Incapable Quotes - Page 21

Someone who is incapable of drawing, and cannot master line or colour perspective can always express themselves in some form of abstraction.

Hans Werner Henze

Drawing, Perspective, Lines

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When I consider the state of things in our fief, I find that those who hold positions and receive official stipends are incapable of the utmost in loyalty and patriotic service. Loyalty of the usual sort-perhaps, but if it is true loyalty and service you seek, then you must abandon this fief and plan a grass-roots uprising.

Yoshida Shoin

Loyalty, Patriotic, Uprising

"Yoshida Shoin Zenshu" by Yoshida Shoin, vol. IX, 1938.

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The Germans, in the age of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular.

Edward Gibbon

Memories, Reflection, Ideas

Edward Gibbon (1854). “The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire”, p.354

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Yet the people, and even the clergy, incapable of forming any rational judgment of the business of peace and war, presumed to arraign the policy of Stilicho, who so often vanquished, so often surrounded, and so often dismissed the implacable enemy of the republic. The first moment of the public safety is devoted to gratitude and joy; but the second is diligently occupied by envy and calumny.

Edward Gibbon

Gratitude, War, People

Edward Gibbon (2009). “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edited and Abridged): Abridged Edition”, p.552, Modern Library

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Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.

Herbert Marcuse

Earning, Existence, Humans

Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.134, Routledge

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Im plain incapable of getting angry with Angela Merkel and likewise.

Donald Tusk

Angela, Angry

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I was just about to begin writing Mirror Mirror, within about a week of it, when September 11, 2001 happened. I found myself incapable of caring about fiction-making for a number of months.

Gregory Maguire

Writing, Caring, Numbers

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The American elite ... is almost beyond redemption. Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush -- sophistry washed down with Chardonnay.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Class, Redemption, Sophistry

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (1997). “The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories”, Regnery Pub

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And so matching by itself is incapable of creating an art of reckoning. Without our ability to arrange things in ordered succession little progress could have been made. Correspondence and succession, the two principles that permeate all mathematics - nay, all realms of exact thought - are woven into the very fabric of our number system.

Tobias Dantzig

Art, Numbers, Two

Tobias Dantzig (1954). “Number, the Language of Science: A Critical Survey Written for the Cultured Non-mathematician”

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It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in, God.
He only has to refuse his ultimate love to everything that is not God.
This refusal does not presuppose any belief.
It is enough to recognize what is obvious to any mind:
that all the goods of this world, past, present, and future, real or imaginary,
are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying
the desire that perpetually burns within us
for an infinite and perfect good.

Simone Weil

Real, Believe, Past

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And I was incapable of living all by myself in those lodgings where I didn't know a soul. It terrified me to sit by myself quietly in my room. I felt frightened, as if I might be set upon or struck by someone at any moment.

Osamu Dazai

Soul, Might, Rooms

Osamu Dazai (1973). “No Longer Human”, p.72, New Directions Publishing

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... rights are liable to be perverted to wrongs when we are incapable of rightly exercising them.

Sarah Josepha Hale

Exercise, Rights, Liable

Louis Antoine Godey, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (1850). “Godey's Magazine”

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The truth is that family values, as used by the American Family Association, Dan Quayle, and the southern Baptists, has nothing to do with either family or values, nor does it really have anything to do with homosexuals, abortionists, or pornographers. Those groups actually only serve as windmills to tilt at. The true agenda is power - power over the intellectually weak, emotionally immature, and ethically deficient Americans who are incapable of critical thinking and independent decision-making, and who are easily manipulated by the basest of human emotions - fear and the desire for revenge.

Morris Sullivan

Revenge, Independent, Thinking

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I love to consider an Infidel, whether distinguished by the title of deist, atheist, or free-thinker, by three different lights, in his solitude, his afflictions, and his last moments.... [In these situations such people show themselves] in solitude, incapable or rapture or elevation, ... in distress, [with] a halter or a pistol the only refuge [they] can fly to, ... [and liable to conversion] at the approach of death.

Richard Steele

Atheist, Light, People

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Those with very loud voices in their throats are nearly incapable of thinking subtle thoughts.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Thoughtful, Thinking, Loud Voices

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Musick is certainly a very agreeable Entertainment, but if it would take the entire Possession of our Ears, if it would make us incapable of hearing Sense, if it would exclude Arts that have a much greater Tendency to the Refinement of human Nature; I must confess I would allow it no better Quarter than Plato has done, who banishes it out of his Common-wealth.

Joseph Addison

Music, Art, Plato

Joseph Addison (1867). “The Works of Joseph Addison: Including the Whole Contents of Bp. Hurd's Edition, with Letters and Other Pieces Not Found in Ay Previous Collection; and Macaulay's Essay on His Life and Works”, p.65

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Long accustomed to the use of European manufactures, [the Cherokee Indians] are as incapable of returning to their habits of skinsand furs as we are, and find their wants the less tolerable as they are occasioned by a war [the American Revolution] the event of which is scarcely interesting to them.

Thomas Jefferson

War, Long, Interesting

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He who does nothing renders himself incapable of doing any thing; but while we are executing any work, we are preparing and qualifying ourselves to undertake another.

William Hazlitt

Work, Doe, Executing

William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1846, Delphi Classics

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The Past is dead, and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation. The Past is, in many things, the foe of mankind; the Future is, in all things, our friend. In the Past is no hope; The Future is both hope and fruition. The Past is the text-book of tyrants; the Future is the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.

Herman Melville

Book, Past, Tyrants

Herman Melville (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)”, p.1541, Delphi Classics

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As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

Elizabeth Bowen

Passion, Character, History

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... in general, the Anglo-Irish do not make good dancers; they are too spritely and conscious; they are incapable of one kind of trance or of being seemingly impersonal. And, for the formal, pure dance they lack the formality: about their stylishness (for they have stylishness) there is something impromptu, slightly disorderly.

Elizabeth Bowen

Dance, Kind, Conscious

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It used to be said in antislavery days that a people who would tacitly consent to the enslavement of 4,000,000 human beings were incapable of being just to each other, and I believe this same rule holds with regard to the injustice practiced by men towards women. So long as all men conspire to rob women of the citizen's right to perfect equality in all the privileges and immunities of our so-called "free" government, we can not expect these same men to be capable of perfect justice to each other.

Susan B. Anthony

Believe, Equality, Men

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Since [man] is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he was made, and the infinite in which he is swallowed up.

Blaise Pascal

Knowledge, Men, Secret

Blaise Pascal (2013). “Pascal's Pensees”, p.21, Simon and Schuster

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In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we donot know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.

Marcel Proust

Love, Ideas, Sound

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toleration of exploitation, oppression, and injustice points to a condition lying like a pall over the whole of society; it is apathy, an unconcern that is incapable of suffering.

Dorothee Solle

Lying, Suffering, Apathy

Dorothee Sölle (1975). “Suffering”, Fortress Press

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