"Impotent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... or razed a dozen times by French armies crossing the Rhine. The last occasion when the French ruined it, however, was not in vain-glory, but in impotent malice. They fired it on August 19, 1870, during the horrors of the Strasburg bombardment. It is a town formed of a single street—But I will enter no further ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... in her eyes. The veins seemed to stand out on her clenched, worn hands. She looked at him with all the suppressed passion of a creature impotent yet fiercely anxious ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... incessantly, as the vapors rise and the springs run, and as the sun rises and the stars come up into the heavens, then we may be sure that great results will be attained and a great work done. And then it will most surely be seen that Masonry is not effete or impotent, nor degenerated nor drooping ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... down, and ordered all his people that they in haste should get ready their weapons, and prepare them to fight, as brave knights should; so that when the Rome folk there should come riding, that they should attack them, as brave knights should do. All the swains, and the impotent thanes, and of the small (base) folk many thousands, the king set them on a hill, with many standards,—that he did for stratagem; thereof he thought to boast, as it afterwards happened, thereafter full soon. Arthur took ten thousand ...
— Brut • Layamon
... no climbing down those precipitous rocks. Corp was shouting, gesticulating, impotent. "How can you stand so ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... that Sir Lionel should summon up his best courage. He reminded himself that after all his brother was but a feeble old man—impotent in all but money; and as it seemed now clear that no further pecuniary aid was to be expected, why need he fear him on this account? Had it been possible for him to get away without further talk, he would have done so; but this was not possible, so he determined to put a good face ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... heart overflowing with bitterness and impotent protest against the condition to which his own act had reduced him, Haldane was learning to indulge in such bitter soliloquy with increasing frequency. It is ever the tendency of those who find themselves at odds with the world, and in conflict with the established order of things, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... the eyes, and holding them with spell-like power, until—until what?—why, until a sharp twitch on the lip from the fire of the close-burned cigar we recommended awakens you to a due sense of such a "lame and most impotent conclusion." ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... young idiot!" he broke out at length in impotent rage. "This is not the first trouble in which he has ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... value. As for our present "anxious morality," as Maeterlinck calls it, it seems equally clear that the sinful extravagances of Sardanapalus and Nero, and the conspicuous public virtue of Aristides and the Horatii, are alike impotent to ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... sharp, impotent oath broke from him. Then he checked his impulse to rave. "Yes. See here, Nita," he went on, with a restraint which added deep impressiveness, "we've got to quit. We've got to get out—quick. Steve's hard on our trail. I've seen him to-day at Mallard's. He didn't see me. Only my back. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... Rovere, Duke of Urbino, commanded a considerable army as general of the Church, and was now acting for Venice. Why he effected no diversion while the Imperial troops were marching upon Rome, and why he delayed to relieve the city, was never properly explained. Folk attributed his impotent conduct partly to a natural sluggishness in warfare, and partly to his hatred for the house of Medici. Leo X had deprived him of his dukedom, and given it to a Medicean prince. It is to this that Cellini probably refers in the cautious phrase ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... his teeth with 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 ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... deeming is but dreaming, And in the statesman's art most unbeseeming. I answer: None has might men's life to sway, If impotent the worth of dreams to weigh. From cravings, powers that seek their form, ascending, They fill the air; their right to be defending, Till all men wakened to one goal are tending. His nation's dreams are all the statesman's life, Create his ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... have swelled the period of our separation into ages. I will not attempt to conceal from you, that those who have good cause to envy your supreme dominion over my heart, have set every scheme in action to lead me even into a temporary oblivion of you, but their attempts are as vain as their impotent rivalry, and need cause no uneasiness to you, my beloved friend. I frequently smile at the vast pains and precautions of which my '' is the object; and I am encountering '' some of those fair ladies who would fain usurp your place, sometimes bedecked with jewels rare, and sometimes, as ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... the grim Azrael. And the struggles of the passionate wife were, to my astonishment, even more energetic than my own. There had been