"Ineptitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is a great poetic creation; Browning's own robust temperament provided hardly any aid in delineating the emaciated soul whose gifts had thinned down to a morbid perfection of technique. But this vigorous human creature, with the teeming brain, and the realist eye, and the incorrigible ineptitude for the restraints of an insincere clerical or other idealism, was a being to which Browning's heart went out; and he even makes him the mouthpiece of literary ideas, which his own portrait as here drawn ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... has, and freshness of vision is an important element in the new movement. But beyond this a parallel is non-existent, must be non-existent in any art other than pure artificiality. It is one thing to ape ineptitude in technique and another to acquire simplicity of vision. Simplicity—or rather discrimination of vision—is the trademark of the true Post-Impressionist. He OBSERVES and then SELECTS what is essential. The result is a logical ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... misfortune of a man of letters is not perhaps being the object of his confreres' jealousy, the victim of the cabal, the despised of the men of power; but of being judged by fools. Fools go far sometimes, particularly when bigotry is added to ineptitude, and to ineptitude the spirit of vengeance. The further great misfortune of a man of letters is that ordinarily he is unattached. A bourgeois buys himself a small position, and there he is backed by his colleagues. ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... both in this controversy and the later one with Pope, Cibber did not come off worst. His few hits were personal and unscrupulous, and they were probably far more deadly in their effects than any of the ironical attacks which his adversaries, on their part, directed against his poetical ineptitude or halting "parts of speech." Despite his superlative coxcombry and egotism, he was, moreover, a man of no mean abilities. His Careless Husband is a far better acting play than any of Fielding's, and his Apology, which even Johnson allowed to be "well-done," is valuable in ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... pardon," I said. "Yet it would be difficult to say which is the worst of the two—Russian ineptitude or the German method of growing rich through ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... sniff an editor here, I think, but I am not sure. There's a similar touch of ineptitude (senility, perhaps) in the Memorabilia, ad fin. On the other hand I can imagine Xenophon purring over this side of ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... "O thou Inefficiency! Ineptitude garbed as woman! Must I then teach thee the elements of thy business? Hast thou not observed the pump? Go to it, and draw water. Cause the water to flow into buckets. Carry these buckets—need I go on? Will not Nature herself teach thee what ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... plug as carefully as she does the rest. This final barricade, an excellent precaution when the cot is occupied by an Halictus in course of metamorphosis, becomes the height of absurdity when the Gnat has passed that way. Instinct does not hesitate in the face of this ineptitude: it seals up emptiness. I say, emptiness, because the crafty maggot hastens to decamp the instant that the victuals are consumed, as though it foresaw an insuperable obstacle for the coming Fly: it quits the cell ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... and hardened the individual units of other races, the Filipinos have, as a race, received an artificial impetus which tends to deceive them as to their own capacity, and to increase their aggregate self-confidence, while the results of personal ineptitude are ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... the hill-sides—by forbidding access to such tracts and placing them under the "vincolo forestale." To denude slopes in the moist climate and deep soil of England entails no risk; in this country it is the beginning of the end. And herein lies the ineptitude of the Italian regulations, which entrust the collective wisdom of rapacious farmers with measures of this kind, taking no account of the destructively utilitarian character of the native mind, of that canni-ness which overlooks a distant profit in its eagerness to grasp ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... ever witness such an exhibition of ineptitude and spiritual asthenia? We can conceive a man rejecting all revelation. It is possible even to conceive a man denying the Divinity of Christ. But we know nothing that would ever enable us even to conceive ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... that it sounds of itself and needs no music-box to make it, that we find such difficulty in conceiving the nature of our own clocks and are compelled to describe them only musically, that is, in myths. But the ineptitude of our aesthetic minds to unravel the nature of mechanism does not deprive these minds of their own clearness and euphony. Besides sounding their various musical notes, they have the cognitive function of indicating the hour and catching the echoes of distant events ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... powers of observation, and called him an "irresponsible meddler"—Hapley was not a professor at that time. Hapley, in his retort[C], spoke of "blundering collectors," and described, as if