours without a protector; for the one you left me, if indeed he deserved that title, has, I think, more regard to his own pleasure than to what concerns you: as you ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... effects of light upon the eye: when it has acted violently for some time on the optic nerve, it diminishes the excitability of that nerve, and renders it incapable of being affected by a quantity of light, that would at other times affect it. When we have been walking out in the snow, if we come into a room, we shall scarcely be able to see ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... because each element by itself is incapable of producing an effect. Such incapability is declared by Scripture and tradition alike. The text 'Having entered these beings with this jiva soul let me reveal names and forms—let me make each of these ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... of slaves caused the wages of the free labourer to be low. But the slaves were treated with humanity. From early times it was a law that if a slave were hired to another, the hirer should pay a penalty to his master whenever he was incapable of work, thus preventing "sweating" or overwork. Similarly, injuries to a slave were punished by a fine. The slave could trade and acquire property for himself, could receive wages for his work when hired ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... incessantly; Locke, as usual, sat facing the entrance, his eyes watchful, his countenance alert. In spite of the fact that he had constantly plied his companion with liquor in the hope of stilling his tongue, Higgins seemed incapable of silence, and kept breaking forth into loud, garbled recitals of the scene at Padden's, which caused the Missourian to shiver with apprehension. To a sober eye it would have been patent that Locke was ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... youth and circumstances, into a design upon her, and even dared to make free with names that she ought never to mention but with reverence and gratitude; what would you say to that?—Say, sir! said she, I cannot tell what to say. But I hope Pamela incapable of such ingratitude. ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... tones, incapable of slowness or solemnity, began to return thanks for himself, and pronounce this to be the happy day to which he had been looking throughout his life—the day of restoring the family inheritance to his mother, and the child of his elder ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... possible, and every observation taken that there are instruments devised to record, surely the soul is dead that feels no more and sees no further than the instruments do, that stirs with no other emotion than the mercury in the tube or the dial at its point of suspension, that is incapable of awe, of reverence, of worshipful uplift, and does not feel that "the Lord even the most mighty God hath spoken, and called the world from the rising of the sun even to the going down of the same," in the ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... redress; and thus the spark was kindled into flames, which for thirty years continued to rage throughout all Germany. At the death of Matthias in 1619, the Bohemians refused to receive Ferdinand II as their king; and elected the Protestant palatine Frederic V, a generous prince, but incapable of affording them support. The battle at the White Mountain, near Prague, in 1620, decided the destiny of Bohemia. Twenty-seven of the leaders of the insurrection were publicly executed; sixteen were exiled or condemned to prison for life; their property, as also the possessions of seven ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... they were stupefied with amazement. That peasants and townspeople, the plain workers of the land, should have opinions of their own about government and the rights of man was to them a thing too monstrous to be endured, but for the time being they were so dumfounded as to be incapable ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... September. Hecht, the Arnauds, all their friends, were out of Paris. They had no one to turn to. Christophe was beside himself, and talked of going part of the way on foot. Olivier begged him to wait for an hour, and promised to procure the money somehow. Christophe submitted: he was incapable of a single idea himself. Olivier ran to the pawnshop: it was the first time he had been there: for his own sake, he would much rather have been left with nothing than pledge any of his possessions, which ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... through many generations of this inconvenience or danger would be the stoppage of speech, leading possibly to a complete loss of the faculty. I am satisfied that they were incapable of vocalization, for even the women did not talk! But that is ahead of ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... to inherit, the child must be born alive, must be born during the lifetime of the mother, and must be born capable of inheriting—that is to say, monsters are incapable of inheriting. There is a mode of inheritance called 'tenancy by courtesy.' When a man marries a woman possessed of an estate or inheritance, and has, by her, issue born alive in her lifetime capable ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... the law. To this group also belong those high-strung individuals with early antisocial tendencies, who from childhood show a marked degree of egotism and self-love; who are very vindictive and revengeful in their reaction to frictions in social life. Upon falling into the hands of the law, they are incapable of adjustment to the new situation, react in an insane and wild manner to the prison routine, and, in consequence, frequently commit ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... Japanese, whom he had known in England and lived with in Japan.... Their only religion is patriotism, and their prayers to the Emperor are formal merely, yet they are reckless of life and eager to die for Fatherland; indeed, so incapable of retreating before an enemy as sometimes seriously to damage strategic plans. Were they launched against the West, they would ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... artist in the old mountebank, and I was quite sure that he was altogether incapable of any trickery, and I told him so, while expressing my admiration to him; and he had been touched, both by my admiration, and above all by the justice I had done him. Thus we became good friends, and he explained to me, very modestly, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... occasionally to European larvae, as in the case observed in the Italian Alps by F. de Filippi. Nevertheless, in the axolotl the latent tendency can still be revived, as we have seen above and as is proved by the experiments of Marie von Chauvin. When once sexually ripe the axolotl are apparently incapable of changing, but their ancestral course of evolution is still latent in them, and will, if favoured by ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
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