much in her stern nature to impress me with the belief that, to her, death would have come without its terrors;—but not so. Words are impotent to convey any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which she wrestled with the Shadow. I groaned in anguish at the pitiable spectacle. I would have soothed—I would have reasoned; but, in the intensity of her wild desire for life,—for life—but ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the laughter beat on his sullen brain with a mocking insistence, and he trembled with impotent anger at the apparent happiness of humanity. Why should these people be merry when he was miserable, what right had the orchestra to play a chorus of triumph over the stinging emblems of his defeat? He drank brandy after brandy, ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... obtained by you and your fathers and brothers and sons, in co-operation with those Commanders, who, with your aid, have done great and wonderful things; but who, without that aid, would have been as impotent ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... enabled to extricate themselves, but no less than forty were held fast; and of these such as were not so fortunate as to be crushed to death in the first shock perished hopelessly in the flames before the eyes of a throng of impotent lookers-on. Some fifty-two or fifty-three persons were supposed to have lost their lives in this disaster, and more than forty others were injured; the exact number of the killed, however, could never be ascertained, as the telescoping of the carriages on top of the two locomotives had made of ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... to effect the great cataclysm in the national life: "Wherefore, seeing our number is so great, so indigent, and so heavily oppressed by your false means that none taketh care of our misery, and that it is better to provide for these our impotent members which God hath given us, to oppose to you in plain controversy, than to see you hereafter, as ye have done before, steal from us our lodging, and ourselves in the mean time to perish and die for want of the same; we have thought good, therefore, ere we enter ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... the new forms now at work in the world are not forms that will do their work by halves. When once the age shall have mastered them, they will be either one thing or the other—they will be either impotent or omnipotent. Their public exponents at present boast that they will be omnipotent; and more and more the world about us is beginning to believe the boast. But the world feels uneasily that the import of it will be very different from ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... 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 seemed ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... the United States, I am proud of both. I am proud of the country they serve. I have enjoyed at times her honors, at others endured her chastisements. I respect the power which our army and our navy give to our nation, but our army and navy are impotent in such ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... the notion of civic purity, of honesty of administration make against this big manifestation of human friendliness, this stalking survival of village kindness? The notions of the civic reformer are negative and impotent before it. Such an alderman will keep a standing account with an undertaker, and telephone every week, and sometimes more than once, the kind of funeral he wishes provided for a bereaved constituent, until the sum may roll up into "hundreds a year." He understands what the people want, and ministers ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... is the spell they've laid upon you? You make me think of Gulliver... a giant stretched out upon the ground, impotent, bound fast with a million tiny threads! Wake up, man... wake up! You've only one life to live. You act as ...
— The Naturewoman • Upton Sinclair
... emphasized the possibility that democracy may govern badly and oppressively; Maine has warned us that the dominance of the commonalty may end in the triumph of the mediocre, and a more than Chinese stagnation; Carlyle has denounced democracy as powerful for destruction, but impotent for building up, as helpless in the face of great emergencies, as incapable of choosing good leaders; Lecky has demonstrated the danger of the corruption of the democracy by evil politicians; Belloc has shown how it tends to develop, and then become a slave to, a bureaucracy; Graham ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... statute laws grown weak and impotent, the barons at Runnymede wrested Magna Charta from King John; in defiance of statute laws grown weak and impotent, the free men of England wrested their Habeas Corpus Act from King Charles; in defiance of statute laws grown weak and ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... such a supply for the present, and such hopes for the future, we no longer dreaded the impotent ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... myself decidedly opposed to any rash movement, and against the idea of secession at this time. I did so because I think that Lincoln's administration will fail, and be regarded as impotent for good or evil within four months after his inauguration. We are to meet to-morrow at ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... makes me grind my teeth;" and his brow blackened like night in his mental revolt, and his eyes were sternly fixed in honest, indignant arraignment of the Power he did not scruple to defy, though so impotent to resist. ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... that I might have been goaded into an outbreak of impotent fury, had my attention not been distracted by the curious turn of the professor's malady, which had renewed its painful assault upon him. He came hobbling to table, leaning upon Saffren's shoulder, and made no reference to his ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... idea that acting is conventional has inevitably come about in England. For it is, in fact, obliged, with us, to defeat and destroy itself by taking a very full, entire, tedious, and impotent convention; a complete body of convention; a convention of demonstrativeness—of voice and manners intended to be expressive, and, in particular, a whole weak and unimpulsive convention of gesture. The English manners of real life are so negative and still as ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... far be blind To my own faults, though patent to mankind, Nay, live in the belief that foul is fair, Than see and grin in impotent despair. There was an Argive nobleman, 'tis said, Who all day long had acting in his head: Great characters on shadowy boards appeared, While he looked on and listened, clapped and cheered: In all things else he fairly filled his post, Friendly ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... with its thrilling suggestiveness of life, of action, of boiling, surging, furious motion, was petrified!—all stricken dead and cold in the instant of its maddest rioting!—fettered, paralyzed, and left to glower at heaven in impotent rage for evermore! ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the house of Maurice Oakley there were sad times. From the moment that the master of the house had fallen to the floor in impotent fear and madness there had been no peace within his doors. At first his wife had tried to control him alone, and had humoured the wild babblings with which he woke from his swoon. But these changed to shrieks and cries and curses, and she was forced to throw open the ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... not refuse," said John Adolphus to himself, when he had just finished reading the report of his agent, Otto von Marwitz, which had only that morning reached him, "No, the weak, impotent Elector will not dare to refuse to acknowledge me as my father's successor; for he must be well aware that I am even now more powerful in the Mark than himself, and enjoy, moreover, the favor and ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... about the factory and the machines, had their fling against their foreman, conversed and thought only of matters closely and manifestly connected with their work. Only rarely, and then but faintly, did solitary sparks of impotent thought glimmer in the wearisome monotony of their talk. Returning home they quarreled with their wives, and often beat them, unsparing of their fists. The young people sat in the taverns, or enjoyed evening parties at one another's houses, played the accordion, sang vulgar songs ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... denounced a war waged for the emancipation of the South's slaves. Both the President and Congress formally announced that it was a struggle for the maintenance of the Union and not a war on behalf of the slaves. It was well that this position was taken, else the North might have broken into impotent factions. The East hated the South and warred upon their ancient rivals, the planters; the border States owned slaves, disliked the Republican party, and feared the purposes of those in power; while the West loved the Union, held the negro ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... 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, ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... Cheyne approached with the same swift even walk. She looked at them for a moment, as she passed, with a sort of well-bred surprise in her air, as though she marvelled to see them there; her black dress touched Laddie, and he caught at it with an impotent bark. ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... with something that had not been there before, his impotent love. Hilda knelt down beside the bed and pressed her forehead against the hand upon the covering, the hand that had so little more to do. ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... to thy heart, my Italy, Fit honor to thy dead to pay; For, ah, their like walk not thy streets to-day! Nor is there one whom thou canst reverence! Turn, turn, my country, and behold That noble band of heroes old, And weep, and on thyself thy anger vent, For without anger, grief is impotent: Oh, turn, and rouse thyself for shame, Blush at the thought of sires so great, Of children ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... to a cry of dismay, cut off suddenly by the policeman, who seized him by the collar. He was jerked out of the way, into a room with the convicted prisoners, where he sat and wept like a child in his impotent rage. It seemed monstrous to him that policemen and judges should esteem his word as nothing in comparison with the bartender's—poor Jurgis could not know that the owner of the saloon paid five dollars each week to the policeman alone for Sunday privileges and general favors—nor ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... for the rebel to assert that even though the name and idea of Christianity be sold—as was its Founder—for