inadvertently, Pawkins' revision as a "miracle of ineptitude." It was war to the knife. However, it would scarcely interest the reader to detail how these two great men quarrelled, and how the split between them widened until from the Microlepidoptera they were at war upon every open question in entomology. There ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... wondered idly—not that it mattered—he could meet a regiment of Amelias with this callousness upon him—if Dick had beguiled her away so that she might not pounce on him when he returned. He got out of the car stiffly. He was, he felt at that instant, an old man. But if physical ineptitude meant age, Jerry and Charlotte were also old, for Jerry was bewildered beyond the possibility of speech and Charlotte shaken out ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... a subservient people. A constitution, which should be republican in its head and ultra-monarchical in all its other parts, has ever appeared to me to be a short-lived monster. The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions, or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... a recluse of seventy. Here we are in the height of the London season, and I am sure you haven't been into ten houses, when a hundred of the very best are open to you—" I loathe the term "best houses." The tinsel ineptitude of them! For entertainment I really would sooner attend a mothers' meeting or listen to the serious British Drama—Have I read so and so's novel? Am I going to Mrs. Chose's dance? Do I ride in the Park? Do I know young Thingummy of the Guards, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... deserted and residual; that deceitful brain, and that lying tongue, and that murderous hand had already begun to decay; and the informing fragment of eternal and universal energy was gone to its next manifestation and its next task, unconscious, irresponsible, and unchanged. The ineptitude of human judgments had been once more emphasised, and the ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... to snigger. He thought for an instant that Mr Orgreave was being jocular over his head, for he could only connect the phrase 'ancient lights' with the meaner organs of a dead animal, exposed, for example, in tripe shops. However, he saw his ineptitude almost simultaneously with the commission of it, and smothered the snigger in becoming gravity. It was clear that he had something to learn in ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... greatest critic, himself. Yet with all this, none of the later critics, not the most cavalier nor the dullest, has dared to call him vain. His estimate of himself, offered as simple fact, has been accepted in the same spirit, and one abyss of ineptitude still yawns for the heroic folly, or the clownish courage, of ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... delegates had condemned, pressing him to reply, "as you well know how. The king esteems you much, and will esteem you still more when you have heaped confusion on this brood of benighted theologians whose ineptitude is no excuse for their violence." By a strange coincidence, Berquin's most determined foe, Noel Beda, provost of the Sorbonne, sent at the same time to Erasmus a copy of more than two hundred propositions which had been extracted from his works, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... witness the conversation of a moment ago, it was still the topic of New York, still the vital issue that filled the maw of the newspapers with ravings, threats, and execrations against the Gray Seal, snarling virulently the while at the police for the latter's ineptitude, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... fake-eloquent speaker. Yet at any given dinner the orator who passes out mere elocution to his hearers has a success almost as instant and splendid as his clowning brother. It is amazing what things people will applaud when they have the courage of one another's ineptitude. They will listen, after dinner, to anything but reason. They prefer also the old speakers to new ones; they like the familiar taps of humor, of eloquence; if they have tasted the brew before, they know what they are going to get. The note ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... momentary," replied Agaric eagerly. "It is due to purely accidental causes; it results from mere contingencies. Chatillon was a fool; he has drowned himself in his own ineptitude. Listen to me, Brother Cornemuse. We have not a moment to lose. We must free the Penguin people, we must deliver them from their tyrants, save them from themselves, restore the Dragon's crest, reestablish the ancient State, the good State, for the honour of religion and the exaltation ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... current of events and is absolutely a cypher." Nor would the court forego its crooked ways. "The queen is even more imprudent," Morris writes in 1791, "and the whole court is given up to petty intrigues worthy only of footmen and chambermaids." Moreover, in its amazing ineptitude, the monarchy had already toyed with republicanism by lending active military support to the revolutionists in America, at a cost to the already over-burdened treasury ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... dear—!" She paused on that, letting her shrewd old glance, and all the delicate lines of experience in her face, supply what farther comment the ineptitude of his argument invited. ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton |
