Incapable Quotes - Page 4

• We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We cannot but desire truth and happiness, and are incapable of certainty or happiness.

  Blaise Pascal

  Desire, Misery, Certainty

  Blaise Pascal (2015). “Pensees: Thoughts on Religion”, p.136, Letcetera Publishing

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Understanding, Spheres

  Oscar Wilde, Nicholas Frankel (2011). “The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition”, p.22, Harvard University Press

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have learnt that I am incapable of packing the right amount of clothing, probably because I start 10 minutes before I'm supposed to leave, and that I truly hate airports.

  Marcus Brigstocke

  Hate, Airports, Minutes

  7 Copy quote

• The most innocent man, pressed by the awful solemnities of public accusation and trial, many be incapable of supporting his own cause. He may be utterly unfit to cross-examine the witnesses against him, to point out the contradictions or defects of their testimony. And to counteract it by properly introducing it and applying his own.

  William Rawle

  Men, Innocent Man, Trials

  4 Copy quote

• Perhaps I overemphasized the value of keeping busy.... I liked to imagine that I was incapable of doing nothing for afternoons myself, but maybe what disturbed me was that I was capable of it. I feared this was a knack one could get the hang of rather readily, and it was therefore now lurking in my house waiting for me to pick it up like a winter flu.

  Lionel Shriver

  Winter, Waiting, House

  4 Copy quote

• More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down--not by solving the problem, but by deciding it's their own damn fault.

  Anna Quindlen

  Numbers, Government, Faults

  4 Copy quote

• Creativity is very much like literacy. We take it for granted that nearly everybody can learn to read and write. If a person can't read or write, you don't assume that this person is incapable of it, just that he or she hasn't learned how to do it. The same is true of creativity.

  Ken Robinson

  Motivational, Writing, Learning

  Ken Robinson Ph.D., Lou Aronica (2009). “The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything”, p.43, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The style, which is something I take to heart, is getting on my nerves horribly. It frustrates and torments me. I have days when Iam sick about it and nights when it gives me a fever. The more I go at it the more I find myself incapable of conveying the Idea.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Work, Heart, Night

  4 Copy quote

• The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. . . .

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Spring, Thinking, Musical

  8 Copy quote

• What, then, is the basic difference between today's computer and an intelligent being? It is that the computer can be made to seebut not to perceive. What matters here is not that the computer is without consciousness but that thus far it is incapable of the spontaneous grasp of pattern--a capacity essential to perception and intelligence.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Intelligent, What Matters, Differences

  Rudolf Arnheim (2004). “Visual Thinking”, p.73, Univ of California Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Human life is so strangely constituted that even perfected intellectual understanding combined with the richest experience is incapable of conquering innate weaknesses. Even if it thoroughly analyzes itself, psychology (and this is one of the dubious aspects of psychoanalysis) can, to be sure, recognize its flawed native characteristics, but it cannot eliminate them. Understanding (them) is not the same as overcoming (them) and, again and again, we see the wisest of human beings helpless in the fact of their small follies which everyone else observes with a smile.

  Stefan Zweig

  Psychology, Understanding, Intellectual

  4 Copy quote

• If I stand alone, It does not mean, I am any less a Human, If my arms do not hold another, It does not mean, They are incapable of holding, If my tongue is silent, And never speaks the words of Love, It does not mean, That it will be mute, When the time comes, That the words can sincerely be spoken. And just because the World, Has not yet introduced, The one that will share my Life, It certainly does not mean, That I am incapable, Of Loving.

  Javan

  Mean, Doe, World

  18 Copy quote

• You have to make an effort to be in an unprotected environment because everyone thinks you're a completely incapable idiot who couldn't possibly brush his teeth without an assistant. You have to make an effort in order to be able to actually experience the country that you're in.