silver, though it be rendered an impotent and useless word, yet there is in mankind a religion which is independent of all names and all words, a spring of living water that may be subterraneanised for a while, but can never be altogether dammed and stopped; that there is an art which shall blossom through all ages, either in the ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... were everywhere left unperformed, so long as they might still have been performed with ease; the neglect of the simplest precautionary measures produced the most dreadful mischiefs and misfortunes, and transformed dependent classes and impotent kings into antagonists on a footing of equality. The democracy and the servile insurrection were doubtless subdued; but such as the victories were, the victor was neither inwardly elevated nor outwardly strengthened by them. It was no credit to Rome, that the two most celebrated generals ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... 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 ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... her room, Nelli departed for Naples and Cesare joined her. It was evident that he was greatly disturbed; but he spoke to her evenly. He was possessed by an impotent rage at his unwieldy body and clumsy hand. This alternated with an evident wonderment at the position in which he found himself and a great tenderness ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Ideas of pure Reason as Kant styled them, that have this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with them the same kind of impalpable appeal. Remember those passages from Emerson which I read at my last lecture. The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not only ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... is expected of you. My friends, a country like ours is not governed by law, or courts of justice, or judges, however wise or puissant. It is governed by public sentiment. Once poison it, and courts are impotent and judges powerless. Therefore we are responsible, each and all of us, according to our talents and influence, for the public sentiment of the day. If it is healthy and just, it is we who have made it so; if it is unhealthy ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... annoyed; but, she thanked me so prettily for her ice, that my anger towards her was instantly appeased:—not so, however, toward the interloper! I gnawed, in impotent fury, the attenuated ends of the small fragment of a moustache which nature had allotted to me, and talked at him and over him, so pointedly, that he had to beat a retreat and claim some other partner for ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... people at Chautauqua, and Jesus went there.' I could certainly write that, for I have seen him and heard him speak in my very heart." Then she went on, through the second verse to the third. "'In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water,'" and here a great swell of tears literally blinded her eyes. It came to her so suddenly, so forcibly. The great multitude here at Chautauqua—blind. ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... when I must work, be the consequences what they would, and work, too, with my brain, my only implement; and that time found my brain impotent from a yet uninvigorated nervous system. If I would work, I must stimulate; and morphine, bad as it was, was better than alcohol. I took morphine once more, and lectured on literary topics for some months with ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... to the name of Donald and to the name of Jack, for they had found out where the foods were poured, and each took his station and waited there, Donald at the first of the course for his, Jack at the second station, while all the impotent fools ran round and round after the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... discomfiture while the heavenly light shines through us. Harvey, though he thought with humility of his past as impotent and ignoble in respect of action, felt with his rich vivid consciousness that he was capable of entering into her subtlest emotions. He could not think of the future without her; he could not give up the hope of drawing nigh with her to those mysteries of ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... his hand. "There is only you, Simon. Oh, there is no hope in that lustful devil yonder. But you are not all base, Simon. You are a man,—ah, God! if I were a man I would rip out that devil's heart—his defiled and infamous heart! I would trample upon it, I would feed it to dogs—!" She paused. Her impotent fury was jerking at every muscle, was choking her. "But I am only a woman. Simon, you used to love me. You cannot have forgotten, Simon. Oh, haven't you any pity on a woman? Remember, Simon—remember how happy we were! Don't you remember how the night-jars ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... the first stupor of the excursionists passed away, and was succeeded by a frantic and impotent energy. They all ran about upon the plateau of rock in an aimless, foolish flurry, like frightened fowls in a yard. They could not bring themselves to acknowledge that there was no possible escape for them. Again and again they rushed to the edge of the great cliff which rose from ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... of impotent rage I had before witnessed was enacted, and the fury of the Spaniards increased as they saw the man-of-war gaining on us, she apparently having more wind ...
