"Impotent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... first ascertaining by a hasty glance that no stranger remained, started up, clasped his hands wildly above his head, uttered a cry of the despair which he had hitherto repressed, and, in all the impotent impatience of grief, half rushed half staggered forward to the bed on which the coffin had been deposited, threw himself down upon it, and smothering, as it were, his head among the bed-clothes, gave vent to the full passion ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... good book or a good play, or to invent a good picture, and having invented paint it. But it always was hard, except to those—to whom it was impossible. Bunglers will not mend matters by blackening the great canvases they can't paint on, nor the impotent ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... forward movement we should have sprung upon them with the ferocity of bull-dogs. Those four soldiers never knew how near they were to meeting their deserts upon that day. As it was we merely scraped our feet in impotent rage. It was this fidgeting which aroused their attention. They turned and must have read our innermost intentions written in our faces, for they instantly grabbed their rifles and rounded upon us. With a motion which could not be misunderstood, ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... structure pride and ambition had combined to rear. A brilliant alliance that insured great wealth, that promised a secure stepping-stone to political preferment, was apparently a substantial bulwark against the swelling billows of an unaccountable whim; yet he was impotent to resist the yearning tenderness which impelled him to forget all else, in one determined effort to rescue and shelter the life he had been the chief agent in imperilling. Clear eyed, keen witted, he did not for an instant deceive himself; and he knew that neither compassion ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... friend and fellow conspirator, the caretaker, and I fumed with rage and disappointment. I was thoroughly tired, as tired as on days when I had beaten my way through tropical jungles without food or water; but I wished, in my impotent anger against I knew not what agencies, to punish myself, to induce an utter weariness that would drag me ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... watched the progress of this astonishing revolution with impotent surprise. Stefano Colonna, who was absent on the eventful day, expressed his scorn of the mob and their leader. But a popular attack on his palace convinced him of his error and forced him to fly from the city. Within fifteen days the triumph of Rienzi seemed to be complete, when the proudest ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... those which a kind master might feel for the poor animals committed to his charge, or—to do justice to the beneficent character attributed to many of the Incas—that a parent might feel for his young and impotent offspring. The laws were carefully directed to their preservation and personal comfort. The people were not allowed to be employed on works pernicious to their health, nor to pine— a sad contrast to their subsequent destiny—under the imposition of tasks too heavy for ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... my love I fold Your little shoulders close about: Ah—could my love keep out the cold And shut the creeping sorrows out! Rough paths will tire your darling feet, Gray skies will weep your tears above, While round you still, in torment, beat The impotent wings of mother-love. ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... dispense with the services of any particular miner. The miner, on the other hand, however expert, could not dispense with the companies. He needed a job; his wife and children would starve if he did not get one.... Individually the miners were impotent when they sought to enter a wage contract with the great companies; they could make fair terms only by uniting into trade unions to bargain collectively." It was of this state of affairs that President Taft spoke ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... chance, a contributor of political leaders and other articles to the rival daily newspaper which had published the King's official refusal of a grant of land to the Jesuits, he writhed inwardly with impotent fury. For might not this unknown man, Leroy,—if he were,—as he possibly was,—a friend of the King's—go to the full length of declaring all he knew and all he had learned from Jost's own lips, concerning certain 'financial secrets,' ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... 'It is some days since this invention has been spread among the deputies; I was aware of it from the first; but from its being utterly impossible to be listened to for a moment by any one, I did not wish to afflict you by the mention of an impotent fabrication, which I myself treated with the contempt it justly merited. Nevertheless, I did not forget, yesterday, in the presence of both my brothers, who accompanied me to the National Assembly, there to exculpate myself from an ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... nailed, the bigness of a man, Aslant from left to right, athwart the span, And painted black as paint could make it. Hushed, I stood, while manifold conjecture rushed To this point and to that point, and then burst In the impotent questionings rejected first. What did it mean? Ah, that no one could tell. Who put it there? That was unknown as well. Was there no legend? My friend knew of none. No neighborhood story? He had sought for one In vain. Did he imagine it ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... of her reply inflamed Hewett with impotent wrath. He smote the table violently, then sprang up and ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... campaign, in which he had displayed the most consummate ability, was miserable enough. The constitution had been assailed by all the leading chieftains, and even Cicero could only give vent to his despair and indignation in impotent lamentations. The cause of liberty was already lost. Caesar had obtained the province of Gaul for ten years, against all former precedent, and Pompey had obtained the extension of his imperium for five additional years. Both these generals thus had armies and an independent command for a period ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... his excitement he had forgotten what the truth meant, what it would mean to the man before him. He was vaguely aware that in abler hands than his own, this knowledge which he possessed would have been molded into a terrible weapon, but he was impotent to use it; with every advantage his, he felt only the desperate pass in which he had placed himself. If Gilmore and Marshall Langham could juggle with John North's life, what of his own life when the judge should have ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... All her efforts had been in vain! Pattie had escaped from her toils scot-free. Pattie had never gone to the station at all. She had stolen the child from one of its own sisters! She had risked so much for that! She could have shrieked in her impotent anger. ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... and it was averted by the active and penetrating mind of Frank, which seems as if it were most accurate and determined, in its conclusions and expedients, in proportion to the greatness of the danger, when common minds would be wholly confused and impotent. ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... recognize a feature of him here; you would never dream that this Book treated of him at all. A pale sickly shadow in torn surplice is presented to us here; weltering bewildered amid heaps of what you call 'Hebrew Old-clothes;' wrestling, with impotent impetuosity, to free itself from the baleful imbroglio, as if that had been its one function in life: who in this miserable figure would recognize the brilliant, beautiful and cheerful John Sterling, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... silence a moment. The womanly heart was touched at his despair and suffering, yet impotent to cheer him. Suddenly she bent over him as he lay there, ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... more frequently fail than succeed in their direct object, and as the alternative of considering them impotent is not open to the votary, some other explanation of their failure was taught in very early day. At first, it was that the god was angered, and refused the petition out of revenge. Later, the indirect purpose of such a prayer asserted itself more ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... movements, and man had apparently traversed vast distances and explored titanic heights and abysmal depths. And yet, for all the glare, the earth was darker. The light was miasmic only. The life of man seemed as ever a brief and sad and simple thing, the stretching of impotent hands, unable to grasp and hold; the interlacing of shadows; the unclosing, a moment before nightfall, of exquisite and fragile blossoms. The sense of the infirmity of life, the consciousness that it had no more than the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... to which religion appears as the object of the world. This State can only redeem itself from its inner torment by becoming the hangman of the Catholic Church. As against the latter, which declares the secular power to be its serving body, the State is impotent. Impotent is the secular power which claimed to be the rule ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... of, impotent to regulate commerce, i. 29; Hamilton on revision, 29; con. called for ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... said, I pray thee, tell Wherein thy strength doth other men excel, And how thou may'st be bound. And he replied, If they with seven green withs that ne'er were dried, Shall bind me hand and foot, I shall be then As weak and impotent as other men. Then the Philistine lords for her provide The seven green withs which never had been dried, And she therewith did bind him, (now there were Men lying in wait whom she had placed there,) Then she cried out, and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the beaten paths,' and is not afraid to be obscure. His is not the poetry 'which takes the popular ear without tasking the popular thought,' like 'the simple common-places of LONGFELLOW.' Such 'criticism' as this we have cited must needs 'make the judicious' laugh merely, being too impotent to make them 'grieve.' It is not perhaps assuming too much to suppose, that GOLDSMITH's 'Deserted Village' and LONGFELLOW's 'Psalms of Life,' simple though they be, will live and be cherished in generations of human hearts, when the volumes of our critics and their client that yet survive ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... living dead, buried like a toad in a hole left by the running lava of life, guarded, watched, tortured in body and soul—a figure of tremendous tragedy, the hapless man once worshipped by the people spreading impotent hands to the outer world, until madness comes to his relief and suicide helps him to escape into eternity and leave only his wasted body on ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... purposely rigged directly over the entrance, propped up by sticks, and at the proper time tripped by means of a string manipulated by some person to the officer unknown, the light being at the same instant extinguished by some one in the plot, the transaction overwhelming the officer with impotent wrath. ...
— History of Company F, 1st Regiment, R.I. Volunteers, during the Spring and Summer of 1861 • Charles H. Clarke
... to other lodgings at the beginning of each quarter of the year, so traversing till doomsday, being impotent of staying in one place, and finding some ease by so purning [journeying] and changing habitations. Their chameleon-like bodies swim in the air near the earth with bag and baggage; and at such revolution of time, seers, or men of the second sight (females being seldom so qualified) ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... no match. The small boy was at the mercy of the big one. The latter was indeed taken aback for a moment at the fury of his young assailant, impotent as it was, but that was all. He might have defended himself with a single hand; he might have carried the boy under one arm out into the passage. But the evil spirit had been roused within him, and that spirit knew no mercy. ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... Losing their influence, he had lost every prop of his own. Nor was this all; he was reproached by the general voice of the city as the original cause of a calamity which he had since shown himself impotent to redress. He it was, and his cause, which had drawn upon the people so fatally trepanned the hostility of the mysterious Masque. But for his highness, all the burgomasters, captains, city- officers, &c., would now be sleeping in their beds; whereas, the best late which could be surmised ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... impressed his mind to be a real gesture, and not the working of his fancy, the most that could be said of it was, that it was quite in keeping with the rest of his diabolical fun, and had the same impotent expression of truth in it. 'If he could kill me with a wish,' thought the swindler, 'I should not ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... stream of gold to her exchequer; and when the bubbles burst in havoc and ruin she smiled and counted her gains, turning a deaf ear to the storm of execration that raged against her outside the palace walls. She knew that she had played her cards so skilfully that all the popular rage was impotent to harm her. Only one of her many puppets—Knight, the Treasurer of the South Sea Company—could be the means of doing her harm. If he were arrested and told all he knew, impeachment would probably follow, with a sentence of imprisonment and banishment. But the crafty German was much too old a ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... it with your life," was his reply. "If you attempt it, you shall never cease to rue your folly as long as you exist. Do not imagine I am afraid of you! I wear an armour against which all your weapons are impotent. Do you not know, miserable wretch, that I have sworn to preserve my reputation, whatever it cost? I have dug a pit for you, and whichever way you move it is ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... door of the carriage, screaming loudly, "Let me out! let me out!" She caught hold of the wooden framework, and shook it till it rattled again, while Mrs. Donaldson, well knowing it was locked, sat calmly smiling at her impotent wrath. ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... maid. While the maid was coming she fell to blushing at her own boldness, and, just as the maid opened the door, her thermometer fell so low that—she sent her upstairs for a piece of work. Oh, lame and impotent conclusion! ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... lives become. For the man of the lion heart all things unfold and unto him the timid must bring their offerings. No one of ordinary gumption consults the human "flivver." Advice from him would be unavailing. His point of view would be inadequate—his ability to advise, impotent. We go to the man who does things and say to him: "Here is my little idea—do you want to help me put it over?" If it is good, he does. If not, his experience tells him so, for men of courage are naturally ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... jurisdiction of the local authorities, who could ascertain the truth; and all the rightful co-sharers have been ever since trying in vain to recover their rights. The Bramin [Brahmin] and the Havildar, with Sookhal a trooper in the same regiment, now divide the profits between them, and laugh at the impotent efforts of the old proprietors to get redress. Gholam Jeelanee, a shopkeeper of Lucknow, seeing the profits derived by sipahees, from the abuse of this privilege, purchased a cavalry uniform—jacket, cap, pantaloon, boots, shoes, and sword—and on the pretence of being an invalid trooper of ours, ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... method of Jesus, which consisted not of mere teaching but of help—which touched not only the issues of the sin-sick soul, but the weakness and want of the body. To the demoniac, to the leper, to the impotent man by the pool, he brought not abstract truths, but words of healing and works of practical deliverance. How striking is the fact that the freshest and noblest charities of this nineteenth century are only developments of the manner in which the Redeemer soothed ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... persecution bred the spirit and created the weapons for its correction. When it was found that every American vessel was the possible spoil of any French or English cruiser or privateer that she might encounter; that our Government was impotent to protect its seamen; that neither our neutrality rights nor the neutrality of ports in which our vessels lay commanded the respect of the two great belligerents, the Yankee shipping merchants set about meeting the situation ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... absolutely incredible and opposed to all the results of science. Nature does not countenance any theory of the original perfection and subsequent degradation of the human race, and the supposition of a frustrated original plan of creation, and of later impotent endeavours to correct it, is as inconsistent with Divine omnipotence and wisdom as the proposed punishment of the human race and the mode devised to save some of them are opposed to justice and morality. Such assumptions are essentially inadmissible, and totally fail to explain ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... killed. She looked at him continually with fierce eyes, and we felt that she was tortured by a wild longing for revenge. That seemed to us to be the most suitable punishment for the terrible torments that she had made Pidelot suffer, for impotent vengeance is such ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... in a fit of impotent rage, made a dash to reach the fireplace, but his feet were hampered by the ulster, and he would have fallen heavily had not the doctor caught him ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... her hair loose and her nails bleeding. She had at last succeeded in opening her door. When she discovered that she was too late, and that Florent was being taken off, she darted after the cab, but checked herself almost immediately with a gesture of impotent rage, and shook her fists at the receding wheels. Then, with her face quite crimson beneath the fine plaster dust with which she was covered, she ran back again towards ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... with me. The men bustled about, nothing loth—for were they not going to get a change from the monotony of sea life, and, at the same time, provide themselves with the means of unlimited indulgence in more or less vicious enjoyment for the remainder of their lives?—and I noticed, with impotent anger, that, having at length arrived, as they supposed, at the goal of their villainous schemes, with the wealth which was to be the reward of their treachery all but within their grasp, as they believed, the restraint which they ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... But is it even mine? It is mine indeed to offer you, as I might take the coin from my neck, as I might break a live branch from a tree, and give it you. And yet not mine! I dwell, or I think I dwell (if I exist at all), somewhere apart, an impotent prisoner, and carried about and deafened by a mob that I disown. This capsule, such as throbs against the sides of animals, knows you at a touch for its master; ay, it loves you! But my soul, does my soul? I think not; I know not, fearing to ask. Yet when you spoke to me your words ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to neglect. But it is not so. For if we hold unshaken those conclusions which we lately reached, thou shall learn that, by the will of Him of whose realm we are speaking, the good are always strong, the bad always weak and impotent; that vices never go unpunished, nor virtues unrewarded; that good fortune ever befalls the good, and ill fortune the bad, and much more of the sort, which shall hush thy murmurings, and stablish thee in the strong assurance of conviction. And since by my late instructions ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... tempted to feel a certain contempt for the Church of Christ, when he turns from the intensely real issues of his week-day world to the abstractness and unreality of religious questions! How fictitious, how unbusiness-like, how preposterous in the sight of God is this internecine sectarianism and impotent sentimentalism where there might be the triumphant march of one army under one flag! Let us learn the lesson which even the grasping, unscrupulous world has to teach,—the lesson of an absorbed and disciplined mind ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... unveiled, and then the explanation is itself a surprise. The characters are generally strongly conceived, skilfully discriminated, and happily combined. The delineation of Mr. Westervelt, the father of the heroine, is especially excellent. Irresolute in thought, impotent in will, and only occasionally fretted by circumstances into a feeble activity, he is an almost painfully accurate representation of a class of men who drift through life without any power of self-direction. Mrs. Westervelt has equal moral feebleness with less brain, and her character is a study ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... being left alone, and of being horribly disgusted by tobacco chewing and tobacco spittle, I have suffered considerably. The sight of slavery in Virginia, the hatred of British feeling upon the subject, and the miserable hints of the impotent indignation of the South, have pained me very much; on the last head, of course, I have felt nothing but a mingled pity and amusement; on the other, sheer distress. But however much I like the ingredients of this great dish, I cannot but come back to the point upon which I started, and say ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... singular import burst from the Navajoes as they beheld these new proofs of their discomfiture. The warriors unslung their lances, and thrust them into the earth with impotent indignation. Some of them drew scalps from their belts, stuck them on the points of their spears, and shook them at us over the brow of the abyss. They believed that Dacoma's band had been destroyed, as well as ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... if thou be'st the Elect of Heaven, The gift that God has largely given, Thou shouldst then for our good impart, To purify thy brother's heart. Yes, we are base, and vile, and hateful, Cruel, and shameless, and ungrateful— Impotent and heartless tools, Slaves, and slanderers, and fools. Come then, if charity doth sway thee, Chase from our hearts the viper-brood; However stern, we will obey thee; Yes, we will listen, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... empty; there will never be a second blast - he has had enough of that trumpet. Nay, he begins to feel uneasily that, unless he is to be rendered useless for the rest of his life, unless he is to lose his right arm and go about his great work maimed and impotent, he must find some way of making his