Incapacity Quotes - Page 2

• The laziness of adolescence is a rehearsal for the incapacity of old age.

  Idries Shah

  Age, Laziness, Rehearsal

  Idries Shah (1983). “Reflections”, p.147, Octagon Press Ltd

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• Beggars market their incapacity.

  Mason Cooley

  Begging, Beggar

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• When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul-then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Moving On, Heart, Past

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• The price of training is always a certain trained incapacity: the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently.

  Abraham Kaplan

  Training, Certain, Harder

  Abraham Kaplan (1973). “The conduct of inquiry”, p.29, Transaction Publishers

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• The coward’s fear of death stems in large part from his incapacity to love anything but his own body. The inability to participate in others’ lives stands in the way of his developing any inner resources sufficient to overcome the terror of death. — J. Glenn Gary, The Warriors

  Sebastian Junger

  Warrior, Coward, Overcoming

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• Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Eye, Men, Mirrors

  "The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa (1982). Translated by Richard Zenith, p. 371, 2006.

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• What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Hands, People, Solitude

  "Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life Arthur Schopenhauer". Book by Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851.

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• The obscurity of a writer is generally in proportion to his incapacity.

  Quintilian

  Obscurity, Proportion

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• No man can exactly calculate the capacity of human genius and stupidity, nor the incapacity of will.

  B. H. Liddell Hart

  Military, Men, Stupidity

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• Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Religious, Profound, Paradise

  Emile M. Cioran (1975). “A short history of decay”, Viking Books

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• This superficial blurring has something to do with the incapacity I have just mentioned. I can make no statement about reality clearer than my own relationship to reality; and this has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness, or whatever. But this doesn't explain the pictures. At best it explains what led to their being painted.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Reality, Technique

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• All of us wrestle with the angels of our inabilities all the time. We live in fear that our incapacities will be exposed. We posture and evaluate and assess and criticize mercilessly.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Angel, Inability, Posture

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• The capacity of any conqueror is more likely than not to be an illusion produced by the incapacity of his adversary.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Military, Illusion, Capacity

  George Bernard Shaw (2015). “The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more”, p.1826, e-artnow

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• Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar-the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

  Yann Martel

  Love, Blessing, Qualms About

  Yann Martel (2010). “Beatrice and Virgil”, p.23, Canongate Books

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• The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.

  Franz Kafka

  Writing, Effort, Casts

  Franz Kafka (1970). “The Trial”

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• On the occasions when I have pondered over men's various activities, the dangers and worries they are exposed to at Court or at war, from which so many quarrels, passions, risky, often ill-conceived actions and so on are born, I have often said that man's unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room.

  Blaise Pascal

  Spring, War, Passion

  "Pensées and Other Writings".

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• Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Alternatives, Propositions, Bigotry

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• What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Men, Bears, Philosopher

  Viktor E. Frankl (2006). “Man's Search for Meaning”, p.118, Beacon Press

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• What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor,' the prince said, 'is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous

  Thomas Bernhard

  Doctors, Ridiculous, Said

  Thomas Bernhard (2010). “Gargoyles: A Novel”, p.180, Vintage

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• That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing outside of ourselves

  Carl Jung

  Substitutes, Objects, Memories Dreams Reflections

  Carl Gustav Jung, Beatrice M. Hinkle (2003). “Psychology of the Unconscious”, p.193, Courier Corporation

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• A guide, on finding a man who has lost his way, brings him back to the right path—he does not mock and jeer at him and then take himself off. You also must show the unlearned man the truth, and you will see that he will follow. But so long as you do not show it him, you should not mock, but rather feel your own incapacity.

  Epictetus

  Men, Long, Doe

  Epictetus (2013). “The Golden Sayings of Epictetus In Plain and Simple English (Translated)”, p.63, BookCaps Study Guides

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• We compromise ourselves the day we are born. If we are looking for the original sin, there it is- our incapacity to live honestly with ourselves because we are human, because we are shackled by custom, by obligations and we accept compromise only in the light of our conscience, answerable as we are only to ourselves.

  F. Sionil José

  Light, Compromise, Sin

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• Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art.

  Emile Zola

  Art, Inability, Boundaries

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• This account of him [Thomas More] developed as I wrote: what first attracted me was a person who could not be accused of any incapacity for life, who indeed seized life in great variety and almost greedy quantities, who nevertheless found something in himself without which life was valueless and when that was denied him was able to grasp his death.

  Robert Bolt

  Able, Firsts, Greedy

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• Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?

  Yann Martel

  Men, Age, Able

  Yann Martel (2010). “Beatrice & Virgil”, p.91, Knopf Canada

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