— The African Trader - The Adventures of Harry Bayford • W. H. G. Kingston
... that time, the Brahmans (the initiates, at any rate) knew of the coming of him whom they regarded as an incarnation of Divine wisdom, and therefore were well aware of the astrological date of his birth. If, in after times, in their impotent rage they destroyed every accessible vestige of the birth, life and death of Him, who in his boundless mercy to all creatures had revealed their carefully concealed mysteries and doctrines in order to check the ecclesiastical torrent of ever-growing superstitions, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... turned again towards White Fell: Tyr's also, and he strained against the length of the chain. Christian's hand lay on the dog's neck, and he felt it ridge and bristle with the quivering of impotent fury. Then he began to quiver in like manner, with a fury born of reason, not instinct; as impotent morally as was Tyr physically. Oh! the woman's form that he dare not touch! Anything but that, and he with Tyr would be free to ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... its appropriate 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 judiciary shall be deprived of the constitutional powers invested in them, and of their ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Polk • James Polk
... He rose, came within the electric zone, felt his arms twisted in a giant's grasp, staggered back again and sat down gasping. The window went down noiselessly, the dummy swung back into place. Kay got upon his feet again, choking with impotent rage. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... scarcely ate. But this was something more than that; for the man was not dully brooding over some small grievance; he seemed to see an all-absorbing fact or fancy recorded on the wall, which was a blank to me. I wondered if it were some deep wrong or sorrow, kept alive by memory and impotent regret; if he mourned for the dead master to whom he had been faithful to the end; or if the liberty now his were robbed of half its sweetness by the knowledge that some one near and dear to him still languished in the hell from which he had escaped. My heart quite warmed to him at that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... is 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... in spite of secretary-birds with pens stuck clerk-like behind their ears (as useless an emblem of sinecure office as gold keys, silver, and coronation armour)—in spite of whole flights of geese, capable enough of saving capitols, but impotent to wield one of their own all-conquering quills—in spite, also, (keen-eyed categorists, be to my faults in ratiocination a little blind, for very cheerfulness,) in spite, I say, of copying presses, manifold inditers, and automaton artists, MAN IS ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... witness of the vague phantasmagoria of the future. Why despair? Why be impatient? only give time, only secure all the possible tickets in the lottery of chance, and our hopes must at last be realised, all will be all right. 'Tis only our miserable impatience, our miserable sense of our own impotent mortality, which makes us fret: and Rome bids us take patience ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... stream of men as the minute for the starting whistle approached.... So he was of some importance, in the eyes of the workingmen, at least! They saw hope in his friendship. ... He shrugged his shoulders. What could his friendship do for them? He was impotent to help or harm. Bitterly he thought that if the men wanted friendship that would be worth anything to them, they should cultivate ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... his powerful and elastic mind, impatient of impotent sorrow, and burning for some kind of action, seized upon vengeance as the ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... wretch!" she cried, hoarse with anger and despair. "What a cur you are! You know you are not speaking the truth. How can you say such things to me? I have never wronged you—" She was almost in tears, impotent with shame and fear. ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... say, seaward—the tower does lean; though but by a foot or so, and now not perilously; the salt winds, impotent against its masonry, having bitten with more effect into the earth around its base. But the church has been restored, the mischief arrested, and the danger no longer haunts its vicar as it haunted the Rev. John Flood on a bright September morning ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... staggering load of the helmet, the 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
... before. But this incident of the feeding-cup was the climax, somehow. It struck him as an intolerable humiliation and outrage that Richard Calmady, splendid fellow as he was, gifted, high-bred gentleman, should, of all men, come to this sorry pass! He was filled with impotent fury. And was it this pass, indeed, he asked himself, to which every human creature must needs come one day? Would he, Roger Ormiston, one day, find himself thus weak and broken; his body—now so lively a source of various enjoyment—degraded into a pest-house, a mere dwelling-place of suffering ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... see it out upon my bridge," Anderson said. The determined tone in which he spoke only added to my impotent wrath. ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... who all along had been back in one corner of the church, came forward; and Allan and his maid kneeled before him, while the old knight, held an unwilling witness, gnashed his teeth in impotent rage; and the ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... dismantle their ships, the trade of the North stagnate at the wharves, and the manufacturers starve at their looms, while the whole people shall pay tribute to foreign industry to be clad in a foreign garb; that the Congress of the Union are impotent to restore the balance in favor of native industry destroyed by the statutes ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Quincy Adams • John Quincy Adams