  Christian Bale

  Country, Thinking, Order

  "Christian Bale May Kill Someone Yet". Interview with John H. Richardson, www.esquire.com. November 15, 2010.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Therefore it is the law of the mystics to see all things, to experience all things, either of heaven or earth, and yet to say little; for the souls incapable of understanding the possibility of their reach will ridicule them.

  Hazrat Inayat Khan

  Law, Heaven, Understanding

  18 Copy quote

• I think it's just a lack of ability, we're incapable of writing hits.

  Kenny Hickey

  Writing, Thinking, Ability

  6 Copy quote

• The God of Christians is a God of love and comfort, a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses, a God who makes them conscious of their inward wretchedness, and his infinite mercy; who unites himself to their inmost soul, who fills it with humility and joy, with confidence and love, who renders them incapable of any other end than himself.

  Blaise Pascal

  Christian, Heart, Humility

  Blaise Pascal (2010). “Thoughts, Letters & Minor Works”, p.186, Cosimo, Inc.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.

  Oscar Wilde

  Country, Lying, Hero

  Oscar Wilde (1969). “The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde”, p.304, University of Chicago Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• It seems to me that he has never loved, that he has only imagined that he has loved, that there has been no real love on his part. I even think that he is incapable of love; he is too much occupied with other thoughts and ideas to become strongly attached to anyone earthly.

  Anna Dostoyevskaya

  Love, Real, Thinking

  10 Copy quote

• When a government is arrived to that degree of corruption as to be incapable of reforming itself, it would not lose much by being new moulded.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  Government, Degrees, Corruption

  Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, baron de, Charles de Secondat baron de Montesquieu (2005). “The Spirit of Laws”, p.169, The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Some people say the president is incapable of enforcing the law. Let them say that once more and I will set the tanks on them.

  Ferdinand Marcos

  Law, People, President

  1986 Quoted in'The Snap Revolution', in James Fenton All the Wrong Places.

  92 Copy quote

  Show source

• The evil which assails us is not in the localities we inhabit but in ourselves. We lack strength to endure the least task, being incapable of suffering pain, powerless to enjoy pleasure, impatient with everything. How many invoke death when, after having tried every sort of change, they find themselves reverting to the same sensations, unable to discover any new experience.

  Seneca the Younger

  Pain, New Experiences, Evil

  4 Copy quote

• Humans are incapable of securely storing high-quality cryptographic keys, and they have unacceptable speed and accuracy when performing cryptographic operations. (They are also large, expensive to maintain, difficult to manage, and they pollute the environment. It is astonishing that these devices continue to be manufactured and deployed. But they are sufficiently pervasive that we must design our protocols around their limitations.)

  Charlie Kaufman

  Keys, Design, Quality

  "Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World". Book by Charlie Kaufman, Radia Perlman and Mike Speciner, April 22, 2002.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There are many eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and household virtues; there are many that can discern Genius on his starry track, though the mob is incapable; but when that love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to itself, that it will be a wretch and also a fool in this world, sooner than soil its white hands by any compliances, comes into our streets and houses,--only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only compliment they can pay it, is to own it.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Jesus, Eye, Hands

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.60, Courier Corporation

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• If liberals think Iraqis are genetically incapable of pulling off even the most rudimentary form of democracy, why do they believe 50 million Mexicans will magically become good Americans, imbued in the nation's history and culture, upon crossing the Rio Grande? Maybe we should dunk Iraqis in the Rio and see what happens.

  Ann Coulter

  Believe, Thinking, Democracy

  4 Copy quote

• I would inquire of reasonable persons whether this principle: Matter is naturally wholly incapable of thought, and this other: I think, therefore I am, are in fact the same in the mind of
  Descartes, and in that of St. Augustine, who said the same thing twelve hundred years before.

  Blaise Pascal

  Thinking, Years, Mind

  Blaise Pascal, Henry Rogers, Victor Cousin, Charles Louandre (1859). “The Thoughts, Letters and Opuscules of Blaise Pascal”, p.510

  4 Copy quote

  Show source