peace with England and the indignant Queen. The letter just quoted was written on the 6th of April 1559; and on the 10th, after he had cooled his heels for four days more about the ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... development been so unmistakably the work of a single hand,—and that, too, the hand of a mere youth of four-and-twenty. The events immediately preceding the return of Gustavus prove conclusively, if they prove anything, how impotent are mere numbers without a leader. For years the whole country had been almost continuously immersed in blood. One moment the peasantry were all in arms, burning to avenge their wrongs, and the next moment, just on the eve of victory, they scattered, each satisfied with promises that ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... It was also impotent, for it rather made Gordon persist in carrying out his resolve than deterred him from doing so. His reply was thus worded: "Arrange retirement, commutation, or resignation of service; ask Campbell reasons. My counsel, if ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... pale and haggard as we hurried back to rejoin the teacher; and I have no doubt that he felt terrible anxiety when he considered the number and ferocity of the savages, and the weakness of the few arms which were ready indeed to essay, but impotent to effect, Avatea's ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... child in his arms from the horrible height in the sea, Shrill screeching, "Revenge!" in the wind-rush; and pallid Maclean, Age-feeble with anger and impotent pain, Crawled up on the crag, and lay flat, and locked hold of dead roots ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... drive me mad!" She sprang to her feet, wringing her hands in impotent wrath. "You never used ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... invaders swept on through the village, and Jules Lemaire, from his hiding-place on the church tower, watched them come with tears of impotent rage on his cheeks. Battalion after battalion they passed by—big, confident Germans who jeered at the peasants, and who sang as they plodded over the pave. Once, when a company was halted beneath him, while the officers went in to the Faisan d'Or across the road, to see what ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... powers. If the executive or the judicial branch be deprived of powers conferred upon either as checks on the legislative, the preponderance of the latter will become disproportionate and absorbing and the others impotent for the accomplishment of the great objects for which they were established. Organized, as they are, by the Constitution, they work together harmoniously for the public good. If the Executive and the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... in varied moods and conditions, now weeping bitterly for her father, again resenting with impotent passion the change in their fortunes, but ending usually by comforting herself with the thought that Mr. Van Dam was true to her. He was as true and faithful as an insidious, incurable disease when once infused into the system. His infernal policy ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... build solidly on a solid foundation, it is then that he has achieved his great work. But he has never been satisfied, or never been able, to go on doing just that work, his own work; and the poet in him, the impotent poet who is full of a sense of what poetry is, but is never able, for more than a moment, to create poetry, has come whispering in the ear of the man of science, who is the new, unerring artist, the maker of a wonderful new ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... range, remarked this full armament, marveling how the stranger had taken six men of such desperate notoriety all strapped with their guns, but they understood at once his purpose in allowing the weapons to hang under their impotent hands. It was a mockery of their bravado, a belittlement of their bluff and swagger in the brief day ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... on his ultra-violet projector and swung it into the thickest ranks of the enemy. In the beam many of the monsters died, but the Terrestrial ray was impotent compared with the weapons of the Titanians, and Stevens, snapping off the beam with a bitter imprecation, shot the visiray out toward the bare, black cone of the extinct volcano and ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... little moment of comfort, which she yearned to hold free from suffering that its remembrance might uphold her, the powerful vision of the Tintoretto's awful Judgment rose beckoningly before her. It was the doom of Venice, and she alone—so impotent—recognized the danger. ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... responsibility for local distress, and that of a distinction between the pauper and the vagabond, were more clearly defined in a statute of 1572. By this Act the justices in the country districts, and mayors and other officers in towns, were directed to register the impotent poor, to settle them in fitting habitations and to assess all inhabitants for their support. Overseers were appointed to enforce and superintend their labour, for which wool, hemp, flax, or other stuff ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... know the worst; but we know that in three campaigns, we have done nothing, and suffered much. You may swell every expense, accumulate every assistance, and extend your traffic to the shambles of every German despot; your attempts will be forever vain and impotent—doubly so, indeed, from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your adversaries, to over run them with the mercenary sons of rapine and plunder, devoting them and their possessions ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... what for you cry?' and looking up, saw that I had not yet done with this intolerable infliction. A poor crippled old man, lying in the corner of the piazza, unable even to crawl towards me, had uttered this word of consolation, and by his side (apparently too idiotic, as he was too impotent, to move,) sat a young woman, the expression of whose face was the most suffering and at the same time the most horribly repulsive I ever saw. I found she was, as I supposed, half-witted; and on coming nearer to enquire into ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... cried; and putting his foot against him, he sent him spinning across the room. Leo did not growl, or cry out, but his eyes gleamed like coals, and he showed his white teeth with savage but impotent hatred. It was easy to see that if he had been a bulldog instead of a greyhound, he would have torn Mr. Paul Linmere limb ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... or else spoke of her husband, whom the captain had killed. She looked at him continually with fierce eyes, and we felt that she was tortured by a wild longing for revenge. That seemed to us to be the most suitable punishment for the terrible torments that she had made Piedelot suffer, for impotent ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... leaning against the tree trunk, staring at him in impotent rage. And the fire died out of his eyes as she looked. He drew a deep breath or two and turned away to pick up his rifle. When he faced about with that in his hand, the old mask of immobility was in place. He waited while Stella gathered up her scattered ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... preparations for departure, and addressed a word or two to his wife; but he spoke in low tones, and the fast-advancing march of feet and sullen low roar of singing outside drowned his voice. An oath burst from his lips, and he struck his fist, in impotent fury, on a ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... books ever written. He lived a stirring and a strenuous life, and the world bowed down before him. His death was strangely pathetic, and illustrates the faith and the superstition of men mighty in material affairs but impotent before gods of their own creation. His son and the heir to his throne, Humayon, being mortally ill of fever, was given up to die by the doctors, whereupon the affectionate father went to the nearest temple and offered what he called his own worthless ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... comfortable upholstery with a gesture of impotent despair. Medenham was sure she would not dare to leave him. What wretched project she and Marigny had concocted he knew not, but its successful outcome evidently depended on Mrs. Devar's safe arrival in Bristol. ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... the women always have quite as much influence as the men. But in modern England neither the men nor the women have any influence at all. In this primary matter, the moulding of the landscape, the creation of a mode of life, the people are utterly impotent. They stand and stare at imperial and economic processes going on, as they might stare at the Lord ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... the furry back of the cowering coyote. Now they found a new sport in driving the icy powder through the cracks of the loose board shanty, upon the stripped back of the mother huddling her sobbing children against the empty, impotent stove, perhaps wrapping her young in the worn and whitened robe of the buffalo taken years ago. For it was only the buffalo, though now departed, which held the frontier for America in this unprepared season, the Christmas of the Great Cold. The robes saved many ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... and valuable property as a consequence of it. Let me put this proposition to them. Here is a vessel, it may be, out on a trackless ocean hundreds of miles from land, her forecastle hands consisting of a gang of murderous ruffians ready to make lawful authority impotent, and, if need be, to enforce their own by overpowering the captain and officers and making an opportunity for mutiny. Let the moralists think of it; four or five men at the mercy of a score of hang-dog scoundrels who ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... partisan. For the flippancy parallels can, no doubt, be found in some of Mr. Mahaffy's earlier books, but the prejudice and the violence are new, and their appearance is very much to be regretted. There is always something peculiarly impotent about the violence of a literary man. It seems to bear no reference to facts, for it is never kept in check by action. It is simply a question of adjectives and rhetoric, of exaggeration and over- emphasis. Mr. Balfour is very anxious that Mr. William O'Brien should wear prison clothes, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... My arm is impotent; what worth to trim The bending sails! Look, I shall quaff a cup To Fate, while the wild ocean swallows up The shipwrecked youth, the man who ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... better than my Maker. And it was the same thing in my marriage,' he added more hoarsely. 'I did not believe this girl could care for me; I must not intrude; I must preserve the foppery of my indifference. What an impotent picture!' ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... desperate remedies. It was a case in which his mind turned instinctively to Diane for help; but in the very act of doing so he was confronted by her theories as to Dorothea's need of diplomatic guidance. For that, he told himself, the time was past. The event had proved how impotent mere "management" was to control her, and justified his ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... the actions and affections, it follows, that they cannot be derived from reason; and that because reason alone, as we have already proved, can never have any such influence. Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality therefore, are not ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... naturally found the Republican or Union party in control throughout the North. Branded with the opprobrium of having opposed the conduct of the war, the Democratic party remained impotent for a number of years; and Ulysses S. Grant, the nation's greatest military hero, was easily elected to the presidency on the Republican ticket in 1868. In the latter part of Grant's first term, however, hostility began to manifest ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... foot before the Indian had recovered himself. Then with a terrific yank the horseman snapped in the slack, the cowman's feet flew from under him, and with one foot taut in the air, caught at the ankle, he lay cursing and shaking an impotent fist. ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... omnipotent, materia [25] medica, hygiene, and animal magnetism are impotent; and their only supposed efficacy is in apparently delud- ing reason, denying revelation, and dethroning Deity. The tendency of mental healing is to uplift mankind; but this method perverted, is "Satan let loose." Hence the [30] deep demand for the Science of psychology to meet sin, ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... overmastered all others—the anxiety, that is to say, of assuring the magnificence and inviolability of sepulture! . . . And this horrible scarecrow, toothless and senile, lying here in its filthy rags, with the hand raised in an impotent menace, was once the brilliant Sesostris, the master of kings, and by virtue of his strength and beauty the demigod also, whose muscular limbs and deep athletic chest many colossal statues at Memphis, at Thebes, at Luxor, reproduce ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... graceful Cielo or Pericon in one of these remote, semi-barbarous South American estancias! I swear I will turn poet myself, and go back some day to astonish old blase Europe with something so—so—What the deuce was that? My sleepy soliloquy was suddenly brought to a most lame and impotent conclusion, for I had heard a sound of terror—the unmistakable zz-zzing of an insect's wings. It was the hateful vinchuca. Here was an enemy against which British pluck and six-shooters are of no avail, and in whose presence one begins to experience ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... police might have inaugurated in connection with the burglary and whatever their progress in pursuit of the clue furnished by the garments discarded in the bath-room. And all the reassurances of Mrs. Gosnold were impotent to counteract apprehensions ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... light, we submit the following remarks as a sufficient antidote to this daring but impotent attempt to exclude Theology from ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... religion are scattered to the winds. The liberalism for the sake of which they were willing to eviscerate their Christianity has already lost its vitality; it survives as a pale parliamentary tradition, impotent before the tide of socialism rising behind its back. The Catholicism which they wished to see gently lingering is being driven out of national life by official spoliations and popular mockeries. It is fast becoming what it was in the beginning, a sect with more or less ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... of the plan it is still impotent until it has appealed to the basest element in every human breast—the willingness to accept happiness that is bought by the agony of another! It is too abjectly selfish and groveling to command the least respect from a noble character or a great, tender soul. It severs the ties of ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... world, passed under a furore of misstatement and misconception, even by such a noble body of men as Third-Corps veterans, will not re-habilitate Joseph Hooker's military