... human intellect is in guiding and controlling the ordinary forces of nature, how impotent and insignificant it appears in the presence of such a transcendent disaster! It is well nigh inconceivable that a great section throbbing with populous towns, and resonant with the hum of industry, should be wiped out in the twinkling of an eye by ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... which also he feels himself conscious. He confesses himself, however, unable to explain the possibility of Free-will; but he maintains that the same may be said about Necessity also. 'The champions of both the two opposite doctrines are at once resistless in attack, and impotent in defence'—(Hamilton's 'Footnotes on Reid,' p. 602.) Mr Mansel also asserts, even more confidently than Sir W. Hamilton, that we are directly conscious of ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... programme. Our voice is now potent for peace, and is so potent because we are not afraid of war. But our protestations upon behalf of peace would neither receive nor deserve the slightest attention if we were impotent ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... to the national genius of the French that it induced them to murmur against their general. Charles, however, felt by experience the prudence of those measures which sacrificed individual interests to the general good by making a desert of the whole country. Francis marked his impotent hatred by summoning the emperor before parliament by the simple name of Charles of Austria, as his vassal for the counties of Artois and Flanders. The charge was the infraction of the treaty of Cambray, the offence was laid as felony, to abide the judgment ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... all price are the discoveries of science. The church has impeded, but it has not and it cannot stop the onward march of the human race. Heresy can not be burned, nor imprisoned, nor starved. It laughs at presbyteries and synods, at Ecumenical councils and the impotent thunders of Sinai. Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual new world; the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the breakers!—how aptly named!—had begun their attack against the poor crippled thing's hull by degrees, little billows leading the assault that could only leap half-way up the side of the stranded steamer, falling back with impotent mutterings in a passion of spray; then, as the tide rose, these were succeeded by bigger waves rolling in from the eastwards, which, swollen with pride and brimming with destruction, beat and blustered all about the vessel from cutwater to sternpost, ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... closely she had approached to destruction. Nor was he aware that a man crouching behind the shrubs had viewed him with the acute hatred of disappointment in his heart. Gerard had clenched his fist in impotent rage, and cursed the man he regarded as an enemy. "I will be even with you for this, Denis Quirk!" he had muttered to himself as he went down the dark avenue, after waiting in the vain hope that Kathleen ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... than I hear they are." (1) But the threat is 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 streets of Dieppe, he gave in altogether, and writes a letter of capitulation ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ever rolling their eyes to heaven and saying, 'Perhaps it's all for the best,' when they are perfectly dead sure it's not, makes me enraged. Humility or resignation or whatever you choose to call it, is simply impotent inertia. I'm for ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... statesmanship is a great passion with the South and she is not going to remain contented in the position of impotent isolation to which her repressionist element has consigned her. A new order of leaders will now be put forward as the spokesmen of the South and the fairness of their words is going to be seized upon by the nation as offering hope for ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... don't stop talking over my affairs, I'll tell papa," she said in impotent rage, for the McAlister code of honor scorned brute force, and she dared not give her young sister the shaking she so ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... Pharaoh brought up in his own palace one of the Hebrew boys, whom Satan would have killed; and that boy became the great leader and deliverer of Israel. All the persecutions of the people Israel in Egypt were Satan's work. When at last they had left the house of bondage, Satan in impotent rage stirred up Pharaoh to attempt their destruction; but Pharaoh and his army found their ...
— Studies in Prophecy • Arno C. Gaebelein
... I was furnished with a memorandum-book in which to write down my daily disbursements. Frequent visits to the opera (oh, the torture of those evenings!) had been an invariable rule with the Mountchessingtons; and, at the risk of rendering impotent the tympanum of both ears, I was compelled to continue that respectable custom. Persons occupying our position should be careful with whom they associated; and the character of my companions underwent a severe investigation. ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... the Sphinx pays you. That is the way all sensible men look at it. She is not the Sphinx; she is an angel, and I call her my Lady Caprice. Hate her for being Caprice! You incorrigible muddle-head. Why, I love Caprice for being her shadow. Poor, impotent love that can't solve a problem. The only one she ever set me. I've gone about it like a fool. What is the use putting up little bits of telegraphs on the island? I'll make a kite a hundred feet high, get five miles of rope ready against the next hurricane; and then I'll rub it ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... on a favourite horse or dog on changing masters were denied to British subjects by the British Government.' The intensity and bitterness of the resentment, the wrath and hatred—so much deeper because so impotent—at the betrayal and desertion have left their traces on South African feeling; and the opinion of the might and honour of England, as it may be gleaned in many parts of the Colonies as well as everywhere in the Republics, would be an unpleasant revelation to those who live in ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... with a little cry of impotent despair. How could she say the sharp, cruel speeches that were struggling to reach her tongue now? It was no use; she was a coward; she simply had not the courage to undeceive him here, on the very first day ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... the heights of truth, falls-back, impotent and broken, into doubt and despair; not by that way can we come to that ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... more whimsically striking than the contrast between Juniper Graves' grand and jaunty bearing a moment before, and his present utter crawling abjectness. He became white with terror, and looked the very picture of impotent cowardice. But this was but for a minute; then his self-possession returned to him. He felt that, if his master gave him over immediately in charge to the police, everything was lost; but if he could only get a hearing for a few minutes, before ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... while she was still threatening him with an impotent gesture. The moment she lost sight of him, Milady tumbled fainting into ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... authorities had been removed. 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, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... suspect, whose plump round face was now distorted with impotent rage. "I'll be even with all ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... continued to travesty the truth, and I was impotent—the truth, that profound thing whose voice was in my ears, whose shadow was in my eyes, and whose taste was ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... divide us, to make of us a Russia, torn by Maximalists and Minimalists, by Militarists and Bolsheviki and, consequently, impotent ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... 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 giving its entire sagacity to ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... "Most lame and impotent conclusion!" The peace of nature in that sweet night was weak assurance of any kindred feeling in the bosom of man. It so happened (as I afterwards learned) that felony—bloody felony—was at that very time busy, at no great distance; that murder, that arson in its direst character, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... "Slightly. Very slightly. As well as I wish. In fact, rather better. He wouldn't remember me. But I'll tell you one thing. But for a series of trivial circumstances, I too might have been ... oh, well, never mind. Not, of course, that for any consideration I would serve in this ludicrous and impotent machine set up by the corrupt states of the world. Wilbraham can: I could not. My soul, at least, ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... in this little creature such a glow of love and reverence that Durtal gazed with admiration and trembled with awe. Without in the least knowing why, in the midst of the darkness that fell on his soul, of the impotent and wavering feeling that thrilled it without there being any word to describe them, he felt a tide bearing him to the Saviour, and then ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... after the Union, that the Irish representation was a true numerical reflection of the Irish democracy. But these were not vital matters. In the Home Rule campaigns of 1886 and 1893, Irish opinion, constitutionally expressed, was impotent. The vital matter was that the Union killed all wholesome political life in Ireland, destroyed the last chance of promoting harmony among Irishmen, and transferred the settlement of Irish questions to an ignorant and prejudiced tribunal, incapable of comprehending these questions, much ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... had once been credulous; prone to see evil where no evil was. For, deceived by Purdy, in whom could he trust? Of a surety not in the pushful set of jobbers and tricksters he was condemned to live amongst. No discoveries he might make about them would surprise him.