character during these five days, nor make him other than a morally and intellectually impotent man from May 1 to May 5, 1863. Loyalty to Hooker, so-called, is disloyalty to the grand old army, disloyalty to the seventeen thousand men who fell, disloyalty to every comrade who fought at Chancellorsville. I begrudge no man the desire ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... found a panic. The Russian detachment of Colonel Kazagrandi, after having twice defeated the Bolsheviki and well on its march against Irkutsk, was suddenly rendered impotent and scattered through internal strife among the officers. The Bolsheviki took advantage of this situation, increased their forces to one thousand men and began a forward movement to recover what they had lost, while the remnants of Colonel Kazagrandi's ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... the world. Behind his voiceless misery was immeasurable hatred of those who had struck him this blow; at moments a revengeful fury all but maddened him. He held his mother's band; if he could but feel one pressure of the slight fingers before they were impotent for ever! And this much was granted him. Shortly before midday the open eyes trembled to consciousness, the lips moved in endeavour to speak. To Hubert it seemed that his intense gaze had worked a miracle, effecting that which his will demanded. She ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... gifts of fellowships in some places are grown, the profit that ariseth at sundry elections of scholars out of grammar schools to the posers, schoolmasters, and preferers of them to our universities, the gifts of a great number of almshouses builded for the maimed and impotent soldiers by princes and good men heretofore moved with a pitiful consideration of the poor distressed, how rewards, pensions, and annuities also do reign in other cases whereby the giver is brought sometimes into extreme misery, and that not so much as the room of a common soldier ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... for a minute or two, then, with a smothered oath upon his lips, he turned slowly to the door and opened it. Before leaving the room, however, he said, in a voice half-stifled by impotent passion— ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... sympathize fully with this eminent deaf author in the intense desire he feels to hear the sweet voices of his children. There is no other object this side of heaven I so ardently wish to see as the faces of my family. A feeling sometimes comes over me akin, I fancy, to the impotent rage of a caged lion, who vainly tries to break his prison bars and gain his liberty. The moral certainty that I must finally leave this world of beauty without having enjoyed many of its highest blessings and purest delights often ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... seized by one of those impotent and inconsistent rages which occasionally betray the habitually cautious and timid man. He caught up the Colonel's stick, which was lying on the table. At the same moment the Colonel, without any apparent effort, grasped it by the handle. To Mr. Hotchkiss's astonishment, the stick separated in two ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... effectually, that when his army was beaten by the powerful Damel, they uniformly retired behind their exorcised heap of stones, which in a moment stopt their enemy's career, and struck them with such dread, that they immediately retired to their country, leaving their impotent enemy in quiet possession of his usurped territory; whom otherwise they might have annihilated with the greatest facility. Superstition is a delusion very prevalent in Africa; and its powerful influence upon the human mind is forcibly illustrated by ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... in itself, but it is that which attaches us to God, and then His power flows into us. Screw a pipe on to a water main and turn a handle, and out flows the water through the pipe and fills the empty vessel. Faith is as impotent in itself as the hollow water pipe is, only it is the way by which the connection is established between the fulness of God and the emptiness of man. By it divinity flows into humanity, and we have a share ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... part of the island had been in open and determined revolt against Spanish rule. Though the forces of the King had been able to hold the seaports, thus cutting off the insurgents from regular communication with the outer world and making impotent their efforts to secure recognition from foreign powers, the patriots under Maceo and Gomez held control of the interior, established a government of their own, enforced order, and levied taxes. Enormous sacrifices were made by the Spanish ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... truth. Truth lies in your thoughts, in your feelings, girl, in your choked feelings, in your blood, in the 'yes' you speak in your dreams. Of course I know that they need their lie, for they must be organised, the wolves; they must go in packs, otherwise they are impotent. But I have only my truth, only my truth as I stand on the marble ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... self. Therefore he confines himself to feeling the fetters which the latter imposes on him, without having the consciousness of the infinite emancipation which it procures for him. Without suspecting in himself the dignity of lawgiver, he only experiences the constraint and the impotent revolt of a subject fretting under the yoke, because in this experience the sensuous impulsion precedes the moral impulsion, he gives to the law of necessity a beginning in him, a positive origin, and by the most unfortunate of all mistakes ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... Exasperated by this impotent conservative threat, she pushed her little dart against him with all her vigour. When she tried to sheathe it again she couldn't, but she still made herself useful about the hive by hooking on to small articles and dragging them about. But no other bee would sleep with her after ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... you, mother, as your loving and obedient son," said Eugene, kissing her hand—even the one which still clasped the wonder-working purse. "I have no right to despise this tiny necromancer, for, by its beneficent power, you have been rescued from dangers which I, a man, and not a coward, was impotent to avert. I submit, dear mother, to your dictates—no longer your champion, look upon me henceforth ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... been defeated in this, his withdrawal then to await the result at Fisher's Hill would have been justified, but it does not appear that he made any serious effort of all to dislodge the Confederate cavalry: his impotent attempt not only chagrined me very much, but occasioned much ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... that secret agreement was directed. They, the feeble and powerless ones, with their necks ever bent under the yoke of the mighty and their feet ever stumbling into the traps of the crafty—they, too, would utter an impotent "Wicked!" if they knew. His voice had the note of gentle raillery in ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... had contrary winds at first; all night the lorcha—an old grandmother of a craft, full of dry-rot spots as big as woodpeckers' nests—flapped heavily about on impotent tacks, and when the sun rose we found ourselves on the same spot from which we had watched its setting. Toward ten o'clock, however, the monsoon veered, and, wing-and-wing, the old boat, creaking in every joint as if she had the dengue, grunted ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... their powers of attainment. Many envy and desire wealth, who can never procure it by honest industry or useful knowledge. They therefore turn their eyes about to examine what other methods can be found of gaining that which none, however impotent or worthless, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... was no longer listening. He wished to believe the whole fantastic story an invention of the keen-eyed old madame herself. Yet something within him confessed to its truth. A tumultuous storm of baffled desire, of impotent anger, swept over him. The ring he wore burned into his flesh. But he had no thought of removing it—the ring which had once belonged to the beautiful golden-haired woman who had come back from the grave to woo ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... other with whirling hats knotted into the ends of dingy handkerchiefs, relaxed their enmities in a common rush for the projecting ladder behind the dray and collided with Zussmann on the way. A one-legged, misery-eyed hunchback offered him penny diaries. He shook his head in impotent ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... condition,—very ill, in a lodging of which he could not pay the rent,—threatened with being turned into the street as soon as the thing could be done without danger to his life,—galled with a sense of disgrace, and full of impotent wrath against an oppressor,—and even suffering under deeper griefs than these,—at such a time, the worn man fell asleep, and dreamed that I looked kindly upon him. This happened three times; and on this ground, and this alone, he applied ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... the old red anarch, is passing. It is safer to be a soldier than a working-man. The chance for life is greater in an active campaign than in a factory or a coal-mine. In the matter of killing, war is growing impotent, and this in face of the fact that the machinery of war was never so expensive in the past nor so dreadful. War-equipment to- day, in time of peace, is more expensive than of old in time of war. A standing army costs more to maintain than it used to cost to conquer ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... This conclusion, impotent to Bradley, was practically all the savage critic had to offer. Either go back to despotism or go ahead to ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... instructions to turn crew to making pair mitts and helmet out of Jaeger fleece for all hands forward. With strict economy we should make things spin out; cannot help worrying over our people at the hut. Although worrying does no good, one cannot do otherwise in this present impotent state. 11 p.m.—Wind howling and whistling through rigging. Outside, in glare of moon, flying drift and expanse of ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... yet in method and results, he stands like a giant among a race of dwarfs, like one instructed, who judges from principles, among men of opinion, who merely stick results together, a methodical systematizer among well-meaning but impotent eclectics. The philosophy of the Illumination is related to that of Kant as argument to science, as halting mediation to principiant resolution, as patchwork to creation out of full resources, yet at the same time as wish to deed and as negative preparation to positive ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... to mark himself a miserable fool and tool. That Eugene Wrayburn, for his wife's sake, set him aside and left him to crawl along his blasted course. He thought of Fate, or Providence, or be the directing Power what it might, as having put a fraud upon him—overreached him—and in his impotent mad rage bit, and ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... persons of whom her friendship, now impotent, had thought, were, for various reasons, the two fatal instruments of the fate of the "poor little soul," and the vague remorse which Maud herself felt with regard to the terrible note sent to Madame Steno in the presence of the young girl, was only too true. When the servant had given ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... direction, the wind tears along in a mad fury. The forest tops sway as with the roll of some mighty sea swept by the sudden blast of a tornado. In the rage of the storm the woodland giants creak out their impotent protests. The wind battles and tears at everything, there is ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... thing was out of reason. I laughed aloud in my tomb; and to prove to Bob how far he was astray, I gave a little impulse from my toes. Up I soared like a bird, my companion soaring at my side. As high as to the stone, and then higher, I pursued my impotent and empty flight. Even when the strong arm of Bob had checked my shoulders, my heels continued their ascent; so that I blew out side-ways like an autumn leaf, and must be hauled in, hand over hand, as sailors haul in the slack of a sail, and propped upon my feet ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is bound up with the success of that movement. The man who rejoices in it and strives to further it is alive; the man who shudders and raises impotent hands against it is merely dead, even though the grave yet yawns for him in vain. He may make dead laws and preach dead sermons and his sermons may be great and his laws may be rigid. But as the wisest of men saw twenty-five centuries ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... nowhere recorded that any of our kings were deposed by those formidable bodies of men, or that any remarkable changes were made by them in the form of our government; and, therefore, till some reason shall be alleged, why such insurrections are now more dangerous, and our civil magistrates more impotent than in former ages, I humbly conceive, that even without the protection of a standing army, we might yet sleep in security, notwithstanding the plots of the colliers, and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... her powerful adversary, must fall an easy victim; nor would there be much reason to apprehend that a single shot from the battery could reach them, before the captor, and his prize, would be at such a distance as to render the blow next to impotent if not utterly innocuous. The wild and audacious character of such an enterprise was in full accordance with the reputation of the desperate freebooter on whose caprice, alone, the act now ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... Further, if a man is competent to do a thing by himself, he should not seek the assistance of something weaker and more imperfect. Now the reason is competent to achieve by itself deeds of fortitude, wherein anger is impotent: wherefore Seneca says (De Ira i): "Reason by itself suffices not only to make us prepared for action but also to accomplish it. In fact is there greater folly than for reason to seek help from anger? the steadfast ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... efficient aid to Conde and Orange! As if England's dissimulation and refusal to support the "Huguenots" and the "Gueux" in any other than an underhand way were likely to retard the sailing of the great expedition that was to turn the Pope's impotent threats against the "bastard of England" into fearful realities! As if Protestantism, everywhere menaced, could hope for glorious success in any other path than a bold and combined defence![636] ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... great practical interests afloat in the Poor Laws, Coleridge did so little real work, that he left, as a res integra, to Dr. Alison, the capital argument that legal and adequate provision for the poor, whether impotent poor or poor accidentally out of work, does not extend pauperism—no, but is the one great resource for putting it down. Dr. Alison's overwhelming and experimental manifestations of that truth have ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... my kind love," said Mrs Greenow, thereby resenting the impotent interference. "And look here, Captain Bellfield, suppose you both dine with me next Saturday. He always comes in on Saturday, and you might ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... presumed too much upon his strength. Anger had given him a moment's energy, but at the cost of his life which was ebbing away. When he again tried to speak, he could not. Twice did he open his lips, but only a choking cry of impotent rage escaped them. This was his last manifestation of intelligence. A bloody foam gathered upon his lips, his eyes rolled back in their sockets, his body stiffened, and he fell face downward in a ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... reputation. But to that son himself, as he passed through the familiar haunts of his boyish days, it seemed as if he could perceive the figure of his grandmother sitting by the roadside and throwing stones at the procession as it went by. He could almost fancy the old woman aiming, in her impotent wrath, at that baneful influence which had trampled down her life, and with it, all she had gathered round her to make that ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... has loved, the mind has taught Through the long generations, hoarded gains Of plastic fancies, and of potent brains; Thrones, Temples, Marts, Art's alcoves, Learning's domes, Patrician palaces, and bourgeois homes. Down, down!—to glut its spleen, the paltry thing, Impotent, save to lurk, and coil, and spring, But powerful as the poison-drop, once sped, That creeps, corrupts, and leaves its victim—dead! As the asp's fang could turn to pulseless clay The Pride of Egypt, so this Worm can slay If left long covert for its ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... His eye was on the alert, now as always, for anything that might light up the sovereign problems of human government. A book by a member of this circle had appeared six months before, which was still the talk of the town, and against which the Government had taken the usual impotent measures of repression. This was the Treatise on Tactics, by a certain M. de Guibert, a colonel of the Corsican legion. The important part of the work was the introduction, in which the writer examined with what was then thought ...
— Burke • John Morley
... it." But not on such terms, can I, for one, live. To know, to have some assurance—that is the one and only thing that matters at all. For if I once believed that God were careless, or indifferent, or impotent, I would fly from life as an accursed thing; whereas I would give all the peace, and joy, and contentment, that may yet await me upon earth, and take up cheerfully the heaviest burden that could be devised of darkness and pain, if I could be sure of an after-life ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... whole enchantment, and leaves the reader in a state of cold and anxious scepticism. This most lame and impotent conclusion has been variously imputed to the taste or irreligion of Virgil; but, according to the more elaborate interpretation of Bishop Warburton, the descent to hell is not a false, but a mimic scene; which represents ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... it would smite us gasping to earth, or draw us helplessly struggling within its merciless clutch. A prayer trembled on my lips, but remained unuttered, for I could only stare upward at the mighty, crawling thing now overshadowing us, my arms uplifted in impotent effort ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... passed from page to page, following the dark thread of narrative that darkened at each remove, he lapsed into that illogical frame of mind when one looks half expectantly for some providential interposition to avert the calamity against which human means are impotent. If Richard were to drop dead in the street! If he were to fall overboard off Point Judith in the night! If only anything would happen to prevent his coming back! Thus the ultimate disgrace might be spared them. But the ill thing is the sure thing; the letter with ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... impotent rage. This range-rider always had interfered with his affairs from the first moment he had met him. If ever he got the chance again to stamp him out—! The strong fingers of the man worked with the nervous longing to tighten on the throat of the gay youth who had worsted him in the duel ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... intended for Alexander, and still less that it is the work of Lysippus. It is difficult to imagine that the favored and devoted artist of the mighty conqueror would choose to portray his great master in a painful and impotent struggle with disease and death. This consideration makes it extremely improbable that it was executed during the lifetime of Alexander, and the whole character of the work, in which free pathos is the prevailing element, and its close resemblance in style to the heads on coins ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... reached Bologna a few minutes after Catinella, and put up at the same hotel, where I found an opportunity of telling her all her lover had said. I arrived in Reggio before her, but I could not speak to her in that city, for she was always in the company of her potent and impotent lord. After the fair, during which nothing of importance occurred to me, I left Reggio with my friend Baletti and we proceeded to Turin, which I wanted to see, for the first time I had gone to that city with Henriette I had stopped only long ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... show her that the motives borrowed from another life are powerless against the passions and the bitter wrath engendered by a corrupt administration in the life here; and that all the terror of the punishments of this world is impotent against necessity, against criminal habits, against a dangerous organisation that no education has ever been applied to correct" (ch. xiv.). In another place: "A society enjoys all the happiness of which it ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... the river-harbour at all more lively. The old Albert, of Nigerian fame, has returned to mother Earth; but we still note H.M.S. Dover, a venerable caricature, with funnel long and thin, which steams up stream when not impotent—her chronic condition. There are two large Frenchmen loading ground-nuts, but ne'er an Englishman. The foreshore is defaced by seven miserable wharves, shaky mangrove-piles, black with age and white with oystershells, driven into the sand and loosely planked over. There ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... were continually passed for the repression of vagrants. They were passed on to their native place: they were provided with passes on their way. But these laws were always being evaded, and vagrants increased in number. Under Henry VIII. a very stringent statute was passed by which old and impotent persons were provided with license to beg, and anybody begging without a license was whipped. But like all such acts it was imperfectly carried out. For one who received a whipping a dozen escaped. Stocks, pillory, bread and water, all were applied, ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... disconcerting to Mr. Pat, obsessed as he was by a sudden sense of shame at having thumped so impotent an adversary. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... doing it. That he should so refrain was a matter of course. Naturally! He still kept a hold on common sense. He would not only refrain, but be civil. If Claude were in need of anything or were short of cash he would probably write him a check. It was the irony of this kind of rage that it was so impotent. It was impotent and absurd. It might shake him to the foundations of his being, but it would come to nothing in the end. It both relieved and embittered him to foresee ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King |