—And once more the old impotent anger with himself broke forth, that he should ever have let himself take root ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... part they rode silently. Already the journey had been long and tiresomely uneventful, and Sunny Oak particularly reveled in an impotent peevishness which held him intensely sulky. The widower, too, was feeling anything but amiable. What with his recent futile work on a claim which was the ridicule of the camp, and now the discomfort of a dreary journey, his feelings towards ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... evoke clearer pictures. But the sentences that passed through his mind seemed sterile, impotent. The past, set in motion by his effort, evaded him. Its details blurred like the spokes of a ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... perverse Radicals of a subsequent epoch. Moreover, their aspirations were, as we have seen, more reactionary than experimental; for the rights for which they conspired had been in a great measure enjoyed under Europe's modern conqueror, then impotent in action, but most efficient in remembrance, although isolated on his prison-rock. Foresti's companion in misfortune has made their mutual wrongs "familiar as household words"; and to be associated in captivity with the author of "Le Mie Prigioni" was of itself a passport ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... known Sterling would 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, with his ever-flowing wealth of ideas, fancies, imaginations; with his frank affections, inexhaustible ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... the voluntary power of man over his animal frame comes next under Mr Godwin's consideration, and he concludes by saying, that the voluntary power of some men, in this respect, is found to extend to various articles in which other men are impotent. But this is reasoning against an almost universal rule from a few exceptions; and these exceptions seem to be rather tricks, than powers that may be exerted to any good purpose. I have never heard of any man who could regulate his pulse in a fever, and ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... Vickers told him to swing to the right," grinned the rider from his elevation. He watched the driver until he gained the bank and stood there, dripping, gesticulating, impotent rage consuming him. The buckboard could not be moved without endangering the comfort of the remaining occupants, and without assistance they must inevitably stay where they were. And so the rider on the mesa wheeled his pony and sent it toward the edge of the mesa where ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... "surplus value". And these epidemics of "graft" that broke out upon the body politic—they were not accidental or sporadic things, and they were not to be remedied by putting any number of men in jail; they were to be understood as the system whereby an industrial oligarchy had rendered impotent a political democracy, and had fenced it out from the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... ignorance, misunderstood what it all meant. And there were wild reports afloat of resistance brooding in Queensland and of excited meetings in the bush and of troops being sent to disperse the bushmen's camps. Why did they endure these things, Nellie thought, watching and waiting, as impotent to aid them as she was to save the baby dying now beside her. Day ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... that he was lying on pillows "softer than sleep," that the air he breathed was laden with perfume, that the golden light which came through his half-closed eyelids was deliciously tempered, that his ears caught a musical murmur, as of a plashing fountain. So he lay for long, too impotent, too contented to ask where he lay, or whence he had departed. Athens, Hermione, all the thousand and one things of his old life, flitted through his brain, but only as vague, far shapes. He was too weak even to long for them. Still the fountain ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... to see approaching her doors an enemy before whose assault all human strength is impotent and all valour unavailing. Like Imperial Rome, she had depended for her food supply upon external sources, and now these sources were one by one being ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... might at full Tell of the wounds and blood that now I saw, Though he repeated oft the tale? No tongue So vast a theme could equal, speech and thought Both impotent alike. If in one band Collected, stood the people all, who e'er Pour'd on Apulia's happy soil their blood, Slain by the Trojans, and in that long war When of the rings the measur'd booty made A pile ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... for men to know things so great and divine."[44] Frequently the patristic writers have occasion to emphasize the inability of man to attain by any of his natural powers to religious truth, and to point to the impotent longings and aspirations of Greek philosophy as an example of this. St. Clement of Alexandria, for example, asserts that "the chiefs of philosophy only guessed at" religious truth,[45] and lays down the general principle ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... settle. For two years a great 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 people to re-establish sovereignty ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... of the senses—live The ideal life free thought can give; And, lo, the gulf shall vanish, and the chill Of the soul's impotent despair be gone! And with divinity thou sharest the throne, Let but divinity become thy will! Scorn not the law—permit its iron band The sense (it cannot chain the soul) to thrall. Let man no more the will of Jove withstand [42], And Jove ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... His expression of impotent fury mingled with compelled admiration and respect made his face about as unpleasant to look at as she had ever seen it. But she liked to look. His confession of her strength made her feel stronger. The sense of strength was a new sensation with her—new and delicious. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips |
